Cleaning Leather

 

My secondary autistic sense is Touch. I enjoy feeling textures with my fingers. My primary autistic sense is Smell. I enjoy smelling people I love and fragrances. Both my these senses are greatly satisfied by one single activity: cleaning leather.

Once in a while, I will gather up the whole family's leather bags and shoes. I will line them up in a circle around me, and then, with a cloth, I spend 1 hour rubbing mink oil lovingly into the leather. Once the leather has absorbed the mink oil, I spend another hour rubbing carnauba wax onto the leather to protect it from water and mould.

There is something very therapeutic and calming about cleaning leather, and feeling its texture under my fingers.

聪明的女人

聪明的女人 

一定要记住

好好工作

好好赚钱

所有的喜欢你和想你的人

都是假的

都会变的

在这个世界上靠谁

不如靠自己

女人一定要会赚钱

一定要会开车

一定要会打扮

车子里有油

包里有钱

这些都是安全感

The Daughter has bought a home, and will be getting married soon. Hers is a truly modern relationship where the partners are truly equal. They share in the expenses. They share in the responsibilities. Younger folks are more willing to share in everything. In my generation, it was still expected that the husband would be the main breadwinner and the wife would bear the major load of childcare and homecare. 

In my generation, women friends who made it to the C-suite did so with huge mom guilt because they also felt that they had to do it all at home. Those, like me, who don't have mom guilt, gave up a career. Then, there are women situated along the whole spectrum between one or the other.

I really did not like not earning money. I worked hard at home, and brought to my family skills in medicinal herbs, organisational psychology, gardening, cooking, housebuilding. I worked very hard. It was simply not paid work. This made me vulnerable to disrespect. People could assume that I contributed nothing and therefore, I had no rights.

I don't want my daughter to go through what I did. So, I was prepared to ditch my 2nd career, in order to raise her kids. Then, I found out that her company has Work From Home days, and 6 months to 1 year childcare leave for BOTH male and female parents. Since husband and wife work in the same company, they would be able to take equal turns.

I mean... wow! I need not have worried. Society has moved and organisations have evolved along with it. Shared responsibilities are now a real thing. The Daughter can embrace womanhood as expressed above.

Now, I have a new fear. Relationships require vulnerability. It was because My Husband saw that I had given so much and become so vulnerable that he now cherishes me and protects me like a rare gem. To grow into each other within a marriage, it requires both parties 

- to be vulnerable to each other

- to then move to shield each other

This is the reason why The Husband and I are as thick as thieves today. Will the new style partnership allow such vulnerabilities (and therefore such bonds) to develop?

以柔克刚

 The EQ classes attract many "difficult" children. Many of these children come into class with hardened wills, ready to do battle with any adult in authority over them. These are children with a lot of potential. They resist authority because they are fed up with how authority is always forcing them to conform to one model of what is a good and obedient child:

- do all your HW

- show respect to adults no matter what

- focus entirely no matter how boring the lesson is

These children step into class ready to be criticised, scolded and disciplined. Their teachers have scolded and complained to parents. Their parents have scolded and counselled and punished, in order to get the child to fit the mould of a good student. The first 3 to 4 lessons is about trust building. The children learn to trust that I will respond to their needs, instead of demand from them behaviours they are as yet unable to control.

To teach them EQ, I need to soften their will before I can mould them. So today, I was thrilled to come across the phrase 以柔克刚. Children are like clay, you know. When parents breathe the fire of anger and frustration onto them, it is as good as putting clay in a kiln. What happens to clay in a kiln? It gets hard and brittle. Do this to your children (in cooperation with the school) and your child will harden into brittleness by adolescence. When that happens, you can do nothing to influence the shape of your child.

Sometimes, the fire that hardens clay comes from family dynamics passed down through 2 generations. If the family dynamics are not rearranged by the time the siblings enter their teens, these dynamics will define interactions for adult siblings through the rest of their lives.

Parents tend to send me their P6 children because it is in P6 when the children begin to harden to such an extent that parents find it really hard to influence their child. When I first meet the child, I need to 以柔克刚 before I can even begin to mould them. I wish parents would send me their children earlier. Then, I can teach the parents how to mould their children before problems develop. Done this way, we also maximise the chances of bringing the children to full potential.

Why wait for problems to get out of hand?

Oh well... the reality is that many parents do.

 

No Time to Dream

I am dreamy. When I have time, I like to get lost inside my personal Mind Palace, exploring this thought and thinking that question. Then, I like to go and find answers to my questions. Then, I like to play with the answers inside my head and try to test them in reality. 

That was how I learnt how to:

- cure dandruff

- use garden herbs to cure common ailments

- develop a way to teach EQ

- develop a method to teach kids how to think

I have been so busy that I have not had time to dream. My parent coaching schedule is booked all the way through to May. To be sure, it is rewarding work. I feel such a deep sense of satisfaction to hear parents say:

- We have small wins.

- We are happier.

- He/she is calmer.

- Thank you for helping me understand my child.

I miss dreaming, though. I am doing a lot and not dreaming enough. Dreaming is a necessary part of my life. Without it, I cannot see beyond what is real, to explore what is possible. Without it, I feel trapped and limited. In my imagination anything is possible. Then, after a bit, I can push some of my imagination into reality. That way, I break moulds and do things differently. Then, there is the thrill of seeing the results of breaking the mould.

Prisoners in solitary confinement develop skills in exploring their own Mind Palaces. I guess I learnt to do this out of sheer loneliness. Autistic people don't have many friends. As a child, my internal reality had always been richer and more interesting than the childhood I was living. As a child, escaping into my head kept me sane. As an adult, escaping into my head allowed me to bring the richness of my thought, into reality.

I now understand that the way to imprison the mind in solitary confinement is too have too busy a life. In a life filled with tasks, schedules and things to do, the mind is shackled to one place. 

I need to make time to dream.

The Evil in Myanmar

In the past weeks, I have viewed videos coming out of Myanmar of such violence that I did not believe possible. The Myanmar military capture protesters, pull out teeth, pull off fingers and behead them. They put the whole lot together and send the corpse with some of its pieces back to its mother. The video has the mother wailing over what is left of a 20 year old young man, his decapitated head lovingly positioned back on the neck of the corpse. I stared at the bewildered of his mother and cringed at her keening wails.

My son is 20 too. In that moment I knew what she was saying even though I understood not a word, "Bring my son back and take me instead. I would give my life for his."

I saw another clip of a soldier shooting point blank into another young man's head. Another showed soldiers dragging naked bodies across a basketball court.

Her village has a few tens of households. The villages around there have been visited by soldiers in the night. The soldiers have pulled out young men and taken them away. They have not been seen since. Teen girls between 12 to 20 have been gang raped and shot in the head afterwards.

The extent of the evil deeds being visited upon the people of Myanmar by their own government is indescribable. There are no words to describe the horrors I saw in Her Facebook page.

The crops at this point are ready for the harvest. Martial law has been declared and the military will shoot on sight anyone who leaves his house. The crops are now rotting in the fields. This winter, there will be no food to eat. The one thing I know is that prayer works. I have gathered everyone I know from the USA to Lebanon to Greece to UK to France to pray. Catholic or Protestant, I don't care. Even if you are a Buddhist or a Muslim, please pray.

Prayer works.

Soldiers pulled on the gates of the village one night. The gates held. The soldiers left. We all got on our knees to pray. The next night, the soldiers were redeployed away from M's village. They came back in the day and took up space in the village square. They did not rape nor kill anyone. 

Giftedness: The Label

 

Mary Poppins' Bag

 

When I researched for material to write the blogpost on the Hermès Ethos, I boned up on the history of the Hermès Birkin bag. 

In 1981, British-born, Paris-based actress Jane Birkin found herself on an Air France flight, seated next to then-chief executive of Hermès, Jean-Louis Dumas. She was carrying a basket like the one above.  The contents of Jane’s bag spilled out all over the floor. In reaction to the mishap, Dumas suggested she get herself a bag with pockets. Jane replied, "I will do so the day Hermès makes a bag large enough for a me."  The rest is history.

That really made me sit up. Jane Birkin was the other Brigitte Bardot. The 2 women were the sexpots extraordinaire of the swinging 60s. Together, they broke all polite conventions and kickstarted the 1960s sexual revolution. Both had extraordinarily successful careers at the forefront of cinematic art, and the 1960s sexual revolution.

Yet, Jane Birkin was a mother. She needed a large bag. Those of us who are mothers know that our handbags must produce anything and everything in any and every emergency. My bag used to contain nappies, water bottles, writing pad, a pouch of stationery (stapler, scissors, scotch tape, pen), wet tissue, dry tissue, antiseptic wipes, Handyplast,  nut bars, ponchos, hairbrush, wallet, handphone. So, after my babies arrived, I started to carry all sorts of large, sport backpacks.

When the children grew up, I began to carry small backpacks. Recently, I have had to make do with 3 bags:

- 1 bag for my knitting

- 1 bag for worksheets and the iPad

- 1 bag for wallet, wet tissue, hairbrush,

So, when I found out that the Hermès Birkin was designed for mothers, I became intrigued. I bought 2 fake Birkins, on Shopee. My fakes are so fake that they did not even bother to fake the Hermès logo. The design is exact, though. For all practical purposes, it functions as a Birkin would. It simply does not have the aura of exclusivity and class that a real Birkin would have.

I was very pleased with how much I could fit in there, and still have a handbag that looked sharp and held its shape. The design is very clever. It is actually a large tote bag, that looks like a handbag. Anyway, one thing lead to another and I ended up owning 3 fakes. I finally settled for the grey calf leather one at 35 cm because that one is big enough to hold 3 bags' worth of stuff in 1. Into it, I fit:

- 24 sets of worksheets

- 20 whiteboard cleaning cloths

- large wallet

- large wet tissue

- large hairbrush

- dry tissue

- iPad

- Kindle

- 1 large cone of woollen yarn

- half knitted sweater

- mobile phone

Man! I was impressed! This is like a real life Mary Poppins' bag!

Mary Poppins' Carpet Bag

30 cm fake crocodile leather.

35 cm grey calfskin leather and 30 cm khaki calfskin leather.