So you thought I got the title all wrong?

Nooooo…

Let me tell you why and let me tell you how.

If you thought giving birth was the toughest cookie you bit, you were so wrong.

That was just the tip of the iceberg.

Life happens, first it’s all about yourself, then it’s the spouse and then it’s the kid/s.

Sorted?

Nooooooo…

As a mother to a gen Z and a gen Alpha, life is constantly throwing lemons, no wait, melons at the speed of thought, aiming to shake up my existence. And I will not make any more lemonade lest I am launching another cooler this summer. Point is, when your child is young, you bawl each time they get pricked by the paediatrician. But those are mandatory checks. Thereafter, begins your journey of crying tears of happiness as you run from one milestone to another.

You find tears rolling down alongside a smile when your child first smiles, first turns, first crawls, first walks, says their first word, so what if it was ‘Baba’ (can you see my monstrous expressions right now?), first day at pre-school, kindergarten, graduation, the list goes on and on.

At some point, however, when you drop your guard down, believing you have nailed it all, you hit an ice berg, just like the Titanic did! That ice berg is located in sunny Singapore and is named PSLE – Primary School Leaving Exmination or as I think about it – Please Stop this Lame Examination.

With stress building up from every nook and cranny, your child arrives home with just one message everyday – this will decide your future! As a mother, I think all it means is that my present is in ruins. I do not see my own future. My life is officially a dark tunnel. There are no more days in the life of this PSLE mom. Instead, she needs to find some life in each day.

Here is what my every single day looks like –

6 am – Wake up and stir up droolicious concoctions that will spruce your PSLE kid into action and provide a head-start to their day. After all, every single day is precious. Who will solve all those practise papers that I picked from Popular otherwise?

7 am – When the kids go off to school, pressure is still on, and your mind runs a marathon of negative thoughts and emotions and draws up every wrong scene relating to the exam. This sets your heart pounding, leaves the better-half worried and your messed up kitchen from the morning routine, crying for cleanliness.

8 am – The spouse makes up an excuse to leave you to yourself and escapes to office, lest he would need to take care of you in sickness and health, wait a minute, none of the vows included PSLE… was I the only one that did not know that?

8.30am – You try yoga and meditation to flush off the fluff and focus on your breath instead. But all you manage is counting your breath in whole numbers while your breath comes in, in fractions. The ratio of air going in versus coming out is all messed up and the percentage of surviving this breathing exercise for even the next 5 minutes sits is in the negative quadrant of your attention span in Vajrasan(a yoga pose that I cannot hold for long). If someone were to measure the volume of your stress, what would the formula be? Quick, I am testing your speed now…

9.30 am – Shower is a necessary ritual. But my amygdala has been hijacked. All I can think of under that running water are three pictures for the English compo where the first one is water overflowing from a bathroom, second one is an overweight woman slipping and falling and third one is a girl looking shocked. Moral of the story – PSLE doesn’t really demand so much creativity, so let it go with all the soap that washed your body mad Mommy.

10.30 am – You make an excuse to walk down to the neighborhood grocery store in order to avoid any further panic-driven thoughts. But then you end up colliding with a nosey acquaintance with an older child, who wants all details of your child’s timetable, prelim score, school shortlist, tuition schedule, status of mother tongue language and even offers free expert advise on how you need to chill and let your child be. And while you are rethinking all the answers and appear worried sick your child is lagging behind, she passes a sly smile to your ageing 10-years-by-the-second face, abruptly says a bye, turns around and gets going, now that she has juicy gossip to share. All this, before your own jaw can even drop completely. Is there a problem with your jaw? How is it so slow? Must be your faulty genes that your child follows suit. Aaahhh…

12 pm – Get back into the creative cabin – kitchen, and brainstorm ideas to whip up a tasty storm, aka healthy lunch that will keep your child from an afternoon siesta. You look at the lentils and eggs. Isn’t there a grain in the bag that will re-wire your slack kid and turn them into a competitive genius, straight A’s kid who is destined to ace PSLE, get into a top school, reverse your blood pressure and make other parents jealous of you? If only wishes were horses… there is a problem with the phrase itself. What you need is a unicorn. Running horses are good enough for placing bets or outside Buckingham Palace. Know what I mean? Sometimes, even I myself don’t… so don’t bother.

2 pm – There arrives the PSLE kid, holding a plastic glass with straw and ice, sipping on water formed from melting ice. While your mind runs into condensation, heat gain from the sultry weather to the glass, and the impact of drinking icy cold water in the blazing Singapore heat and the effect of this temperature change on her throat, the daughter is going ga-ga over Math and health benefits. She mentions how buying a sugary drink is bad for health while buying ice worth 20 cents that comes along with a glass and a straw is absolutely copacetic (bragging her newly acquired vocabulary) and enough to last her walk from school all the way home, yapping with a friend. While you try looking for the right moment to ask about her day, the level of pressure and level of readiness for the dreaded exam, she goes on and on, slides her bag to the living room floor like some construction worker who gets off a work shift at the sound of a siren, and quickly sticks her flared nostrils inside the kitchen as she cranes her neck to guess what healthy disaster her mother has devised for the day; smartly hides her disappointment and disappears into the bathroom for a cool shower, partnered with her phone, Percy Jackson audio book blaring away to keep her sane.

3 pm – Shower, lunch, TV and all other preposterous little necessities later, you sit right next to her thinking, how to bring up the conversation of getting her to start solving a Math paper. You bargain in your own mind decide Hindi it is. Math can wait another hour. One look at you and she knows your smile means business. You ask her politely to do Hindi while you do dishes. You can’t be sure which job stinks more…

3.30pm – You are proud, your kitchen looks sparkling clean and the sink is left high and dry, but worry not, dishes will pile up again in the next four hours. Next up, in your mind, you run across the thorn-studded forest barefoot, followed by the hanging vines in the dark, crossing them like spider man, only to swim and cut through the crocodile infested 1000 rooms of water in your palatial home to make it to the master bedroom alive and check on the status of Hindi. But the minute you open the door and peek in with a fake smile, you are hit in the face by a rock called reality check – Hindi is fast asleep in the warm embrace of your PSLE daughter. They both look so cosy together.

4.30 pm – If your anger were measured using a water fountain, it would make the most dramatic one, not the one on display at Sentosa or outside Burj Khaleefa! But you take a deep breath in and practise a smile despite the disgruntled state of your mind and try to wake up the sleeping beauty with utmost love. She turns to the other side. You try again in 5 minutes and she groans. You try once more and announce it is 4.45pm. She jumps with a start; apologizes, feels frustrated and hungry all at the same time. She knows she has tuition and she has not finished homework from school. Your only takeaway from the situation – if you have insomnia, trust Hindi to solve it.

5.45 pm – We are on our way to the tuition. You decide to give my morose life a break. So you dress up, marinate yourself in perfume and decide to spend the first hour after dropping her, exercising and the next at the library hunting for some soul stirring reads (as though you need any more stirring for the day. Even Dalgona coffee would get ready sooner). But the minute you say goodbye to your PSLE warrior and turn towards the running tracks, feeling liberated, damn your luck. The father of your kids and the veteran PSLE kid call up. What a perfect day to feel hunger rumbling their tummies and demand a tasty snack while announcing their arrival in 20 minutes. They even offer to pick you up. You stomp your feet to the ground like a horse gone mad in a storm. Then you stop, worried about your beautiful white Onitsuka Tigers and the opinion of people around. You give in to temptation, meet the other half of the family for a high-calorie, deep-fried soul satiating snack. And then youI end up even heavier in both guilt and weight.

9 pm – The PSLE kid is back home, chatting with the sister and father, completely oblivious of the pending homework while yours truly is making sure kitchen is closed for the day. You can salvage some sanity with a quick walk and disappear out of the house.

10 pm – The kids are tucked in bed, and while I decide to embrace slumber, the PSLE kid is wide awake. She has now remembered the erstwhile homework situation and is worried sick of her plight in class the next morning.

11 pm – Homework is done and we finally press the snooze button on life…

Until next morning. Then it is wake and repeat the madness.

The year has almost passed and tomorrow we begin with the Listening Comprehension of the PSLE.

P.S. I remember playing to my heart’s content at ages 11, 12. I am glad my generation had an extended childhood. But our children live in a different world, one where information is omnipresent online, and everything seems fast forward. I sincerely wish that as schools and parents, we do away with the dread that surrounds PSLE. I hope that as adults we can bring about an attitudinal shift in which to train our 12-year-olds to put in their best effort and be ready for any eventuality; to teach them to not lose heart when they do no enter a school of their choice and to teach them that a mere school leaving exam is not capable of grading their entire being. I wish we can look at people with disabilities or the misfortune of living in places of danger, of disaster or scarcity and feel grateful if we have kids who can live independent lives and choose to blossom when it is time. In comparison, PSLE will never win, I assure you. I wish that PSLE is taken with a pinch of salt and not like some life altering milestone.

But no matter what I think, PSLE is a reality for an entire cohort every year and from one worried mother to another, here is wishing good health, no stress and loads of luck to all our PSLE kids this year!