A Force To Be​ Reckoned With

Dato’ Sri Siti Nurhaliza Tarudin tells us how motherhood has completely turned her life around and why she’s not looking to go anywhere else.

- Poon Li-Wei

We're all for celebrating home-grown talents. So it’s fitting then that this August, we had to have the woman who rose above criticism to pursue an outstanding career and fulfillment in motherhood: Dato’ Sri Siti Nurhaliza Tarudin. Having debuted after winning a local singing competition, Bintang HMI, in 1995 at the tender age of 16, my earliest memory of her was when she first enraptured Malaysians all over after belting out a Chinese song – using the distinctively melodious timbre in her voice to transcend all barriers. Since then, she’s gone on to sing and record songs in Javanese, English, Mandarin, Arabic, Urdu, and even Japanese – amassing up to 200 local and international awards. But if you were to ask her what her proudest moment has been in the past decades, it would be holding her daughter, Siti Aafiyah, in her arms.

LOUD AND PROUD

Those in the know will be aware that she’d been trying to conceive since the beginning of her marriage, to the extent of going for hormone therapy – which made the public disclosure of her miscarriage, several years ago, even more heartbreaking. With her yearning for motherhood outweighing inconsequential judgement from members of the public who still frown upon such taboo matters, she underwent IVF treatments thrice before finally succeeding, "I hope that by sharing my story, it inspires other women to never stop trying to conceive – it took me 11 years!" says Siti, who has also told the press that women should not feel ashamed to talk about infertility.

THE BEAUTY OF MOTHERHOOD