Deadline for Love and Other Stories by Catherine Lim

Author:Catherine Lim
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789814779845
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish International

The Mother

The mother so loved her son she would lay down her life for him. She loved him with a quiet kind of love that precluded the effusive cuddling and coddling of fond motherhood, which yet went so deep that she would smite to death any intruder upon his safety. In the deep wells of her protective energy, she reminded one of the enraged mother bear stalking her cub’s robber to the ends of the earth. Or the monkey in that atrocious experiment devised by psychologists to test the limits of mother love. The monkey, carrying her baby in her arms, would be put in a cage with a steel plate floor that was electrically controlled to make it hotter and hotter. At some point it would be clear to the monkey that the only way to save herself was to put the baby between herself and the burning plate. Now she, the mother, would have no hesitation in spreading herself on the death plate to keep her baby alive on her body as long as possible.

This formidable reservoir of love nevertheless regulated itself in small unobtrusive surface rills of attentiveness in their everyday lives, through the successive stages of cradle, playpen, kindergarten and school. The boy never had so small a cut or ant bite that it did not need the most assiduous application of ointment procured from the neighbourhood medicine-shop in readiness for such mishaps. The boy loved a kind of rice dumpling made from fine rice flour; the mother searched the markets for the finest rice flour and reserved the best meat at the butcher’s, spending hours in the stuffing and steaming of the dumplings. When at the age of eight, the boy came home in tears one day because his written composition homework had been stolen by a classmate intent on copying it, the mother immediately went to the culprit’s house, stood resolute against the culprit’s denials and his mother’s angry protests for several hours until they backed down and the homework was finally brought out of its hiding place and returned.

Through the years, the boy’s love for his mother grew to parallel hers for him – a strong, deep pool which could be inexhaustibly drawn upon to make calm and sweet their day-to-day lives together, with now and again a rumble of energy in the face of threat. When he was five years old, his mother was rushed to hospital for an emergency operation. In wide-eyed terror, as a relative held his hand, he stood and gazed at the hurrying, white-clad figures of doctors and nurses and realised that it was in his power to save his mother. He sat down and wrote on a large piece of cardboard the words: “Please don’t let my mother die”, hung it round his neck and stood outside his mother’s room in full view of the hospital staff. He refused to move until the doctors and nurses, touched and amused by the child’s heroic ploy, assured him that his mother was not going to die.

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