iron sharpens iron

I’m so proud of my eldest daughter for being invited to join the Science Olympiad team at school. It’s a wonderful opportunity to deepen her understanding, build confidence, and develop her skills in science. It’s such an honour to be selected.

Only six students were chosen, and what makes it even more special is that three of her closest friends were also invited, meaning all four girls in her little group made the team. She is surrounded by studious, curious, and like-minded peers, the kind of circle where iron sharpens iron.

They are such a good influence on one another, encouraging each other to aim higher, stay focused, and grow together. Like a small constellation, each one shines brightly, but stronger together. It’s a joy to see her thriving with such inspiring young ladies by her side.

mother goose

One of the nice things about getting older is knowing you don’t need to have had all your ducks in a row. Even as a kid, I never had one of those polished answers to the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I wasn’t dreaming of becoming a doctor, a lawyer, or anything particularly impressive.

But age brings the comforting realisation that the answer doesn’t have to be a profession to be purposeful. Sometimes, it turns out to be motherhood.

My daughters have promoted me to Mother Goose, which is a far better title than anything my younger self could ever have put on a vision board. Of course, no goose can be majestic all the time, and my goslings would be the first to tell you that I am just as often a silly goose.

the fire after the fireworks

The movie Eternity poses the question: is love at its truest in the bright rush of the beginning, or in the long, unremarkable faithfulness of time? 

Elizabeth Olsen gives Joan a tenderness and intelligence that keep the film from collapsing into sentimentality. She captures the difference between young love and enduring love without reducing either one. One is electric, unfinished, almost mythic because it never had the chance to disappoint. The other is deeper, weathered, familiar, and less cinematic on the surface, but far more real.

Unlike Joan, I do not have two different husbands. I just have Dave twice. There is Boyfriend Dave: the guy I loved with reckless, gleaming, honeymoon affection. This Dave could do no wrong. He was young, handsome, proper, and such a gentleman. Then there is Husband Dave: the man I have loved through years of adventures and laughter, companionship and loyalty, dirty socks, abandoned cups, household chores, and all the small, unglamorous acts that go into raising a family.

He complains that I loved Boyfriend Dave more than I love Husband Dave, which is exactly why Eternity resonated with me. If Joan had two husbands, then in a way, so do I: Early Dave and Lifetime Dave. That is what makes the comparison sweet rather than sad. Early love is noisy. It sparkles. It is full of butterflies and daydreams. But lasting love is underrated because it stops performing and starts proving itself. It becomes less about the thrill and more about choosing the same person so many times that your heart knows the path by instinct.

So no, perhaps I do not love Dave now in exactly the way I loved him in the beginning. Back then, it was all fireworks. Now it is the fire still burning after the party is over, the chairs are stacked, and the house is quiet. Honestly, that is the greater miracle.

Eternity suggests that love has seasons, and that the softer, older kind may not look as romantic, but it runs deeper. Joan had to choose between two husbands. I got lucky. I chose Dave, and then kept meeting new versions of him along the way.

growing pains

I used to think heartbreak was losing a guy.

I was wrong.

The deepest pain comes when your own child disappoints you. No one lives in your heart the way your child does. They carry your love, your hopes, your prayers, and the dreams you held for them before they could hold any of their own.

When they make choices that wound you, reject what you taught them, or become someone you hardly recognise, the grief lands hard. It carries sorrow for who they are and mourning for who they could have been.

This heartbreak bruises love to the bone. This grief bears their name.

The hardest truth is that love stays. You love your child through every break in your heart. You keep hurting. You keep hoping. You keep praying they find their way back.

suddenly thirteen

Her room still carries traces of childhood: a dollhouse sits beside her Lego box, stuffed animals lining the shelf, the fresh scent of strawberry shampoo after her shower. You braid her hair and finish it with ribbons to match her outfit.

Then she turns thirteen. There is no warning. The change comes all at once. Yesterday she was role-playing with her toys and making stop-motion videos with her little sister. Today, she stands at Mecca, asking for lip gloss and press-on nails, studying her reflection as though the way she looks has suddenly begun to matter.

Childhood recedes like the tide. Loose hair and claw clips replace the neat plaits of younger years. For school, sleek ponytails. On weekends, her long, straight hair is carefully parted, falling exactly the way she likes it. Her dresser stacks with the things you never expected to see so soon: tiny perfume bottles, an eyelash curler, and skincare products she learned about from friends.

Her sense of style changes too. The pretty dresses that once filled her wardrobe are pushed to the back, making space for denim shorts, trendy activewear sets and oversized hoodies, birthday gifts she expertly persuaded her doting uncles to buy.

Children are always eager to grow up. They hurry toward the next phase of life, certain that older must mean better. Meanwhile, you find yourself wishing she would slow down just a little, so that princess costumes and tiaras, unicorns, braids, and ribbons might last a bit longer.

People warn you about sleepless nights with babies, the chaos of the toddler stage, and the rush of school schedules. But no one prepares you for the emotional whiplash of watching twelve turn thirteen.

The shift feels almost overnight.

One day, you are curling her hair. The next, she’s dabbing blush onto her cheeks, pushing against the no-makeup rule. Somewhere along the way, your little girl stepped quietly into adolescence.

blank space

There are some people you miss because they left a space where an ending should have been. This is a quick epilogue to the first-heartbreak chapter, because I never leave a story incomplete.

A few years later, that boy came back into my life without an explanation for his disappearance. The closest thing to a reason came wrapped in practicality: he wanted to focus on his last year of high school and avoid distractions. As if vanishing was a productivity hack. I half believed him, the way you let a bandage pretend it’s stitches. I wanted a noble reason more than the truth. Any excuse can feel like relief when you’ve been living on questions.

I expected his comeback to cure the ache. I pictured it sliding into place like a false tooth, covering the raw nerve. When he returned, my body stayed braced. My mind didn’t celebrate. My heart didn’t open. The old silence sat between us like a bruise you don’t poke. Bitterness rose first, then something darker, close to vengeance. Teenage me had wanted an answer to “Where did you go?” Adult me wanted acknowledgement of the crater he left behind. The adolescent burn cooled into something defensive. I could hold a grudge like a Taylor Swift bridge.

He acted like we could restart without touching the rupture, and he assumed my heart would forget what it had learned. But I couldn’t. The gap taught me what erasure feels like. So we didn’t get back together, because I resented him more than I missed him.  

And maybe that’s the real closure: not the lost explanation, or a happy ending that mends a broken heart, but the fact that my life moved on, and the strange realisation that the door I’d been staring at was never the only way forward.

ankle deep in yearning

There’s one particular scene in the latest “Wuthering Heights” that stirred an unexpected sadness in me. I didn’t understand why until I pulled it apart.

It’s during Catherine’s fever spiral. She’s lovesick in bed, the room blurring as time folds in on itself. In her delirium, the boy Heathcliff appears; then his hand reaches from under the bed and holds her ankle. The touch strikes like memory in muscle. She doesn’t look down, but her skin recognises him, as if childhood has returned to comfort her.

Under his grip, her body unclenches: I’m here. I’ve always been here. The adaptation carries their history without words. The past arrives through contact, and it grabs hold. Their story runs on yearning: the hunger to belong, to be seen by the person who knew you before you outgrew yourself. Beneath the romance, there’s protection, too: the flashback of him shielding her from her father’s violence. The gesture becomes shelter: Stay with me. I’ve got you. As she slips away, her mind reaches for the first safe place it ever learned to trust.

That’s when it hit me. I know that yearning. At seventeen, I was infatuated with a former boyfriend. I replayed our conversations like a broken record, trying to track down the part where he stopped wanting me. I told myself it was love, because what else do you call a feeling that consumes your whole body?

One day I was still in his world. The next he blocked me, erasing us with a click. The silence left blank space instead of closure. I kept pining for him the way a tongue keeps checking a missing tooth, resisting the clean finality of absence.

So when Catherine reacts to that hand on her ankle, I notice the cycle: the brain clings to what once felt good and keeps wondering, Where did you go? The wound stays open, so the search continues.

That’s the heartbreak: a hand around an ankle. As her body begins to give way, the scene strips their tether back to instinct: reflex, nerve, something older than choice. Attachment refuses to let go. It keeps asking for the answer it never got.

match my freque

The “Opalite” music video by Taylor Swift is about meeting someone who resonates with your frequency, letting you be yourself unapologetically. It’s a magical connection where your quirks are celebrated rather than tolerated.

My story with Dave began in the opposite way. He felt like my ideal man, and I was convinced he was out of my league. I tucked parts of myself away, packing the colourful, messy pieces of my personality into boxes and shoving them into a closet. I tried to become someone who matched him, terrified I’d scare him off.

A few months in, I couldn’t keep the facade. I got a little unhinged, the boxes cracked open, and the real me spilled out. And to my shock, he didn’t flinch. He opened each hidden box, oddly amused by the opals inside.

That was the pivot. I stopped bracing for rejection. His calm met my chaos, and he stayed, accepting me exactly as I am.

I admired his character from the moment we met, and I tried to meet him there. Nineteen Valentine’s Days later, the twist is that he’s changed too. He’s tuned into my energy: cheeky, playful, and gloriously goofy. He jokes that I must have “dropped and broke him,” and that scenario still makes me laugh. I picture him as a pristine piece of china that fell into a kaleidoscope. Now he’s the one sparkling in my colours, matching my frequency.

relief without grief

It’s been over six months since I ended a thirty-year friendship, and I don’t miss her. No regret, no curiosity. Her absence is a relief. Good riddance.

But the anger stayed.

It’s sharp and active. I’ll be walking the dogs, doing laundry, getting a manicure, and a memory cuts in. A sour moment I once shrugged off now reads like evidence: the way I’d give her an inch and she’d act entitled to a mile.

The real injury is self-betrayal. That’s what rattles me. I expected grief, but it never came. I got a clean exit and leftover rage. The right outcome, the wrong aftertaste.

My mind keeps running inventory: every time I ignored my instincts, swallowed a cheap shot, and rationalised behaviour I didn’t respect. Each flashback lights the match again.

Embarrassment sits under the fury. Shame is the splinter, and anger is my body trying to yank it out.

She started as background noise in my life, and I assumed she’d fade out on her own. She trailed my circle, and we couldn’t ditch her. I adjusted instead of drawing a boundary. People warned me, but I didn’t listen, defending her instead. I pride myself on being inclusive, and sympathy traps me, so I let her in.

Onlookers called me loyal, but they meant blind. I knew it and kept going. The embarrassing truth is the real gamble was my ego. I doubled down, stubbornly backing a lame horse. I didn’t want to lose face after I’d vouched for her, but instead I lost time, energy, and self-respect.

In dating, I leave at the first red flag. I protect my peace. I didn’t apply that same discipline to friendship, and that inconsistency is what stings.

When I think of my high school best friends, CP & LN, I’m flooded with warm nostalgia. We had that rare kind of closeness that made ordinary days unforgettable, ridiculous laughter and spontaneous adventures that turned into favourite stories I still tell my children.

With her, it was just habit. Nothing heartfelt. No memories that make me smile.

That contrast hurts. It shows me what genuine connection looks like, and how long I confused tolerance with sisterhood.

mad blood

I hate how difficult it is to get over it. Once I cut someone off, they’re gone for good. No being cordial. No “but people change.” Jenny in 7th grade was my first proof: I wrote her off, and she turned out to be an awful person. That’s why I trust my judgment, and why part of me thinks this vendetta is justified.

My mind keeps replaying what they did, stirring the same anger over and over. Imagining them laughing and unbothered only adds fuel. I wish I could erase it, or at least stop giving it so much power. They’re out there sleeping just fine, probably not thinking about it, while I’m stuck carrying resentment and wishing them harm.

Sometimes the rage hits so hard I want to fire off a mean text just to relieve it. Texting feels therapeutic because it tells my nervous system, “That was real. That mattered. There should be a consequence.” What makes it worse is knowing it only hurts me. She is free, and I am trapped in the memory, letting it take up space in my head. She was one of the few parasites I’m embarrassed I ever let close. She still irritates me every time I remember her, like a mosquito I can hear but can’t swat. I want to be the kind of person who chooses peace over bitterness. But sometimes spite smothers logic, and letting go feels like letting her win.

I admire how easily my eldest daughter can brush things off, just like her dad. I’m glad she didn’t inherit my petty genes. She’s already over last year’s friendship squabbles, while I’m still holding a grudge against a couple of teenagers.