The Thread that hold

She still remembered the day she stepped into the world of nursing. Fresh out of school, uniform pressed, penlight in pocket, she walked into the ward like it was a battlefield and she was ready for war. There was a fire in her then.

A spark of ambition that burned quietly but fiercely. She made a silent promise to herself: by the time she retired, she would have climbed to the pinnacle. Director of Nursing. Or at the very least, Assistant Director. She would lead teams. Shape policy.

Train younger nurses to not just care, but lead with integrity. She believed that with hard work and unshakable focus, nothing was out of reach. And for a time, that belief carried her. She thrived in her early years picked up procedures quickly, earned the trust of senior doctors, handled difficult patients with a calm that surprised even herself.

Recognition came. Promotions whispered her name. The path was clear. Until love stepped in. It wasn’t a dramatic shift at first. She fell in love the way one eases into warm water cautiously, then all at once. She got married. And then something inside her stirred.

A new dream took root softer, but just as powerful. She wanted to build a family. A home with laughter and toys on the floor. A child who would one day call her Mama. It wasn’t that she gave up on her career.

But the map began to redraw itself. What had once been a ladder now looked like a balancing act. One dream pressing against another. She thought she could do both. Be both. But life, as it often does, had other plans. However, the journey to parenthood was anything but easy.

For three long years, despite their heartfelt efforts, they struggled to conceive. Each month brought renewed hope and then, quiet devastation. She vividly remembered the MRT rides. Packed trains. Strollers. Toddlers asleep on their mothers’ shoulders. Pregnant bellies swaying with the motion of the carriage.

She’d stand quietly among them, eyes cast down, heart cracking silently. Sometimes, her gaze would fix on a young couple looking almost inconvenienced by the child in their arms, or a teenager with a burgeoning belly and a look of indifference.

The unfairness of it would hit her like a physical blow. A life so desperately wanted, so meticulously planned for, remained elusive, while others seemed to stumble into parenthood without a second thought.

Once, a small child in their carriage erupted into a full-blown tantrum, flailing on the floor, their parents' faces etched with exhaustion and a hint of desperation. She and her husband exchanged a fleeting glance, a silent question passing between them: Is that what awaits us? Would our longing withstand the messy reality?

It was a sobering thought, quickly dismissed by the deeper ache of wanting, but it lingered nonetheless. Still she’d stand quietly among them, heart cracking silently. Sometimes, the tears came before she could stop them. Just hot streaks down her cheeks, quickly wiped away as if they weren’t real. But the isolation wasn’t just inside her. It echoed from the people around her too.
Friends who meant well, but didn’t know when to stop asking.

“When are you going to have a baby?”

“Don’t wait too long, you know.”

“You’re a nurse surely you know the tricks!”

Every comment landed like a paper cut small, but cumulative. Over time, she bled silently beneath her smile. One day, she broke. A close friend had asked the question again, lightly, over lunch “Still no baby ah?” and she snapped.

Her voice didn’t rise, but her words did. “You think I’m choosing this?” she said, fork trembling in hand.

“You want honesty? I can f** my husband every night, but if my womb won’t cooperate, what do you want me to do? Draw a baby on my uterus and hope it listens?”

The table went silent. Her friend blinked. Another looked away. She stood up, trembling, humiliated by her own outburst but also liberated by the truth of it.

Later, she would apologise for the language. But never for the message. Infertility was never a choice. And she was tired of pretending it was. They say desperate people will try anything. She and her husband became walking proof of that.

Suddenly, everyone had advice on how to get pregnant. Uncles, aunties, neighbours, colleagues none of whom had medical degrees but all of whom swore by “guaranteed” methods.

“Try facing north during intercourse.”

“Use the passion pillow.”

“Eat more red dates.”

“No air-con during the act. Cold womb cannot hold baby.”

“Must be under the morning sun. Life comes from heat.”

They tried it all. She kept a mental checklist. Passion pillow: bought. Morning sun: scheduled. Red dates: soaked. Air-con: switched off, much to her husband’s misery. At one point, her husband joked, “If this doesn’t work, we might need a compass and a fertility priest.”

She laughed. Then cried. Then laughed again. Because that’s what it felt like a cycle of trying, laughing, hoping, crying and still, nothing. They weren’t just making love. They were performing rituals equal parts science, myth, and sheer human longing. And through it all, they never said it aloud. But each time it didn’t work, it broke them just a little more.

He would hug her tight, say 'We'll try again,' his voice a little too bright, and she see the flicker of something else in his eyes, a shadow that mirrored herown. The world outside continued to multiply, babies cooing in advertisements, pregnant women everywhere she looked. The irony wasn't lost on her.

Two people who yearned for this more than anything, denied so relentlessly. She was a nurse, damn it. A good one. The kind you called when no one else could handle a combative patient. The kind who could suture, stabilize, and solve things that scared others. She could save lives. Turn codes around. She was known for it.


But this? This one thing? She couldn’t make it happen. The betrayal felt physical, as if her own body had turned against her. As if her womb had quietly rejected her. She did not cry. Not at first. Instead, she began sitting for long stretches beneath her block, on the hard plastic bench near the provision shop, staring at nothing.


The world moved around her ceiling fans whirring lazily overhead, neighbours calling out to one another, the familiar clatter of mahjong tiles drifting down from an open window. Why is it so easy for everyone else? Why not me?


She had no answer. She had never felt so capable in every other part of her life, and yet so completely helpless in this one. On better days, she’d take a slow walk to the nearby park. Not for fitness just to be somewhere else.

She’d sit under a tree and gaze out at the open space, her eyes unfocused, her body still. Around her, life moved. Children ran, aunties watered plants, couples walked dogs. But inside her, everything felt suspended like watching the world through a pane of thick glass.

The stillness didn’t comfort her. It swallowed her. She wasn’t resting. She was disappearing. To escape the shadow of her failures, she turned to the one place where she still felt capable her career. In the silence of her grief, she found structure in schedules, comfort in protocols.

She threw herself into professional development, attending nursing seminars, sitting in lectures, even reading clinical journals late into the night. She updated herself obsessively on the latest practices, wound management, fall prevention, palliative care. While her body felt broken, her mind remained sharp.

In a world where everything else felt uncertain, she could still be a good nurse. It wasn’t just distraction it was survival. Every seminar attended, every note taken, every skill refined became a small defiance against despair. And in that space, however narrow she still found success.

A version of herself she could still respect. Then came a major turning point. Her husband sat her down one evening, his voice steady but serious. His company had decided to relocate whole department to Cyberjaya, Malaysia. She listened in silence, a strange weight settling in her chest.

She knew what was coming before he said it: “We’ll need to relocate.” At the very same time, she received a letter from HR. An internal promotion. Nursing Officer.

A stepping stone to the leadership track she had worked toward since her first year on the ward. For a moment, she stared at both futures the one calling her upward, and the one pulling her away. The decision tore at her. On one hand, the career she had built from the ground up. The mentors who had seen her grow. The respect of colleagues. The rhythm of ward life that made sense to her.

On the other hand, a fragile, flickering hope: that a change of scenery, a new environment, a slower pace might finally help them conceive. She knew the statistics. Knew that fertility didn’t care about geography. But this wasn’t a logical decision. It was an emotional one. A desperate one. She could stay and climb the ladder alone. Or she could go and hold onto the dream of building something that couldn’t be measured by job titles. In the end, she chose love.

She let go of the career she had so diligently built, believing hoping that the bonds of family outweighed even her deepest ambitions. But as she packed up her flat and returned her staff pass, a quiet question lingered in the back of her mind: What if this is the wrong choice? Back then, her goals had been clear. Linear.

But life has a way of shifting the ground beneath your feet. Sometimes, it isn’t that the choice was wrong only that the map had changed. And with it, so did the destination. She would come to understand, there are no right or wrong choices. Only the choices we make based on who we are, and what we know, at that moment in time.

And in that moment, choosing love, choosing family, choosing hope was the right thing to do. In Malaysia, she could have continued nursing. The option was there she still had her license, her skills, her experience. But something inside her had changed. She didn’t want to stand in a hospital anymore, surrounded by machines and sterile walls. She needed a different kind of space.

A different kind of healing. So she became a volunteer teacher at a children’s home, a quiet place tucked away, where neglected, abandoned, and abused children found shelter. There were no IV drips, no charts, no beeping monitors. Just crayons, thread, stories, and the sound of laughter trying to relearn itself.

Perhaps this, too, was a kind of nursing. A way to tend to her own invisible wounds, by pouring love into the wounds of others. She taught them simple things how to sew, how to write their names, how to trust someone who didn’t leave. And without knowing it, they taught her how to keep going.

She had tried once before. In Singapore, not long before the move to KL, they went through their first IVF cycle. Everything had been new and terrifying blood tests, hormone injections, clinical appointments that made her feel more like a case file than a person. She had followed every instruction, suppressed every ounce of excitement, and waited.

And then it failed. The result came quickly and coldly. Negative. She had held it together in the clinic. But when she got home, she broke. Curled into a ball on the floor, crying until her throat hurt.

After that, she told herself she was done hoping. But hope, like grief, has a strange way of reappearing when you least expect it. Her dream of having a child was rekindled during her time at the children’s home. Not because of medical breakthroughs. Not because of hormones or lab results. But because of the children themselves.

They were loud, messy, unpredictable. Many had been neglected, abandoned, or abused. Some didn’t speak much. Some didn’t trust easily. But day after day, they showed up with crumpled drawings, crooked smiles, and small hands that reached for hers without hesitation.

It was in those small, ordinary moments teaching them how to sew a straight line, watching them sing off-key, helping them sound out their own names that something inside her began to stitch itself back together.

They didn’t know about her failed IVF attempts. They didn’t care that she wasn’t a mother by blood. To them, she was just their teacher. And slowly, through them, she found a different kind of motherhood one built on presence, not biology.

It wasn’t the life she had planned. But it became the life that softened her pain… and opened her heart again to hope. Just when she allowed herself to believe the second IVF attempt might succeed, the bleeding started.

It happened the same day she returned to Singapore for the blood test. She was walking out of the clinic restroom when she saw the faint red stain and instantly, everything inside her dropped. It wasn’t dramatic. No screaming, no tears not then. Just a silent devastation that spread through her like frost.

She still went for the test, but she already knew the answer. Her husband held her hand the entire time. And as agreed, they told no one. This pain, they decided, would be theirs alone. It wasn’t about secrecy. It was about protection keeping that raw, aching part of themselves from being handled clumsily by well-meaning family.

The hope had been theirs. So the grief would be too They returned to KL the next day, and that’s when the depression took full hold. The professor at NUH had tried to prepare her. Had reminded her gently not to place too much hope on a single cycle.

“You must be cautious,” he had said. “Success is never guaranteed.” She nodded. She understood. But she was human. And humans are built for hope. It’s the hope that makes us keep going. That gives pain a purpose. That allows us to dare, even when we’re told not to.

So yes she had hoped. Fiercely. Fully. And when she saw the blood, it felt like her body had betrayed her and her hope had betrayed her too. Her body felt like a shell. Her mind, like a room where all the windows had been closed.

The simplest acts like brushing her teeth felt like insurmountable tasks. The world outside continued but inside her, everything had stalled. She was drowning in despair, quietly, invisibly. It wasn’t just sadness. It was a flattening.

A hollowing out of joy, of energy, of purpose. Time blurred. Mornings felt the same as nights. Some days, she didn’t shower. Others, she didn’t eat. She smiled when her husband was around. But it was mechanical, polite. The kind of smile you wear when you don’t want someone to worry. Deep down, she believed she had failed not just as a woman trying to become a mother, but as a person trying to stay afloat.

She kept thinking: If I can’t do this one thing... what am I even good for? The voice of depression is quiet. It doesn’t shout. It whispers: “You’re not enough. You’ll never be enough.” And in those few days since coming back to KL, she started to believe it.

Then, just when the darkness seemed unyielding, a small, unexpected light broke through. Her phone rang. For days, it had barely moved. She hadn’t picked it up, hadn’t replied to anyone. She’d even considered turning it off for good. But this time, something made her answer.

The voice on the other end was soft, sweet uncertain but full of hope. “Teacher, teacher… are you coming today?” There was a pause. A tiny breath. Then: “You promised us that once you were back from Singapore, you would come and teach us sewing.”

It was Mary. One of the quietest children at the home. Her words weren’t dramatic. There was no grand emotional plea. Just a child’s gentle reminder of a promise made and a hope held. And yet, something inside her cracked.

For the first time in weeks, she felt something other than heaviness. She looked down at herself still in yesterday’s clothes, hair unbrushed, the weight of silence clinging to her skin. And then she remembered the bag of sewing supplies in the corner.

Still packed. Still waiting. Sewing. A strange kind of order in the chaos, she thought. Each stitch deliberate, a way to piece together something whole from disparate parts. A fragile hope, like a single thread. That one call didn’t cure her depression. But it stirred something. The children had been waiting.

Mary’s voice wasn’t dramatic or pleading. It was soft. Innocent. Pure. And yet, those simple words pierced through the thick fog of her sorrow like light cracking through a shuttered window.

She had been drowning in her own grief. Silently folding into herself, day after day, convinced that her pain was too heavy to carry and too private to share. But here was this little girl, speaking not with pity or sympathy, but with expectation.

Expectation not of perfection. Not of performance. But of presence. Mary wasn’t asking for a miracle. She was asking her to show up. And in that moment, she realized while she had been busy mourning what she couldn’t have, there were children waiting for what she could give.

A group of young souls, bruised by life, but still eager. Eager to learn. To be guided. To find joy. And somehow, they had been waiting for her. Not for a mother. Not for a miracle. But for someone who would sit beside them, teach them to thread a needle, laugh when they made mistakes, and remind them simply by being there that they mattered.

She stood up slowly. Changed her clothes. Combed her hair. For the first time in a long time, she moved not because she had to but because she wanted to. At the gate, she was greeted by a flood of smiles. Not the polite kind, not forced or obligatory but the wide, radiant, unfiltered joy of children who didn’t care about her past, her failures, or her grief.

To them, she wasn’t a woman undone. She was their teacher. Someone who showed up. Someone who stayed. Someone who had once promised to return and did. They ran toward her with open arms, tugging at her hands, proudly showing their half-finished sewing projects, eager to pick up where they’d left off.

And in that moment, standing under the warm KL sun, surrounded by children who had every reason to close themselves off but didn’t she felt it: She still had love to give. She taught them simple things, how to sew a straight line, her own fingers demonstrating the careful pull of the thread, the need for even tension.

"If it's wrong, we unpick it," she'd say gently, guiding their small hands. "It just means we try again until it's right." And without knowing it, they taught her how to keep going, how to unpick the tangled threads of her own grief and begin again.

She even showed the boys how to stitch. For so long, she had been consumed by personal loss, convinced that her story had narrowed to emptiness. But here, among threads and crooked stitches, giggles and glue sticks, she realized: She wasn’t just choosing an escape. She was choosing a new path.

One filled with unexpected purpose. One where love didn’t come through bloodlines or biology, but through presence, patience, and shared laughter. This journey had taught her that the choices we make are rarely black and white.

They’re made in shades of emotion in the tug-of-war between longing and reality, fear and hope. Life, she now knew, was a tapestry woven with joy and sorrow, plans fulfilled and plans surrendered.

And sometimes, the most beautiful threads come from the moments we never planned at all. We don’t always get the life we imagined. But we still get to shape the life we live. So, as she stood there that day arms full of tiny hands and her heart stitched back together one smile at a time she carried this quiet truth: It’s okay to face the dark. It’s okay to feel broken.

Because sometimes, just showing up is how the light gets in. She had just returned home when the phone rang again. This time, the voice wasn’t sweet. It was sharp, irritated.

“I’ve been trying to reach you all day! I even called your in-laws. They said you went back to KL. Why did you leave?” Her voice was flat. Heavy.

“Because I have no reason to stay in Singapore.”

“What do you mean? Don’t you want to know your blood result?” the nurse replied

“No. I know it’s negative.” A pause. Then

“No, girl. It’s positive. You’re pregnant.” The words pierced through her.

“What…? But I was bleeding that day. I thought”

“That’s normal. That’s why we need you back here. Professor wants to see you. You need medication. Now get back here!”

She stood in silence, heart pounding. Everything had changed in a single breath. ​
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​December 2025