Mrs Lee Kuan Yew, My Role Model

I am facing some challenges at work and had to speak with a senior HR lady in my company.

In our conversation, the topic of engagement to the company came up. This lady, a mother of a sweet little girl about Yu’s age, questioned the level of my engagement to the company. She claimed her day at work finishes at 9 or 10pm many nights due to frequent teleconversations with the US. That, according to her, is “engagement”. And she came across to me as being quite proud that she was sacrificing her pesonal time for the company. In her own words, she was “going that extra mile” for the company.

I pondered over her words after that conversation, and could not help but feel really sorry for her little girl. As I rolled around in my bed with my 2 boys that night, I wondered if the little girl was being put to bed by her maid, or her “engaged” mother?

In contrast, something PM Lee Hsien Loong said in his National Day Rally speech in 2008 made a lasting impression on me. And I quote him:

“…Do you work 110 per cent on your career or do you set aside time for other activities, for a balanced life? I think each person has to decide his or her own point of balance.

I remember my own experience. I’m a beneficiary of this. My mother was a lawyer. But every day she came home to have lunch with us. So every day we come home from school, three of us, my mother is there, we have lunch. Nowadays you would call it quality time. This was before people invented such big words. All it meant was she had time for us, we had time to talk to her.

And it was a tremendous help. She avoided going out at night for functions. She had to go for, accompany my father, but business functions, very seldom. What it meant is less takings as a lawyer, less work, less conveyancing, but she decided her children were more important to her. And she acted on that and I think she was happy with that. And we’re definitely very grateful for that.”

As I write this post, news of Mrs Lee Kuan Yew’s death has hit the media and tribute to this amazing and well-respected lady is pouring in. But way before that, I’ve come to regard her as a role model for working mothers like myself. I truely admire and wish to have the kind of success she has with raising her children and in keeping house.

Admittedly, it is because of the above quote that I decided to scale myself back on my career and give my children my priority. It does not matter whether my sons will grow up to be grateful to me for that, but I am sure I have made the right decision to engage myself with the people that really matter – my sons and my husband!

No regrets!

(This post was originally intended to be entitled “On Engagement”. But half way through it, Mrs Lee Kuan Yew, wife of MM Lee, passed away and I decided to change the title as my way of paying tribute to her.)

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