For subscribers
Dear mothers, your children need you to be your own person too
We cannot afford to lose ourselves in our children’s needs. This Mother’s Day, the best gift we can offer is the presence of a mother who remains connected to herself.
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Life can begin to revolve so completely around children that it becomes difficult to tell where motherhood ends and the rest of one’s identity begins, says the writer.
ST PHOTO: KUA CHEE SIONG
Caryn Lim
Shortly after my eldest son was born, I started a side hustle on top of my full-time job in a healthcare company. It was a home-based Chinese immersion programme for toddlers – a concept I really believed in, as a way of bringing early language learning into homes whose primary speaking language was not Mandarin.
The business grew quickly, especially as this was during the Covid-19 pandemic. But when my son was two years old, it emerged that he might have autism. I was also preparing for the birth of my twins.
