Investment

When some people say a child is not an investment, I kind of disagree.

A child is indeed one. All the time, energy, resources spent in raising one, she is indeed an investment whose return would only visible in the long term.

Just like those graphics in our investment app, some periods are bloody red while some other time are smiley green. Yet, you don’t stop topping up when it’s red and not overly joyful when it’s green, because nothing is permanent in the short term.

But, in the long term, the purpose of the daily, weekly, monthly or yearly investment is to achieve our goals, whatever they are.

The tricky part about investment : there’s no guarantee that you’ll gain, and there’s a huge possibility you might end up with a loss.

But, this is why you should still invest. Because, when you do nothing, it’s clearly a loss. No gain.

By doing something, we’ll allow ourselves to learn, to find a way, and try to enlarge our chance to gain something in the future.

Parenting is just like a bussiness which needs clear goals so we know where we head to. A system how to achieve those goals, constant evaluation along the way.

The picture above was a short meeting done few months ago that had been planned for weeks to have all the people on the screen from three different time zones to sit and talk about one little girl.

All these people invested their time and energy to discuss what the next goals for her therapy in the upcoming year.

We’re blessed to meet such incredible people who are willing to help us raising the little girl with their kindness and expertise.

Dr Phua who spent her Saturdays to do the tests that no single centre in Jakarta could provide (as far as my research tells). Mr Philip who spent his precious weeknd to have weekly session with little girl.

We fully understand how ‘expensive’ their time is, until we really had a hard time to pay it, in literal meaning.

This might be subjective and only based on my experience, but we prefer pay all the teachers in advance, so they don’t have to wait for what they deserve for their work.

When with the local ones I need to be annoying about how they do their job (as written here), with the foreigner ones, we need to be really fussy about how to pay them. It took us four months until we finally received the bank detail for weekly session we have, and no response at all for the service we received from the other one.

This girl is one of the luckiest (special needs) kids indeed.

For every investment she has received, we hope it would be enough for herself and hopefully, there are much more left to share and pay it forward.

Amin.

(One of the writing that has been sitting for months in the draft and released once a right book at the right time found me).