It was one of those days.
Stretched paper-thin all week working hard and having cooked six dishes the day before for the week ahead, I had looked forward to that Sunday’s special takeout treat with breathless anticipation. It would be a refreshing break from the usual routine, the one meal which was a surprise for Papa, which made every eye twinkle, and most of all, a tired Mama very happy.
Nothing beats the sound of the crunch of Popeye’s fried chicken.
I had psyched the kids up all day for this special treat.
Very patiently, my older firstborn held my credit card with unctuous pride and meticulously read out all its numbers to help Mama make the order online. “I like helping you, Mama.”
Knowing that the chicken often came fifteen to thirty minutes early, I ordered it for 7:30pm this time, hoping that would ensure an enjoyable 7pm meal to the freshest, crispiest extent. But as 7pm rolled around and then 7:10pm, and we watched the delivery riders scoot into our estate, each holding savory fares to be doled out to hungry families in different blocks, my heart sank.
I wanted to track my order but failed to. I checked my email and to my horror, unlike previous times, there was no mailed receipt.I panicked.
We were ruined.
Nothing could be worse than holding out for an entire week for a decadent deep-fried treat, psyching all the kiddies up for it, and then making the mistake of failing to complete the order.
This was disaster to the worst degree, a cardinal sin of its own category.
My heart racing, I buried my forehead in my palm as I herded my brood up to our flat. “Let’s pray, kids.”
“Dear God,” Sarah-Faith said, “I pray we will have chicken tonight.”
But when we got up, there was no chicken.
“I’m so sorry, Sarah-Faith and Esther-Praise. I think Mama made a mistake. I’m so so sorry.”
I was prepared for a major tantrum, severe disappointment, but all Sarah-Faith said was, “Are you sad, Mama? It’s okay to be sad. I am sad too.”
She pouted but held back tears.
As soon I barged into our home, I proclaimed, “We have no dinner and it’s my fault.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” said Cliff, in typical Canadian speak. “Let me run out and get chicken rice.”
“But I don’t WANT chicken rice,” I said petulantly. I ordered a Popeye’s surprise for everyone and now I’ve ruined it.”
For lunch, Cliff and the kids had gone to buy takeout from a foodcourt, only to have found it closed. Closed!
I ended up cooking again.
Now, history repeated itself, after an entire afternoon of hard work cooking the day before for the busy week ahead. I enjoy cooking, but this was too much. It was the straw that broke my back and I proclaimed to the universe, “This is a bad day.”
I looked for something, someone to project my blame, my torrent of frustration upon, but found no one.
Unfairly, I commented, “I couldn’t even complete the order properly with the kids around and needing my attention.”
With exquisite sensitivity, my firstborn snuggled up close with a quiver on her lower lip and said, “I’m sorry Mama. I really wanted to help.”
Regretting what I had said and hugging her close, I said, “It’s okay, you were good! You did everything right. Mama must have forgotten to complete the last step. Can I cook you another surprise?”
“Yes, Mama.”
But back in the kitchen, in the wake of the unbridled wrath of a hypoglycemic wife, nothing Cliff could say would make me feel better.
I unleashed a torrent of unfair words. “How can you offer to buy chicken rice when I ordered Popeye’s? I don’t even like chicken rice!”
“I can go out to get Popeye’s now but it’s too far and it’ll be late when I get back.”
“But you could have offered!” I accused.
Cooking (again) and seething, I had lost all rationale.
“Wai Jia, you really need to let us pamper you once in a while. I’ve offered so many times this week to get you a special takeout meal and you always decline.”
“No I don’t.”
“Yes you do!”
“That’s because it’s hard for me to accept!”
“You know I would do anything to help you feel more loved, rested.”
“I wish you didn’t tell me you would buy chicken rice. I wish you had just listened and paraphrased. That would have helped way more than a lecture.”
“I tried!”
“Well, you have to try harder!”
I was relentless.
A little nose peeked in through the kitchen door.
“Mama? Papa?”
“Yes?” We said, in carefully concealed irritation.
“Are you okay? I love you,” she said, scampering off.
“We love you too, Sarah-Faith.”
I crumpled onto the kitchen stool.
“It’s just a bad day,” I said, my eyes tearing up. “I don’t know why this is such a big deal.”
Cliff sat on another kitchen stool, at eye level. Suddenly, I remembered what empathy was, that it’s about sitting at the same level with someone else, without judgement or blame.
Instead of blaming me further for my petulance, my resistance to be helped or pampered, my cranky hypoglycemic state, I saw a face filled with compassion.
With his signature cheeky smile, he said, “So what can I say that would help you feel better?”
“Say- I’m sorry the order didn’t go through. What a bummer. It must be so hard to cook three meals for the family every day when there’s so much to do. Say- I’m sorry for suggesting chicken rice when I should have listened.”
Compassionately and sincerely, he said every word before asking, “Can I give you a hug?”
Tears. A bear hug in the middle of an unruly kitchen with the smell of charred vegetables on the stove.
“I just feel like I’m always trying so hard, and things are just not working out today. Plus, it’s Sabbath.”
I buried my head on his shoulder, his arms entwined like vines around mine.“Maybe you need to try less hard, my wife.”
A tiny nose peeked in through the kitchen door again.
“Papa? There’s knock on the door.”
It must be our neighbor returning our Tupperware since our last donut drop-off to them, I thought.
With a megawatt grin and his chest puffed out in classic Superman style, Cliff announced, “IT’S POPEYE’S CHICKEN! IT ARRIVED!!!”
Celebratory cheers all around.
Tears in my eyes.
“God answered our prayers! Yay!” Our firstborn squealed with pure delight and trust.
“Wow,” I said wryly, smiling too.
For the first time in our family history, Popeye’s had arrived late.
But more importantly, I had the opportunity to witness incredibly emotional agility by my husband and four-year old.
Instead of escalating the argument with an exhausted, disappointed wife angry at herself, Cliff hit reset. Instead of self-righteousness and choosing to be right, he chose compassion. He chose to sit on the wooden kitchen stool with a ballerina hippo on it to be at eye level with me and say, “What can I say that would be helpful?” He chose to love me when I was unloveable.
Instead of throwing a tantrum, my four-year old had applied, in an incredible way, the lessons I had taught her through drawing cartoons on colored paper over the weeks, about the importance of choosing our response over how we feel.
Having failed to find age-appropriate material on emotional learning for kids, I made up my own along the way as I read and listened to the work of Dr. Susan David, who wrote the book “Emotional Agility”.
In short, emotional agility “enables us to navigate life’s twists and turns with self-acceptance, clear-sightedness, and an open mind.” While it sounds straightforward, I’ve learnt how counterintuitive it is, for those of us who’ve grown up in cultures where emotions are labelled, consciously or unconsciously, as “good” and “bad”.
Embracing emotional agility is thus about facing our emotions courageously and compassionately, even at times with a healthy detachment, and then moving past them to choose positive change.
Often, I would try to distil whatever I learned into short 5-minute simplified drawings in the time I had together with my two and four-year old, without knowing if I made sense or if any of it would stick.
This time, however, my four-year old had displayed astounding mastery over her emotions, choosing to push past her disappointment and believe what Mama had always said, “If Plan A fails, Team Tam always has Plan B.”
I had always told her- we can be flexible and creative when things don’t work out. I’d always said- It’s okay to feel sad, but it’s not okay to throw a tantrum.You may feel all these yucky emotions, I’d point to the paper with my scrawled cartoons, but you can choose these actions A, B or C. Which would you choose and why?
And here she was, at all but four years of age, living out the full measure of emotional adaptability, articulating how she felt “I feel sad too, Mama” while exercising agency, flexibility, compassion for me, while I seethed and teared in the kitchen, besides myself.
We had a royal feast that evening- with fried chicken, fries, and also Chinese noodles and vegetable stir-fry.
During our weekly “marriage talk” that Sunday night, Cliff and I held hands and did what we always do every Sunday night- we talked about the hard things that happened in the week, what we could do for the other to make things better.
“I want to request an evening every week to treat you where you cannot refuse,” Cliff said. I laughed in defeat, and conceded.
“I want to request that you not offer solutions when I’m disappointed, but paraphrase how I feel first,” I said.
“Deal.”
Most of all, as we held hands, ten days shy of our 9th wedding anniversary, we were grateful for each other, for how much we had stayed the same and yet, had grown.
We laughed at how ridiculously we had behaved towards each other, and smiled at the tender faith of a little child whose default is always to turn to prayer.
I went to bed that night thanking God for our Popeye’s chicken that miraculously arrived, but most of all, that all the scrawls I had drawn at the living room sofa over our homeschooling table had materialized into gems of emotional strength, compassion and self-restraint in our four-year old.
We went to bed, our hearts and tummies full.
Then just before we closed our eyes, my inbox pinged.
The Popeye’s receipt arrived, three hours late.
