The Prodigal Daughter

There are many reasons why I never seem to visit home often enough. Some older generations call me an ungrateful bitch who lacks all sense of filial piety. My childhood friends think i'm too involved with City life to care much about home. My city friends think I'm lucky, because they either stay half an hour from their parents, or in their parent's basement. My workmates probably don't even know that my parents are still alive, judging by the weekends i have appointments and events lined up for.

I just started Scrap-booking about 5 months ago. It started when recession hit, I was jobless and down, and found it hard to get out of bed every morning. The sickening feeling of my whole world crashing down and the self pity syndrome sent "why me?" impulses through my neurons every hour of the day. I was browsing through the streets of Bangsar aimlessly one day and walked through a craft shop. As I looked at the overpriced stickers and craft materials, I thought, why not? Maybe scrap-booking might take my mind of one thing or another, and hence the project started.

Scrap-booking did help me feel better, because for once in months, i was focusing on the good times I had before and started being grateful for those happy memories. Cutting out ridiculous shapes of paper and coloring the pages with decoratives seemed childish, but it brought back some sort of Zen in my life. But what scrap-booking brought back was also guilt, and a hard hitting fact of why I chose to be distant from my loved ones, my parents.

The low down is, I love being the ungrateful daughter that I am. I love being the prodigal daughter who keeps running off and way, and coming back for love and support and running off in the next exit i can find again. THAT, is my coping strategy of being away from home. Not many people understand how hard it is to live in the city all alone, starting out without daddy putting in dosh for your first car installments, or daddy offering to pay for a holiday trip for you so that you can go on a family trip even if you can't afford it on your own. I have to work, put up with bullshit, pay my bills, and yet worry about being there for my parents and enjoying whatever last years they have left with them. That is probably the hardest part, whatever last years.

It's not news that parents eventually and usually depart before their children. But being close to them, and visiting them often, and spending time with them, only nails the reality deeper into my subconscious. Being closer to them, only makes it harder for me when they do leave. Every time my mother or father shows their support and concern, it overwhelms me so deeply that it brings tears to my eyes. And I find it easier to push their charity of affections out of my way rudely, and deal with it my own hard way. And thats why I'd rather be this ungrateful daughter, than to suffer and miss them so dearly now, than to miss them so much when they are gone.