We had murals done on the exterior walls when Trin decided to exercise some creative license one day.

Big googly eyes, a wobbly grin and pockets of teeth. A self-portrait. Thankfully she used blue colour pencils and not ink. There was ONE on the back wall where she did use a permanent marker, so it remains till this day.

I was more horrified and angry but decided that the best thing to do was to tell her not to do that again and to reinforce the message by asking her to clean the walls. We used detergent and water. She had a lot of fun so I'm not sure that the 'punishment' was a true deterrent.

However, she has not done done this again so I think the message stuck.

Thought I'd update on the gym training situation with Caitlin.


I was feeling lost and conflicted about this. On one hand, did not want to be pushy mom but on the other, feeling like this was such a complete waste of talent and opportunity! Prayed about it and in the bus, I told God I'd just leave it to Him to show me the answers. And He did!


He gave me the opportunity to speak to two friendly moms whose girls are also on the national training squad. One of them has a girl who is in the same school, same class as Cait and who's also on the school team. She is highly talented and very advanced in gym.


Listening and talking to these two moms, thinking deeply about my own situation, being advised by the comments of friends etc led to several conclusions:


1) We have the wider perspective as adults so we owe it to the child to give them the perspective they lack. Cait just wants to be a kid. She is reacting like a kid. She wants friends, craves approval and friendship and affirmation, hates boring drillwork, prefers to stick to the tried and true comfort zone. But as her mom, there will be times when I just have to put my foot down and steer her in the direction she may not want to go. That, according to one gym mom's earnest explanation, is NOT pushing. If given enough time and perspective and experience, the child still decides that this is not for her, then yes, time to call it a day. But until then, we have to give them every opportunity to discover and to stick with stuff they may not like. That's our job as parents.


2) Some hard stuff are worth sticking it out. The hard lessons you learn about sticking to stuff you don't like, doing the boring drillwork and seemingly elementary details, will pay off in the long run. I was given lesson after lesson in gym in those two long afternoons I spent at the gym watching them train and for that, I am grateful to these mums for explaining and sharing their time, experience and perspective.

In competition, when we see those fabulous leaps and turns and flips, our jaws drop. But the reality is harder. Judges keep an eagle eye out for the slightest imperfection in those turns and points are deducted for every little deviation. Gymnasts who do not have the fundamentals firmly in place may have a hard time teaching their bodies to 'un-learn' the incorrect moves and conditioning them again appropriately. So everytime Cait yawns about doing "the easy stuff" I remind her to be patient - it will pay off in the long run.

Similarly, sticking it out in training will teach her about tenacity, responsibility, commitment. In life there are hard lessons all the time that we need not like what we have to do, but we just have to do it. We just pray for patience and grace in these times.

I explained to Cait seriously about the opportunities she would forgo if she quit now. So many kids will want the place she has in the training squad. If she leaves the squad, where will she get such training opportunities and with these coaches? I learned that several of them had a hand in training the Chinese Olympic squad. What a valuable experience. How to pass this up? And if she does, what then? The next best club that trains the better gymnasts (and several of her school team-mates are training here) is Prime. But Prime costs an arm and a leg. I told her that I could not afford thousand-dollar training fees. I had to also consider her siblings' other needs and money needs to be stretched very carefully.

So the best thing for her would be to stick with training here. For now at least. Who knows what will happen in 3 months? Perhaps she might not even make the cut to the final team selection. But for now, she just has to not only stick it out, but give her best and learn all she can.

Drama on Saturday morning. I arrived at the bowling alley to watch Gillian in action during a bowling tournament when I was told by the teacher in charge that she was "injured". Turned out that her left knee cap gave way and she could no longer put any weight on it, much less bowl.

She later described what happened. It was the fifth frame and just as she released the ball, her right leg slipped, slamming her left knee onto the lane. She said it hurt but she could still get up and hobble back. She could even bowl the next time it came to her turn. But at that point, she heard a crack sound coming from her knee and the whole thing gave way. She crashed onto the lane, clutching her knee and that was when she was declared out of action.

I arrived to find her in tears and the parent volunteer present calling a physiotherapist for some advice. We managed to get her down from the bowling alley to the lobby and into a cab. The teacher in charge came with us. I decided on Mt Alvernia because of insurance issues.

They took an x-ray of the knee and the doctor pronounced it as acute subluxation of the patella. In layman's terms, it just means dislocation of the kneecap. The force, he surmised, must have knocked the kneecap off its position. Pain relief was given via injection to which my squeamish daughter protested because it was a male nurse giving the jab! The ortho specialist was called in and after palpating (with Gillian gritting teeth and semi-screaming), thinks that 80% it's a meniscal tear which requires surgery. An MRI would confirm it, he said. Meanwhile, she has to stay in hospital.

Long and short of it is, the MRI showed no meniscal tear but bone contusions and ligament sprains on the outer knee. However, she is still in considerable pain when he palpates the inner knee. He's not sure what it is and is a little bugged that the MRI may have missed something. One possibility might be a scaping of the bone or cartilage due to trauma - and this will only be more clearly defined over time.

So she's home now, or more accurately, in her grandmother's home where she will receive much pampering and cooing over. She's also exempt from school for a week and she's learning to navigate with crutches since she can't put her full weight on her left leg. Looks like no bowling for several months ahead at least!

One week into centralised national training and Caitlin now says she wants to quit. I could see this coming. I know that this has been brewing over the past few days. She’s been going for daily training from 4pm to 8pm practically everyday except Saturday and on Sundays, she goes for school training – also at CCAB – for three hours. Her national coach has recommended that she completely stop school training to avoid confusion in coaching techniques and instructions. The school coach concurs. But I wanted her to keep in touch with the school squad at least once a week to keep a sense of loyalty to the school and to the coach. But perhaps, this is not quite a good idea after all as you will see when you read on.

Okay, I know her daily routine is rigorous. By the time she gets home from school, at 2pm, there’s barely enough time for her to have her lunch, get a bit of rest, and finish her homework etc before granddad comes to pick her up at 3.30pm. By the time we pick her up from training at 8pm, she gets a late dinner at 8.30pm, showers, does a bit of reading and then its bedtime at 10pm. So yes, it’s very hard. It’s tough work.

But the tough routine is not the reason why she’s caving.

When we pick her up from gym, KH and I always go a bit earlier so that we can watch her train. We’ve made some observations of our own. Firstly, it’s very clear that everyone is there to train. The gymnasts are very independent and disciplined. They train on their own most of the time, going through drills and routines over and over. Sometimes their peers will give comments and suggestions but the coaches seem to have a very light hand. It’s just plain hard work and everyone seems very single-minded on this point. There was once we saw a gymnast attempt a somersault but fail to land on the balance beam. She fell hard, hitting her head on the beam. There was a loud bang followed by a keening cry of pain, audible throughout the gymnasium and all of us parents there watching froze in horror. I was asking KH anxiously: should I call an ambulance?

But what really surprised me was that none of the other gymnasts went over to see how the girl was. She lay there for a quite a while. Only one coach walked over. The others paused for a moment to watch a bit and then went back to their drills. It seemed quite cold to me.

So I infer that the bottom line is – no one is there to make friends or be buddies. Everyone there is purposeful and serious about training. At the end of the day, everyone there is a competitor. They compete to be in the first team, they compete for spots to represent the nation in competition, they compete for medals.

For Ms Popular Caitlin, who is used to a great deal of camaraderie among her team-mates in school, this is quite a sea change. The girls she’s training with had entered the training squad a year before and so they were familiar with the coaches and with each other. So she feels a bit left out and excluded. Plus her Mandarin is not very good and so understanding instructions from the coaches, who are all Chinese nationals, becomes challenging – so much so that her training mates have had to translate once in a while. She’s also had to get used to other coaching techniques. Luckily, she still has her former school coach with her.

So the duck out of water feeling is what Cait is struggling with now. In addition, now that she’s training in the national squad, everyone there is as good as or even better than she is. For someone who hates to feel inferior, this is a real come-down. She’s got her work cut out to catch up and keep up. There is pressure not to lag behind.

For the first time, she’s been making excuses to not go for gym training so I knew that the storm was coming.

Yesterday we had a talk and she blurted out that girls in her school team (she still goes back for occasional training with her school) also call her “Traitor!” for training apart from them. She was in tears when she told me about this. I know how hard it is for someone like her, who wants to be liked, to be a partial persona non grata now.

It is painful and I feel for her. I also know that this is what the path is like. It can be very lonely. Look at our table tennis world champions. Damn if you do and damn if you don’t. Win and Chinese nationals call you traitor for not playing for China. Win and Singaporeans scoff and say you’re not true blue Singaporean but imported talent.

People are going to throw names at you all the time, I told Cait. Yes, it hurts. On the flip side, there are also lots of people who are very proud of you – our family, our friends, your school, your teachers, your coaches. We’re proud that she’s come so far. But more than just the name-calling, it's knowing that you are not going to fit in that well anymore. Like it or not, you're different (or better) and the opportunity cost of training elsewhere means you will not feel like you belong in either places - not at CCAB (because of the competitive nature of the place and the people) and not in school (because you lose the momentum of friendship made through shared hard work).

Still, it’s bitter knowledge to learn at this age. And I think this is only the beginning. Learning to move beyond the comfort zone, learning to be adaptable, learning the new rules of a different jungle, learning to develop rhino hide, to sift out comments that are constructive and valuable versus plain name-calling, to learn about envy, loneliness and being strong enough to take it all, wanting the big brass ring badly enough to take it all. This is what she has to learn. She has to ask herself how badly she wants it.

I feel for her and I can understand why she wants to throw in the towel. But I also feel that this is such a waste of talent. I am also angry that she is giving up. Why can’t she take it? Why can’t she WANT to take it? As an adult with access to a wider vista, I can see so clearly all the opportunities she would be forgoing and I'm getting an ulcer just realizing it.

But more than just anger at the loss of opportunity, I worry that she will grow into someone who just gives up easily without a fight. Is she becoming someone who will just take the easy way out? Yet what is really the easy way out? Everyone has choices in life – the fork in the road – so who is to say which one is the easy way out?

As a mother, I feel sad that she’s also got to learn hard lessons at this stage in her life. I also wonder, looking at the older gymnasts training, if this is what I want my daughter to become – this coolly indifferent, single-minded person who does not really care when others fall.

I feel conflicted myself.

“Why can’t I just do gym? Why can’t I just train with my school team?” she asked plaintively.

I think I was being a practical and ambitious mom when I replied, “To what purpose? You train and then for what? What is your goal? People want to move ahead – to represent school and then maybe, represent nation. But you don’t! So what’s the point of training so hard? Just do recreational gym then. Tell Mr Lim to downgrade you from competitive gym to just recreational gym. Then you can still do the stuff you love –but without the pressure of training, without the stress of competition!”

She just looked at me stricken because hard-nosed as that might sound, it’s also true. She has enough of a competitive streak in her for that alternative to sound unpalatable.

Do I push her? Or leave her? Am I pushing her for myself or for her? The lines are so blur. As a mom, do I accept my child for who she is, or do I push her to accomplish the ‘more’ that I think she is capable of? Do I let her make decisions which I think are bad for her in the long run, and then rue the day when it happens? Or do I steer her in the direction that I think is best? As an adult, I have perspective that she does not. Do I do the “this is what’s best for you” routine? Or allow her to make mistakes? I can explain the consequences and the opportunities lost till the cows come home but she may not have the maturity to grasp this. So do I just grit my teeth and let it happen?

Like dental hygiene – you know too many sweets are bad for the kid but you can explain it till you’re blue in the face and the kid will still bug you for more sweets. Do you let it happen and say, well, you’ll realize what a big mistake this is when your teeth start decaying? Or stand firm and say nope, no more sweets because mummy knows best?

I had a grim angst-ridden night last night. But before she went to bed, the funny girl left a hand-written contract – yes contract - on my pillow. It read:

“I, Caitlin Chong, agree to go for CCAB training on ONE condition – that you will allow me to go for Sunday training with school.” It came with blank spaces for me and for her to sign, with my full name in one corner.

I could not help but laugh. But as KH pointed out – it really sounds as if we are pushing her to do this. If she really wanted CCAB training, there should be no need for conditions. Sigh. Maybe its not a good idea to let her stay with school training until she's more comfortable at CCAB.

What are we going to do? I don’t know.