Not Mine

As a newspaper girl of sorts, I attend lots of grim, newsy events. I've been to funerals and memorials, one-room flats that are infested with bed-bugs and the diabetic elderly who cannot walk. I've had to interview mentally ill people and the poor who have clung to my arms and begged me to help them. But I've never actually cried at one of these she-bangs.

Sure, gone home and locked the door and sobbed into a tissue, feeling down and out. But not actually burst into tears in front of my newsmakers, though I've often felt like it.

Today, all that changed. I was present at a government do, straightforward enough, really, a little annual party for foster children and their foster parents to commemorate their dedication.

The fostering programme in Singapore runs such that foster parents volunteer to take in children whose own homes can't look after them and basically treat them as their own until they are sufficiently grown-up or until such time as the original family can take them back.

Many of the kids are ditched because they've got disabilities or special needs or because they've been abused or malnourished, so it's clearly not easy being a foster parent.

Hence, the thank-you celebration. It was a cheerful little thing, bouncing castles, pink candy floss, ministerial speeches and skits by the foster kids dressed in animal and plant costumes - just your run-of-the-mill heartland festivity. For some reason though, maybe because I'm hormonal as fuck this week, I just couldn't hold back the tears.

It was the sweetest event I'd ever been to. All these parents, most with grown-up kids of their own, had taken in these tiny toddlers and babies, some who couldn't walk, some who couldn't see or hear, and fed them and clothed them and loved them when their own flesh and blood couldn't or didn't want to. And on this special day, they dressed them in their best, just as if they were their own.

Little girls ran proudly about in fluffy pink dresses, their hair painstakingly combed into little brown curls with shiny barettes pressed into it. Parents toted around tots in animal costumes, too fat with furry bellies to walk.

Boys, sometimes brothers who were being fostered in pairs, walked around in matching outfits. The clean running shoes covered in little caricatures of Ultraman and Sonic the Hedgehog spoke of the care they were getting. I could imagine it, parents bringing their fosters to a shoe store and letting them choose the colours and cartoons they wanted, where before no one had cared enough to even feed them properly. The thought that someone loved hard enough to give them choices made me choked and teary.

The kids danced around on stage, boys slashing the air with cardboard swords and lightning makeup streaking their faces. And when the dance ended, they stood in a little line, fidgeting and swinging their shoulders and took turns to talk into the mic. "Thank you Daddy, for looking after me. I love you."

I welled up all over again.

In the audience, tired of sitting on her own, a little girl climbed into her foster mother's lap and twined her black patent Mary-Jane around the woman's leg. She received a cuddle in return, and a gentle adjustment of the feathered headband in her locks. No one looking at them would ever be able to tell the child was not hers.

But the worst part of the whole arrangement: some day, they have to give them away. Foster parents, I learnt, are only there for so long as the child doesn't have a better place to stay. Some stay in foster placement for years, not remembering who their real parents are, growing up in homes filled with love and warmth. Then, they have to leave.

Parents cry and ache, they tell me, but that's the way it goes. That's the price to pay for teaching one little one, or two, what is it to be loved.

And watching a mother gently lavish her disabled son's pink cheek with kisses as he closed his eyes in sheer delight, I tried to wipe my eyes with a surreptitious finger and realised if some day, I'm ever in a position to have my own little ones to love, I want at least one that is not mine.