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he picks out her dress to wear for work. She is a size 12, and considered obese in a country like Indonesia.

Once upon a time she had men giving her a second look, these days it is just the satpam (security guard) and tukang sayur (vegetable man) who wonder whether they will get a dose of a scolding from her or not.

Oh, how she remembers the good old days when she was slim, trim and seen as gorgeous.

Her role changes every hour as the day goes by. She is a butler as the sun rises, then a wife, cook, driver, traffic regulator, account executive, guardian, counselor, back to driver, teacher, cook then wife again.

She sits with her husband as he eats the breakfast she prepared. Done with his meal, he says his goodbyes and removes the cotton from his ears. Her voice is too loud and what better way than to use cotton balls inside his ears to lower her volume.

It is time to start her work as a cook. She meets the vegetable man at the gate while seeing her husband off. She picks up some onions. 'How much are these onions?' she asks.

He replies, 'Rp 65,000, ibu.'

'Are you sure? Seems expensive,' she asks again.

He replies, 'That's the price, ibu'.

'Okay then, Rp 55,000?' she bargains. Meekly, he replies, 'Okay, bu'.

As the vegetable man walks off she sees him remove balls made out of newspaper from his ears. 'Strange,' she thinks.

She rushes back inside her house. The children have to be dropped to school before she goes to work.

She drives her rented car out the house and waves to the satpam. In the rear-view mirror she sees him reach to his ears to remove something, similar to cotton.

She drops her child and heads for work. She is an assistant to the CEO of a company. Her husband's salary is not enough to pay for the household expenses, so she offered to work.

The job isn't really an ideal one, but there is no choice. It is a very long day ahead of her, she has to accompany her boss to five meetings.

But the day is not yet over. As she is about to head for school, she gets a call from her child's teacher. She reaches the school and meets the teacher.

'Maam, your child did not submit her homework on time and....'

The mother interrupts her. 'Please excuse her she had a play yesterday and the rehearsals took a lot of her time. She wants to be an actress some day,' she says.

'Even mothers once had dreams. I wanted to be a scriptwriter and director, but it never happened. I got married too young and conceived in my first year of marriage. I had too many responsibilities and forgot I had dreams. I had to let go of them.

'For me, a mother is rich when she has good children, because 'no other success can compensate for the failure at home', someone once said.'

'Alright I will let it go this time, since it was a school play she was acting in,' says the teacher.

Her child pushes her out of the teacher's office and dashes to the parking lot. 'Mom, you are embarrassing! How can you tell my teacher about your unfulfilled dreams. It is not your duty to lecture MY teacher.'

The mother looks at her child and frowns. Tired and hungry, she opts not to defend herself and just goes home.

She rushes to the kitchen to cook, still in her office clothes. There is a family to feed. She wonders what the value of mothers is these days.

The whole world thinks mothers are the most loved people in the world, they are also the most hated.

Children despise the unwanted lectures and advice because they think with all the education paid for by their parents that they have become smarter than them.

Most mothers complain that there comes a point in the hormonal imbalance life of their children that they remember only the 'unpleasant incidents' with their mothers.

Here lies the value of a mother, she only has a 30-second time-span of attention from the child she gave birth to. She wonders how many sentences that amounts to. Oh, it's probably just words.

' Aruna Harjani