MY MOM & I

Some of my random thoughts that have never seen the light of day until now. Here goes nothing.

Let me talk about myself and my mother.  

People say I don't look like her because I look more like my dad. My older brother and my youngest sister look more like her. She has a no-nonsense outlook in life.  She is not much into humor; in fact often times she needs jokes to be explained to her. She has the kind of personality that usually puts people off because she is strict, serious, and usually immovable when it comes to ideas that she already tried and decided on.  She decides whether one thing is worth doing again depending on whether they worked or failed the first time, and once she made up her mind about something, it would take short of a miracle for one to get her to  change her mind.  When it comes to accomplishing what needs to be done, she is your person. She gets things done so fast and so effectively that she wants everyone to work at her speed, because to her, anything less is laziness. As the second eldest sister, with 10 other younger siblings at one time, she and her older sister grew up with much of the responsibility of taking care of the family's meals resting on their young shoulders.   She and her big sister were the surrogate mothers to their many young siblings.  I remember when I was a little girl, my unmarried aunts and uncles were living with us, working on the same farm and we all ate from one huge rice pot. Their mother taught them how to work the farm, but in the way of being a good mother, my mom was making it up as she went along, because as far back as I can remember, her own mother was either working in her sweet potato farm, or living in her own mind oblivious to the realities of life.  I understand now that the mental disorder my grandmother used to suffer from was not just simply spiritual oppression as we were told for so long, but actually a result of trauma that she sustained during the war when she had to take care and watch 6 of her siblings die one after the other from illnesses from the chemical devastation resulting from exploded bombs during WW2.

Having left the family home since I was 10, I have developed an independence that my mother seemed to have never understood. As a result, I have always butted heads with her.  At a young age, I became responsible for my own self, without much parental guidance because majority of the year, I was away working and going to school, except for school vacations which mostly totaled to 10 weeks every year, when I would be home.  As a result, I developed this, I-will-do-things-my-way-at-my-own-pace-because-I-know-what-I-am-doing kind of attitude, and she never liked that part of me. 

After I went beyond the age of 25 without a boyfriend to show for it, she kept telling me to get married already.  When I showed up with a guy two years later, she took one look at him, didn't like what she saw, and said to me, "What? That? Really?" ('kaw iya! Hiyatan ngo?)  That's essentially saying, "Can't you find someone better looking?"  In my mind, I replied, "Yeah, Mom! We all know you married the best-looking guy in town!"  It is a good thing my fiance did not understand what was passing between mother and daughter at the time.  

When my dad died, the morning after we buried him,  my mom unloaded all her frustrations of and about me, about how I bankrupted the already-bankrupt family with my nursing education but with no returns as I was not working as one.  I was so hurt I didn't know where to go or what to do with myself, because I thought she understood what I considered to be my calling.  At another time, I was invited to speak at a women's gathering, I must have used one of our mother-daughter conflicts to drive a point home and she got up and went at me while I was on the podium.  I was so embarrassed I wanted to crawl under a rock and never come out.  We had other encounters, very dramatic, hurtful, and heartbreaking.  

I do not have a perfect mother, my siblings can testify to that.  There were times in the past when I would compare her to others, and wish she was more like that other person and less like this.  And when my dad suddenly died, when even she thought he would outlive her, it  dawned on me that maybe, God is giving me more time to love my mother and learn to get to know her better and forgive her for all those years I needed a mother but she was not there.  Her absence during my formative years developed in me a sort of obsession to find the perfect-mother figure, and when these mother figures disappoint my standards or doesn't live up to my idea of a good mother, I tend to disbelieve everything that is good in a person.  Then I would look inward, at myself, and think, "Ah, maybe there is something fundamentally wrong with me, that I really do not deserve a good mother."   

In hindsight, I now have a considerable understanding as to why my mother and I seemed to have seldom seen eye to eye on things.  At a young age, I never have had to be responsible for anyone (except  for myself, and a short period each year of babysitting my younger siblings) as she has had to be, hence, the I-am-always-in-control-personality.

 

But that is not all my mother is about.

When we first found out that I was on the family way, she was the first to rejoice.  When I lost that pregnancy, she was the first to cry.  She brings me cooked meals, even while we are at one of our wars because when I work, I'd get so absorbed, I'd forget to eat, forget I have a husband to lean on and who also needs to be with me, and I, with him, and all that.  While I was suffering my losses, I could tell from my mother's face how worried sick she was and how she wished to take my sufferings upon herself if that were at all possible.  

 

As I age,  I have begun to realize that I take more after my mother than I do after my dad.  I have a set manner of doing things and good luck if you can change my mind about something that I have already decided on.  Yes, so it seems that there really is no changing the stripes of a zebra; or is that how they say that?

So I choose to love my mother with all her colors, stripes, moles, warts, scars  and all.  She sure loves all of me.