What does it truly mean to be a mother?

The writer, a junior doctor, reflects on how her time in the obstetrics wards gave her a new perspective on motherhood and helped her appreciate her own mum.

- Tricia Tan

"You'll never understand until you become a mother yourself," my mother often told me.

As a headstrong teenager, being mothered meant fielding an endless volley of worries.

"Don't paste anything on your walls, next time, our house will be hard to sell."

"Don't take literature just because you like reading, it's very hard to score an A."

"Korea? Why does your school want you to go there? Are you sure it's safe?"

So I plastered my walls with Post-It notes. I took literature for my A levels and got an A. I headed to South Korea for a research programme twice.

In a way, being mothered felt like air quietly present in the background, always there. I never quite imagined an alternative reality until she died in June after being diagnosed with rectal cancer five years ago.

It was only as a medical student, and later, as a junior doctor in the obstetrics department, that I began to see my mother in a new light and better understand what mothering really was.

A WINDOW TO MOTHER'S LIFE

The first time I witnessed a birth as a medical student, I cried when the new mum called out through tears of joy, "Sayang, sayang (darling in Malay)", as she held the greasy, pink infant in her arms.

I had pinned my happy tears to a generic awe of the beauty of motherhood. But in that bright delivery suite, I imagined my own mother seeing me for the very first time tiny, squealing and impossibly alive.

Later, as a junior doctor doing a four-month rotation in the obstetrics department, I realised why mothers treasured the moment so.

My night shifts were punctuated by emergencies that underscored the fraught road to motherhood: midnight caesarean sections when an unborn baby's heartbeat was in flux, 4am rush-ins to hospital when a mother felt her baby stopped moving, and the implacable grief of a mother with a late placenta abruption.

The baby was 19 weeks old, nonviable, and she had come in too late.