Leaving with a Heavy Heart

I dreaded the Sundays where I am back in Seremban, my hometown, where I have to drive back home without my daughter Clarisse. I am sure many parents whom their kids are not staying with them will feel the same.

Many of us are working parents. If your old folks are not with you, you will either :

A. Leave your kid with your parents to take care

B. Send your kid to a day-care centre

C. Have a maid at home to take care of your kid

Mine is Option A. My daughter Clarisse is like a travelling nomad. Her home is either at my parents’ place in Seremban or in my house at PJ. She’s currently alternating between these 2 homes as my parents sometimes come up to PJ to stay with us. So, it’s more like 1 week they all stay in PJ, then come Saturday morning, they all move back to Seremban. Me and my wife will come back to PJ on Sunday afternoon/evening and next week when both of us go back to Seremban, my folks and Clarisse will follow us back to PJ again. It’s almost a weekly routine now. With all these weekly travelling, I am contributing more to Shell (feeding my car with petrol) & Highway concessionaires (paying the blood-sucking fellows for toll charges).

It’s really a joy to watch a young baby grow up. It can be a very hectic job ( if you can call it a job ) to look after a young toddler. Currently, she can’t walk properly yet. Hence, she crawls most of the time and you have to chase after her. She likes to put things in her mouth too. One minute she’s playing with a bunch of keys and the next minute she would want to know how keys taste like. You take it out from her mouth, she will put it back in again. She also like to play with papers as well ( more like ransacking job ). Pulling out a nicely stacked of magazines or tearing leaflets count amongst her hobbies ! It’s fun to see how a young life learn different things in the early stage of life. Everything is new and curious to them. They want to explore everything and can be dare-devils too trying out different things.

When you’re time is filled with joy looking at a kid developing his/her instincts, learning new things and exploring his/her surroundings, you feel like the rest of the world is irrelevant to you. You would feel that your job and challenges you have in your daily work life are burried deep, deep away when you spend every moment you can with your kid.

For this reason, I always hate the Sundays when Clarisse is to stay in Seremban and both of us come back to PJ. I just can’t wait for the week to get by and I’m travelling back to Seremban again to see my daughter….