I used to dislike looking at this photo of the five-year old child above. That scrawny tomboy kid with the characteristic family pout looks too innocent about events that would be soon unfolding in her young life. I hate the little sunshine in her heart because I know soon she would realised how deceptive and fragile everything around her is. I think, there is a sadness in her eyes and she sometimes looks like she is pleading for someone to take her away from her surrounding.
But, not anymore. Nowadays I look at this photo and I see an adorable little girl. A little girl who talks to herself a lot, who imagines about princesses and dewa dewi from the travelling bangsawan performance she saw in our small town, who loves to wander around by herself around our huge compound, who absolutely adores animals and trees and plants. This is the same girl who will be very eager about learning when she starts schooling two years after that studio photo was taken. The girl who would not spend her duit belanja because she is saving them to buy story books, who has few friends but who totally adores the one or two close friends she has. The girl who spends hours reading her newsprint story books with her best friend on the hammock underneath the house and who stubbornly insists to still go to school even when she is very sick. She is a very lovable child and I am falling in love with this little girl all over again.
It is indeed sad that this child has to undergo a lot of trials and tribulations in her young life. To the extent that she begins to truthfully believe that she would always be connected to people who betray her just like her parents and her adopted parents. I think that this little girl is slowly realising that it is not her fault that life events do not always work well for her. She is not jinxed. Those events are her lessons and her wisdom development as a human being. Slowly she is beginning to forgive her parents too.
I still have a long way to go, before I can totally accept some events that have happened in my life. The good thing is, I am starting to. I am aware that in order to really accept myself unconditionally, I need to love and accept this little girl in the photo and acknowledge that she is OK, she is a good child and she doesn't have to feel guilty about anything.
( I use the present tense describing this little girl, because to me she is still around, observing me and sometimes whispering things to me. Nowadays, looking at her in the photo made me cry. Something I was not able to do before this. In between my tears, in my mind, I speak to her with the gentlest terms of endearment, soothing her and reassuring her that everything is okay and that she is a lovely lovable little girl and she is worthy of love, affection and appreciation.)
