For about two years. The decision to make motherhood a full time job was actually a welcome change. Until I realised I don’t have money of my own on a regular basis and that really created a huge vortex of emotion.

Nobody talked about this. Nobody told me this.

Nobody said that when you do not make your own money:

1) you are dependent on your spouse giving you an allowance like a father to a child
2) your opinions take a backseat because you are financially not viable
3) you are no longer an equal
4) feelings of inadequacy overwhelms me from the time you wake up till you go to bed
I have become my mother.

But we were moving to Jakarta and that was no place to leave a child in the hands of a stranger, and so I did not. I stayed home and played wife and mother. I cooked, I cleaned, I played house, I waited for my husband to return home with the bacon. I had no ambition other than to ensure my family was fed. I felt empty.

Why is this happening?

Each passing day I became really good friends with the apartment security guards, the helpers in the condo when the kids went swimming, the check out girl at the nearby Carrefour store. It was a little village of conversations that do not go beyond “what’s for dinner tonight, madam” and my days were just routine, nothing out of the ordinary.

It was so ordinary to the point I became ordinary. And I guess that must have been the beginnings of the crack that started to form. A crack that allowed the not so ordinary to test the ability of my husband to resist temptation. A temptation I was gullible enough to trust would not even be considered for the mere fact we were married.

They say “I AM” are the two most powerful words because what you place after that, is who you become.

Flashback to 2004: I am … ordinary.

Today: I am… extraordinary.