The Part Nobody Photographs

They always say you don't know how good you have had it until it's gone. That has been a recurring theme in my life.

There is no way to hold onto everything so tightly, to appreciate everything all at once. And so often, we don't notice how huge and important it really is, what integral part it plays in our lives, until it is no longer there.

Getting my then 10-year-old daughter ready to spend her weekends with her father was a feeling, and a thing, I never expected to do or have to feel.

When Sophie started going to her father's on Friday evenings, I remember standing in the flat watching the elevator doors close as her father waited downstairs to pick her up. There were tears in the beginning along with the heartache as it felt like I was giving some of my daughter away. It's been eight years and it is still hard to say goodbye to her on Friday evenings.

I didn't notice how her life was the backbone of mine especially on the weekends.

You see, Saturdays had a structure. Tuition first, then lunch out somewhere after. We might walk around the shops a little before heading home for a movie night in together.

This empty timetable on a Saturday might have looked like exactly what I wanted when Sophie was a baby. But now that it was there as a fixture — I had to fill it.

When you file for divorce in Singapore and there are children involved, you attend mandatory classes. They introduce you to the amygdala hijack — the fight or flight response — so that you understand how to keep your emotions in check. In doing so, your children will not be affected by the onslaught of nastiness that will likely affect your mental state. That part of divorce, they tell you.

What they do not tell you is the human side of it. The parenting side of it. They do not prepare you for the empty that stands in front of you — the Fridays, the Saturdays, the days that will never be shared again. I have missed out on so much of Sophie's personal life just because I do not see her two days out of seven. I didn't know that then, I wish I did. But life can't be what you want all the time so you learn how to make the best of it.

I did what most people would do — I looked for my friends. The problem was, all my friends were very much happily married and so they were doing very much the same thing I did when my marriage was intact.

I had to meet new friends and I did, fortunately. All I wanted was somewhere to be on a Saturday afternoon — brunch, so that I was not alone at home with nowhere to go and no one to talk to.

I started making Saturday brunch with friends a weekly anchor for myself. When I returned home, it would be laundry and some pottering around. Some other times I would browse the bookstores or the mall. I had to accept that I would be coming home to an empty house regardless of how my time was filled.

Netflix became a good friend in the evenings when I wasn't out. I say that without apology. Over the years I have learnt to look forward to simply switching my mind off by watching television while playing on my phone.

I had to expand beyond the school-gate friendships — the mothers I knew because our children were in the same school. That social architecture had been built around Sophie. Without her at the centre of it, I had to find people who were there for me, not for the shared logistics of raising children in the same school.

I notice the same thing when I am sitting with people whose long-term relationships have ended. They do not know how to fill their time alone. They realise that their social life was joined at the hip with their partner who had been the one to organise the social calendar, the dinners and the vacations. When that person is gone, so is the entire architecture.

What they don't realise yet, and what I didn't realise when I was standing at that elevator — is that every small decision you make in the absence of that architecture is you learning to trust yourself again. The brunch you booked, the bookshop you wandered and the Netflix you returned home to.

All of this becomes your new weekend without needing it to be extraordinary. These tiny adjustments are not insignificant. They are your new practice in learning that your own judgment is enough. All of this coming together lets you know that you do not need someone else's presence to fill your life for you.

The friends I had built my Saturday routines with in the years before COVID had become like family. When they were sent away from Singapore I found myself alone again — not for the first time, and not for the last.

This is the texture of expat life. Your world is a collage of cities on two-year stints that may or may not get extended. It wasn't just my friends who left — it was my neighbours and Sophie's school friends as well.

The father of one of Sophie's friends from pre-school said something to me that was funny and true at the same time — he told his daughters, find the Singaporean kids and hang on to them, because you will save yourself some heartbreak. The leaving parties in Singapore are a constant and I have attended more of them than I can count.

I call myself a displaced Singaporean. I am Singaporean, but I don't live like one — because every circle I built was expat, or married to one. And when the company says move, they have to relocate.

Some transitions ask you to build once. Others ask you to build repeatedly. I have built more times than I planned to.

What I know now is this — resilience is not built by sheer force of will. It is built from repetition. The way our bones grow stronger when we introduce controlled impact through strength training or resistance training — our hearts learn to face the waves instead of turning their backs against them.

The wise say this builds character, through trials and pain. But life is like the tide, it rises and falls. And our heartbeat is the same. We never want it to flatline.

And the heart has to check the mind, in repeated cycles. Because if you harden your heart so that you do not feel the discomfort, so that you will not be vulnerable — you lose the humanity of life.

The part that is most important in living, in my view, is to feel. So that you know, and by experience your heart grows.

Learning is not only about advancement in career or the material — it is allowing your heart to feel and teaching your mind how to move without armour as much as you can. And in doing that, you can approach with the heart, open.

That is what all the rebuilding has taught me. It is not strategy, it is the willingness to allow. By doing that repeatedly, you gain confidence that you can reshape your life when you need to, want to.

If you are in that in-between right now — the place where what was has ended and what comes next hasn't shown itself yet — know that you are not failing. You are simply in the part that nobody photographs. And you have more in you than you think.

If you need a little help in settling your mind, join me at aroranin.com where you can find a selection of free meditations.

With a Quiet Heart and a Quiet Mind,

Arora.