by Anna Yao Liang
Writers' Block: A contribution from our AWA Writers' Group membersAmy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011) popularized the figure of a Tiger Mom, a strict disciplinarian, tirelessly chasing her school kids between piano lessons and tennis courts. However, compared with Cub Moms, those who are raising toddlers, Tiger Moms are the most comfortable group of moms. It is us Cub Moms who are living under jungle rules.
“We can’t win all the time,” we think, comforting ourselves as adults facing competition. In a Darwinian, human-cub world, the physically stronger and mentally fiercer cub wins. It’s brutal, like Stone Age tribal battles, and primitive, like big feline territorial disputes. Sympathy is nowhere to be found.
My three-year-old happens to be placed center stage for a school dance performance. During three-and-a-half minutes of show time, he has to endure a public scolding, a props-grabbing, and a push to the ground from his peers, which make office backstabbing in the financial industry look like kindergarten games.
Deal with the shame and fear if your cub is bully-like, and deal with the shame and fear if your cub is the victim: a “violent” card from the preschool for punching a classmate in the face, or a big bite mark in the shape of a crescent on his cheek. It’s the law of the jungle, which we Cub Moms knew, mastered, and survived when we were three years old, and now have to practice again, without having much memory of any of it.
Although gender is not yet much of a concern in the human-cub phase when it comes to competition, girls’ moms and boys’ moms act in notably different ways. While moms of toddler girls hunt in packs with their subtle strategies, knowing their tradecraft like riding a bike and acting almost diplomatically, moms of toddler boys are wrestling in the dirt one second and making up and licking each other’s wounds the next. Moms of boys are the most miserable, yet the cruellest. They battle in a field with which they are no longer familiar. They are hurt and lost.
They weaponize their nails with claw-like trimming and a scarlet-colored manicure, with facial expressions that could freeze the princess in Frozen. After a furious boy mom e-yelled at me in a preschool parents’ group chat to “grow a pair,” I threw away my favorite ballet flats in a fury. Instead, I wore a pair of 12-centimeter Jimmy Choo platform heels that my mom had bought for me (“You’ll need a pair of these someday,” she’d said) and a pair of formidable Dior shades for preschool drop offs and pickups.
Cub Moms roar and howl in public, not only to train their cubs to follow rules, but also to protect them from competitors’ pushing, punching, clawing, biting, kicking, hair pulling.… According to developmental psychologists, it is common for toddler boys to express their emotions through actions rather than words. What they don’t mention is that it’s also common for their moms to metamorphose into the figures printed on their boys’ T-shirts: dinosaurs, crocodiles, sharks, and lions.
Don’t woke-talk of “toxic masculinity” or “girls’ empowerment” to Cub Moms. They have zero knowledge of a pedagogical comfort zone. They are in a war zone, dealing with real shock and blood. Publicly challenging the law of the jungle on a playground is taboo, and the punishment could be shame, guilt, embarrassment, and/or social isolation. It is a unique kind of mental suffering, a cocktail made of Aesopian allegories and mythical tales, garnished with a slice of existential crisis.
My bestie and I have boys the same age. We live next door to one another, and our boys go to the same school. One day, when no one at home is sick or hurt, we decide to have a little weekday tea party. We fold botanical-printed tea towels into lovely triangles, sit together on rattan loungers by the swimming pool, and sip the delicious tea my bestie’s brewed for us.
The breeze is cool. The sunshine is warm. Everything is perfect, and our boys have not fought each other or anyone else that day, maybe because it’s only 10 o’clock in the morning.
We feel like the two happiest moms in the whole world.
 | A former Baudelairean scholar in literature and a columnist for Modern Weekly, Anna Yao Liang now works as a financial advisor and runs a start-up business in wealth management. She grew up in northern China in a family with Catholic heritage. After studying in Europe, she moved to Singapore and has been living in the city-state since 2012. |
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