By Marziah Zahar, PhD
On 29 May 2012, I decided to give myself a small reward. I was not in a particularly good place in my life. My career had stumbled. I was pursuing my Master of Engineering and trying to work out where I was heading professionally. Love had not been particularly kind to me either. To put it simply, I felt broken.
Then I heard about an event called Mother’s Day Celebration with Tun Dr Siti Hasmah. I decided to attend. Perhaps I needed an afternoon away from everything that seemed to be going wrong. Perhaps I simply needed to do something kind for myself. I certainly did not expect that a brief conversation that afternoon would remain with me 14 years later.
What I remember vividly now is the room. There was something almost aristocratic about it, with a touch of French elegance: the beautiful hi-tea setting, the elegantly dressed women, the conversations drifting around the tables and, at the centre of it all, Tun Dr Siti Hasmah.
The room was filled with women at different stages of life. There were grandmothers, young mothers and single women like me. Some had already lived through chapters of womanhood that others in the room were only beginning to understand. Yet for that afternoon, we were gathered around the same woman. Tun Dr Siti Hasmah was clearly adored.
But what made the afternoon particularly lovely was that the admiration did not create distance. Somewhere between the tea, photographs and conversations, we began speaking to one another not as strangers, but simply as women. I had arrived carrying my disappointments rather heavily. Then, as conversations became more personal, several women comforted me with some version of the same response: “Hey, Ziya. Me too.”
There is extraordinary comfort in those two little words, especially when you are young enough to believe everyone else has somehow figured out life except you. A grandmother may already have survived what a younger woman fears. A young mother may be carrying struggles invisible behind her smile. A single woman may be wondering, as I was, whether life is somehow leaving her behind. Perhaps none of us had everything figured out. We were simply women at different chapters of the same unfinished book.
I was neither a wife nor a mother. I was a master’s student with an uncertain career and a bruised heart. Yet somehow, in that room full of mothers and grandmothers, I did not feel out of place.
And then there was Tun Dr Siti Hasmah. I remember her elegant baju kurung, her glasses, her gentle expression and, of course, the pearls. They suited her. Elegant without being ostentatious. Luminous without demanding attention.
Even then, I wondered about the strength of the woman wearing them. How does a woman carry so many identities across one lifetime? A doctor. A mother. A wife. A woman who had spent much of her adult life beside one of the most prominent men in Malaysian history yet never seemed to disappear. Perhaps that fascinated the younger me more than I understood at the time. She could stand beside a powerful man and remain unmistakably Tun Dr Siti Hasmah.
A question that changed a perspective
Then came my opportunity to speak to her. Of all the sensible questions I could have asked a distinguished doctor and former first lady, I asked about marriage.
I was unlucky in love. What else was I going to ask?
More than 14 years have passed, and I will not pretend that I remember every sentence exactly as it was spoken. But one question has remained remarkably clear in my mind: “Are you happy if getting married?”
I remember being taken aback by its simplicity. The essence of what she told me afterwards was equally simple. If getting married would not make me happy, then I should not do it.
That was not quite the answer I expected. There was no lecture about finding the right man, no warning that I was running out of time, and no suggestion that marriage was something I needed to accomplish simply because I was a woman. She simply returned the question to me: would I be happy?
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Finding purpose beyond marriage
But that was not the only thing she said that stayed with me. She also spoke about education and career. I cannot remember her exact words now, but I remember what I carried away from them: higher education came with responsibility. If I had been fortunate enough to receive it, I should do something meaningful with it.
At the time, I was pursuing my Master of Engineering. I was struggling enough with the life immediately in front of me that a doctorate was nowhere in the picture. I had approached Tun Dr Siti Hasmah wanting advice about marriage. Somehow, she made me think about what I was going to do with my education.
I did not walk out of that room suddenly repaired. Life rarely gives us transformations that convenient. I still had a master’s degree to complete, an uncertain career and a bruised heart. But I carried something different home: a question, and perhaps a challenge.
Fourteen years later, I sometimes look at our photograph and smile at the woman I was. She finished that Master of Engineering. Then, somewhere along the way, the woman who could barely see beyond her Master’s began imagining that perhaps there could be something after it. I pursued my doctorate and eventually earned my PhD. I built a career in academia and found myself standing on the other side of the classroom, entrusted with the education of others.
Perhaps that is why Tun Dr Siti Hasmah’s words about education have stayed with me just as strongly as her question about marriage. In 2012, I thought one of the biggest unanswered questions in my life was whether I would find the right person. Looking back, another question was quietly taking shape: What was I going to do with the woman I could become?
Education, independence and the life ahead
It would make a beautifully tidy story if I could now say that everything eventually fell into place. It did not. I am still unmarried, and I would be dishonest if I turned this remembrance into a triumphant declaration about the joys of singlehood. Life is more complicated than that. Independence comes with a price.
There have been moments when standing on my own feet felt liberating. There have also been moments when independence simply meant that whatever needed carrying had to be carried by me. A career can give a woman purpose without protecting her from disappointment. Education can open doors without answering every question in her personal life. Strength does not make us immune to loneliness, heartbreak or uncertainty. Perhaps strength is something much less glamorous. Sometimes it simply means continuing.
Becoming stronger, layer by layer
And perhaps that is why, all these years later, I keep returning to the pearls.
A pearl is not made all at once. It takes shape slowly, layer upon layer, until something luminous emerges. And the nacre associated with that process carries a beautiful name: mother-of-pearl.
I cannot help smiling at the coincidence. A Mother’s Day celebration. A room filled with grandmothers, young mothers and single women. At its centre, an older woman wearing pearls. And somewhere in that room, a younger woman who thought she was broken.
None of us had arrived there untouched by life. We had simply accumulated our layers. Of course, not everything difficult becomes something beautiful. Some experiences wound us. Some losses remain losses. But we respond. We adapt, we learn and, somehow, we continue.
Perhaps this is why I understand my conversation with Tun Dr Siti Hasmah differently now. She was not teaching me to reject marriage. She was not telling me to choose career over love. She was not promising that independence would make my life easier. She was reminding me that my life could not be measured only by whether somebody chose to share it with me.
I had choices too. There was education to use, work to do and responsibility attached to the opportunities I had received. There was a woman I had not yet become.
When I think about 29 May 2012 now, I return first to that room. I remember the grandmothers, the young mothers and the single women. I remember the laughter and conversations. I remember the women who responded to my troubles with those wonderfully uncomplicated words, “Me too”. And I remember the woman everyone had come to see.
I remember putting my arm around Tun Dr Siti Hasmah for a photograph, asking her about marriage and, of course, the pearls.
Looking at that photograph 14 years later, I know something the young woman smiling in it could not possibly have known. She would finish her master’s degree, earn a doctorate and become an academic. She would experience other disappointments and other joys. She would discover that independence could feel both powerful and lonely. She would still have questions about love, companionship and happiness.
But she would become stronger. Not because life became easier, not because she stopped wanting love, and certainly not because she learned to carry everything alone. She became stronger because she slowly learned that whatever life gave her, or withheld from her, she still had a responsibility to keep building a life of her own.
Perhaps that is what I see differently when I look at Tun Dr Siti Hasmah’s pearls today. A pearl is built layer by layer. So, perhaps, is a woman.
I was still somewhere in the early layers of becoming myself when I sat beside her that afternoon. Tun Dr Siti Hasmah did not fix the young woman sitting beside her. She did something much more respectful.
She reminded her that she still had a life to build.
I went to that Mother’s Day celebration hoping that perhaps Tun Dr Siti Hasmah could tell me something about marriage. Fourteen years later, I realise that the pearl of wisdom I carried home had very little to do with finding a husband.
The pearls shone beautifully on her that afternoon, but they were never the brightest thing about her. Her quiet strength was.
And somewhere between the woman I was then and the woman I am now, her words became one of my layers.
-- BERNAMA
Dr Marziah Zahar is a senior academician in Safety, Health and Environmental at the School of Business Management, Universiti Utara Malaysia. She writes on work, health, society and the human experiences that connect them. This article reflects her personal remembrance of meeting the late Tun Dr Siti Hasmah Mohamad Ali in 2012.