I'm slowly adapting to life without my mother.
The word "adapting" is so short, but the process is so much more complex than that. Everything she used to handle, I have to handle now.
It's true that the load will be lightened after a year when my bro graduates, but right now, I find myself having to make decisions that involve thousands of dollars. With a single mistake I can easily find myself significantly poorer within months.
I'm fully aware that I will definitely be losing some money within the first several years, but I don't really want to cut myself some slack just because of that.
I can't be too cautious either. Running a business costs money. For a small one like ours, it still costs several thousands per month. In other words, my profits from selling goods must also cover rent, salary and etc, not just the cost price and transport costs of each shipment.
Right now I'm like an unborn chicken living off the yolk of the egg. All the old goods and those already ordered by her will allow me to survive a few more months.
After that, it's going to be all me.
It may appear sad for some people, but standing on one's own two feet only in the mid-twenties isn't actually that rare for people around the world.
And I feel exactly like that. My main support in life is gone. I'm on my own now.
Obviously I worry.
There's absolutely nobody I can count on to help me whenever I need it in my work. There's no single person whose answer I can trust if I have questions regarding my work.
My buyer, though a personal friend of my mum's, barely knows anything about the clothings themselves. She's good at her job, which is selling and picking things to sell, but I can't ask her if nylon zips are better than plastic zips.
My workers, though very experienced, are workers and not business owners for very good (and obvious) reasons. As much as they'd like to think their years of experience (one of them's got about 10 years of it) will let them become my advisors of sorts, my few months of apprenticeship under my mum has taught me they really know jack shit about what we sell.
They're good at noticing what sells and what doesn't because they process the goods, but they do not know that just because certain characteristics help certain goods sell better doesn't mean they work for everything else.
These are the only people I can now ask if I have any problems, but their answers are not reliable. Each of them specialise in a specific part of the whole, but even if I put them together, I'm still not going to get the entire big picture that I need.
In short, my own judgement is the only thing that really counts.
The problem now is that I don't always trust it. I'm too rash and sometimes, I don't even make sense to myself.
The only person who has all the answers now lies on a hospital bed, barely able to eat and almost cannot speak. We now have to switch to porridge from rice because she's to weak to chew even that, despite the fact that she's been eating more than before she was hospitalized.
Today at lunch she could barely handle her first and only bite of watermelon.
I wonder what they can feed her in the hospice when she's transferred there.
As for myself, I've just discovered some really cheap food in my neighbourhood that's only available at night.
I'm sure everybody is familiar with the practice of giving discounts when a shop is about to close.
Apparently the two confectionaries/bakeries do that in my neighbourhood too. The last few times when I went to feed her dinner, I got back at about 8pm. I walked past them and saw those signs.
The one I frequent was offering $2.50 for 3 buns/sandwiches and $1.50 for 3 of those tiny buns that are half the size of the standard stuff and taste much blander.
For $5.50 I could buy enough stuff to cover 2 meals. Next time, I'll just spend $6 for 12 small buns. 6 buns per meal should fill me up.
There's also the risk of them turning bad soon after I buy them. Learnt that when I bit into the tuna bun this afternoon. It tasted slightly off even though I stored it in the fridge overnight. Edible, didn't give me diarrhoea but it was definitely close to the definition of "spoilt". Ate it anyway. I trust my body's defense mechanisms to do their jobs. Even if something happens, I wasn't working after that anyway.
Not going to buy tuna buns at night from now on.
Anyway for $5 I could have also gotten 6 normal buns. That would cover slightly over one meal. Probably 1.5 meals. I'd need to get something extra to cover the rest of the second meal.
Doing all these calculations because I'm worried about my finances. I still have to pay for my bro's tuition fees for one more semester. That's about S$4000.
I'm stopping my own for now. Probably take a year off, or at least one semester, to adapt to this new chapter of my life.
It's not easy. Right now I have to decide between lying to the factories that my mum has retired or just tell them straight up that she's dying.
It's not as simple as deciding whether I should be honest or not.
If I tell them she has retired, they will definitely tell me to ask her if any problems arise. If I ask them anything, it will sound strange because I could just ask her. For all I know it may worsen our business relations if I insist on troubling them instead of her.
Moreover, I can't hide her death forever. I know one of them comes over to Singapore once in a blue moon for vacation. I'm not aware of how my mum managed to convince her to not come over to our place but I don't think I'm as persuasive.
Keeping the lie indefinitely is going to be tiring anyway.
If I tell them she's dying, they're going to try to rip me off very quickly for sure, then feed me a lot of bullshit until I learn all the necessary lessons.
The best alternative, if I only look at this issue, is to stop doing business with them altogether. Start over, like a tabula rasa. Finding new ones isn't as hard for me as it was for my mother back then. I no longer need to fly over to China and walk the streets to find new wholesalers and factories.
But that's got its own issues.
The main problem is trust. I know how much I can trust them, and I can trust them more than I can trust new strange suppliers.
So much so that I can pay them too much and trust they will keep the change as advance credit for my next order. This is to my advantage because I can pay them when the exchange rate is favourable, and when things turn sour, I won't be affected immediately. I have yet to know how I can buy and store RMB at the moment.
At home, I suddenly find myself in possession of so many ingredients that I don't really know how to use, mainly herbs for soups. Then there are the unknown things in the freezer that I can't identify.
Other than food, there's the TV and her computer. I think I'll just give either that PC or my old incomplete PC away for Christmas. I can think of at least one person who might like a good PC like these, even if they're second hand. First, I've got to see which one my bro wants.
We'll still need a computer outside to configure the printer and router when the need arises, so maybe he'll want to switch that desktop with his current laptop.
Not going to touch everything else yet. It's too early.
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