"pintu syurga di tapak kaki ibumu."
or something like that, pardon my malay. i forgot the phrase but i've been told of it countless times - never to be rude to your mother, never talk back, always respect her.. because "
heaven's doors are at your mother's feet."
last night, while catching up with a family friend and mummy dear over drinks at Carlton, i got news of an acquaintance that not only disturbed my thoughts for a long time after, but somewhat shifted the plates that we all stood on. how we all play our roles as the mother/father/daughter/son/sister/brother, etc, and what we perceive as right or wrong when playing them.
the last i met her was in '04.
she'd told me she was of my age in confidence, minutes after her mom'd introduced her as the "eighteen year old daughter". i didn't understand why, until
she got half-dragged from me, to a table of old & rich perverted men, none of which younger than 50 perhaps.
she wasn't cantankerous; it seemed somewhat that
she'd done this sort of conversations (if you can call it that, minus the immoral touching everywhere) before, &
she wasn't a stranger to such behaviour.
i thought
she was sweet, rather intellectual too, the way she could hold a conversation. beautiful
she was,
no doubt; i thought she resembled Annabelle Francis. but there
she was, a fourteen year old, in a micro skirt & a tube top that could barely keep in everything.
yesterday i was told that
she'd quit school previously to work as a hostess at a malay
dangdut club, those sleazy ones that are too smoky to see anything that if you
could see, you'd only be welcomed by old, white-haired men in silk shirts, with a girl young enough to be his granddaughter on his lap. all this
she did, with the recommendations from her very own mother.
the last bit that i heard of
her was that
she'd fallen pregnant just last year, and cos
she'd be too young to keep the baby, a Malay welfare organisation took it from
her. & now
she's under probation in something like a girls' home.
while her mother - the one who'd introduced her daughter to this side of the entertainment world, the one who had gotten her the job as a hostess, the one who had allowed her daughter's boyfriend to sleep with her daughter even when being only fourteen, the one who refused to take care of her newborn grandchild - is still singing her life away.
i just hope
she's doing alright now, it's sad to see such a waste.
i don't know, maybe it's not entirely the mother's fault, given the circumstances. but to literally take advantage of your daughter's beauty and selling her that way.. i guess not all mothers will go to heaven after all.
