I am forty-three years old, Malaysian Chinese, and the mother of two young children: a five-year-old boy and a daughter who is just over three.

I am starting this blog because I keep finding myself in situations I don’t know how to make sense of.

Sometimes my children are crying, shouting, refusing to eat, or rolling around on the floor, and I can feel something in me beginning to tighten. My jaw clenches. My teeth press together. My hands become fists. My body becomes tense before I have even worked out what I am feeling.

And sometimes I shout.

Not just speak firmly. Not just raise my voice a little. I mean a loud, startling shout—the kind that makes my children look at me with surprise or fear.

I don’t like that I do this. Afterwards, I often feel ashamed. I look at their faces and wonder what they have just experienced. I wonder what they will remember. I wonder what is wrong with me.

There are other times when I seem completely calm. Unperturbed. The person who can handle things. But I have begun to realise that my calmness is not always regulation. Sometimes it is a way of disappearing from myself. I don’t feel the anger, the hurt, or the overwhelm until I have held everything in for too long. Then something gives way.

I am beginning to understand that there is a difference between being calm and being disconnected.

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The childhood I remember

I don’t have a clear memory of my mother shouting at me in the way I sometimes shout at my children. My memories of her are, in many ways, memories of care.

She was a working mother. She took me to my weekly piano classes and ballet lessons. She cooked for me. She made sure I went to school and had what I needed. I don’t remember being beaten, and I don’t remember being scolded constantly.

Logistically, she looked after me.

But she was not someone I could easily talk to. Our conversations tended to stay on the surface: How was school? How was work? How much were you earning? She could be dismissive, and she was often more interested in watching her dramas or reading the news than in having a deeper conversation.

When I did share something personal, I often expected judgement.

If I talked about friends from different backgrounds, there might be a comment about why I was friends with an Indian man, or what was wrong with a Malay person. If I said something about the food in the fridge tasting strange, she might immediately dismiss me and say, “No, it’s fine,” as though my experience of it could not be trusted.

Over time, I learned not to share too much.

It was easier to keep things to myself than to explain something only to have it criticised, dismissed, or judged. I don’t think I made a conscious decision to become emotionally guarded. It was simply a way of protecting myself.

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The feeling underneath the memory

Now I have children of my own, and I sometimes catch glimpses of that old emotional atmosphere.

My son is five. He is still learning how to manage his feelings. Sometimes he becomes overwhelmed and ends up on the floor, crying, kicking, and unable to calm himself down. I can look at him and understand that he is not trying to make life difficult. He is having a difficult time.

But I also know what it is like to feel the noise enter my body.

Recently, we were at my mother’s house during dinner. My son was having a tantrum. My sister and her husband understood that he needed time and space to move through it. They knew that repeatedly telling him to stop would probably make things worse.

My mother found the crying and noise unbearable. She became agitated. She told him to stop. The more she tried to interrupt him, the more distressed he became.

She finished her food and walked away, saying that it was too loud and that she could not eat like that.

I watched her, and something in me recognised the feeling.

Not a specific memory. Not a scene I could replay from childhood. I don’t remember her doing exactly this to me.

But somewhere underneath the story, I recognised the emotional current: the feeling that a child’s distress is too much; that the noise is irritating; that the child should stop being difficult; that the adults’ comfort matters more than what is happening inside the child.

I also recognised something of myself.

A note on memory: I am writing about what I remember, what I feel, and what I am beginning to wonder about. I cannot reconstruct my childhood perfectly, and I don’t want to turn an impression into a certainty. This is an attempt to understand a pattern—not a final verdict on my mother or on myself.

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What I am trying to change

That is the part I find hardest to face. I can see how easily I become tense when my children are loud, messy, or out of control. I can see how quickly I move from coping to boiling over. I can see how much I want the difficult feeling to stop—not only for my children, but for me.

I am not writing this to make my mother the villain. She cared for me. She worked. She provided for me. She did many things that mattered.

But practical care and emotional availability are not the same thing.

A parent can do their best and still pass on ways of relating that cause pain. A child can be loved and still learn not to trust their own feelings. A mother can have had a decent relationship with her own mother and still be affected by what was missing.

I am trying to hold all of that at once.

I am also trying to parent differently without pretending I came from nowhere. I want my children to know that their feelings are not an inconvenience. I want them to be able to tell me something without immediately wondering whether I will judge them. I want them to learn that anger and sadness can be survived, and that a difficult moment does not make them bad.

But wanting this does not mean I always manage it.

Sometimes I still shout. Sometimes I respond from the most frightened, tense, and defended part of myself. Sometimes I recognise what is happening only after it has happened.

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What this blog will be

So this blog will be a record of learning to notice.

I want to write about parenting from inside the experience—not as an expert, and not as someone who has found the perfect method. I want to write about what happens before the shout, what happens afterwards, and what repair looks like in an ordinary home.

I want to write about books that give me language for experiences I could previously only feel. I want to explore regulation tools for my children and for myself, and be honest about which ones help and which ones are much harder to use in the middle of a tantrum.

I want to write about motherhood, family, culture, inherited expectations, food, mess, shame, tenderness, and the small moments that reveal something larger.

Most of all, I want to write from my own perspective.

I am not trying to present a polished version of motherhood. I am trying to understand the mother I am becoming, the child I once was, and the space between them.

I am learning that staying calm is not the same as staying present.

I am learning that repair matters, even when I wish I had not needed to repair anything.

For now, I am starting here: noticing the tension in my jaw, feeling my hands close into fists, and trying—just for one more moment—to stay.