Sacrifice

Today is the last day of work for my wife. She served her 3 month notice already. Starting tomorrow, she will work half day for her current company as she transition her work to the new guy. This arrangement will be until 31 Dec 2013. After that, well, we are not sure what's next.

The reason she is doing this is because she wants to take care of the kids. Her mother is having a hard time coping with the eldest, which has proven a handful to handle. I don't think I've talked much about the eldest kid but she's quite difficult to handle as she has a huge and unreasonable tantrum. There are many terms for the cause, we are also not sure how true they are. Some called it hyper sensitive, some called it insecurity, some OCD, some said she needed anger management. Not sure what, but she is giving us a lot of stress.

This caused me to think of the sacrifices that parents made for their children. All of us have the same story but how many of us appreciate the sacrifice and understand the stress our parents went through to change for us? I tell you, 20 years from now, my eldest probably know about this but may not appreciate the pain we all went through. I don't think I truly appreciate what my parents have done for me either.

I still remember that we engaged a private day care person living opposite our house to take care of Jane (not her real name). She was still a baby then. But she cried every night and couldn't sleep well at all. At one point, we thought that the reason was because the day care lady let her sleep most of the day, thus she was awake at night. So when she was 8 months old, my mother in law (MIL) decided that she will take care of Jane.

And that means, we have to engage a maid to help with the house work. And that we need to send her to MIL house in Sungai Buloh. That itself is a 1-1.5 hour drive to and fro from Bandar Utama to Sungai Buloh and back to PJ for work. The difficult part is the evening where we have to bring the kids back to BU, usually they are back only by 8pm or 9pm. Lots of adjustment at that time. And all of us have to adjust having a maid too. In one of my earlier posts, I said that a maid will bring the worst out of you and I wasn't wrong.

Then, because of the time spent to chauffeur the kids to and from Sungai Buloh, we decided to relocate MIL nearer. So last year, we invested in a house in Kota Damasara and in-laws moved to KD in Dec 2012. So now we have an additional mortgage to worry. It was a right decision. We need to invest in a property to finance future kids education system (see? Another sacrifices made for the children).

Now, the wife has to leave the workforce to better educate the girls because MIL can't handle and also because, somehow, kids this generation are very hard to look after by the older generation. A lot of different style and theories and stuff. Life is not easy.

So with all these sacrifices, why do we have kids?

This is a question I have asked myself many times and I can't answer with full conviction.

One man told me that this is all part of a journey that man has to go through in our lives.


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