MY MOM IN HER DAUGHTER'S EYES

It’s May again…a month of numerous celebrations for most of the Filipinos…There’s the annual town fiestas, Flores de Mayo and other festivities that are usually being celebrated in this month.

Also celebrated during this month is the Mother’s Day, which in my opinion, is the least celebrated of all. Although there are already quite a number of advertisements as early as April saying that we should buy our mothers different presents, such as perfumes, jewelries, dresses and cakes, I don’t think that the day is really celebrated in the way that the commercials told us we should. I don’t think a lot of people are actually going out with their moms and surprise her with a beauty and spa treatment in a salon, or if a lot of husbands actually prepared candle-lit dinner dates with their wives…

Maybe it is not proper to assume anything, but honestly we don’t do any of these at home on Mother’s Day. Sometimes we greet her, other times, we don’t. And the day just goes on like any other normal days of our lives.

My mom isn’t a perfect mom (and I don’t think anyone’s mom is). She’s maybe even far from what the majority would call ideal. And my siblings will surely agree if I’ll mention even just this one trait that we all hate about her. Despite all of these, I still decided to blog about her, for a change, as a tribute to her. But because I am writing this because it’s Mother’s Day (her day), it doesn’t follow that everything that I am about to say here are all pretty and nice things. As I’ve said, she’s far from the ideal. And by using the ideal as a standard, I’m afraid there are not a lot of good things to say about mom.

Based from what I am always told, my mom and dad were still in college when they had me. It was my dad who shouldered her education expenses until she graduated from college. She then becomes an elementary school teacher… a tough one at that, before she became a school principal.

Because she’s a teacher, she made me read the alphabet and the abakada at age 3. She taught me how to read long sentences and paragraphs at about the same age too. By the time I reached 6, I was already in Grade 1 helping my other classmates to read on their own.

I can also recall those long hours we spent daily in front of the old 5, 10, 25 and 50 centavo coins along with the other peso bills. Since I still find it hard to add, subtract, multiply or divide at a young age, she made me remember each coins and bills according to its appearance. Then she’ll demonstrate how a piece of every peso coin is equivalent to 4 pieces of my favorite candy and if I only want to buy two candies with it, I should receive one 50 centavo coins or two pieces of 25 centavos, and so on.

Remembering this, I now realized why even if the shape and size of the coins and bills we use are changing, instead of doing the fifty minus eight-fifty math, I sometimes find it easier to count my change and my expenses in the same way. Like when I give a pink 50 peso bill as a jeepney fare, to check my change, I’ll count if I have two 20 peso bill , one piece of 1 peso coin and two pieces of 25 centavos, and so forth.

Unlike most mothers however, my mom also stopped helping me with my daily assignments from school the moment I passed Grade 1 . I don’t know if she trusts my intelligence too much that maybe she thought I have learned how I should study my lessons from the previous school year so maybe she can already left me alone with it. Maybe it’s also because she is a teacher and maybe she thought that the best way for me to learn is to learn on my own…from my own mistakes. Maybe the only wrong thing I can say about it is that she treated me as an adult at age 6 or 7 trying to instill in me the virtue of independence.

So that’s how I get through elementary, then high school then college. She told me that before asking her about something, I should make sure that I have tried doing many things just to find the answers on my own. She told me to use the books and read it thoroughly. She is a teacher and she knows that the answers are always there, just waiting for me to find them. And for those things that can’t be found in the books or from anywhere else, are sometimes the things that I should answer based on how I understood my lessons. Only when I don’t understand a thing clearly that I should finally ask.

True enough, I have learned to work my way through many obstacles in my life on my own…trying not to ask for anyone’s help. I thought for a long time that it’s wrong to ask questions and to ask for help. At most times, I find myself just thinking about the possible questions to ask and when to ask them, but never really get myself to actually saying it. And even until now, I find myself a burden and too weak whenever I am asking help from anyone apart from her, my siblings and my bf.

Mom is also undoubtedly a career woman. Often times (we think) she’s neglecting her obligations to us, just to deliver what is needed of her as an educator. She’s working even after the school hours are over. She’s even working on Saturdays and half of Sundays just to train her students for this and that competition. She spends many (over)nights with the staff of a publishing/printing house to make sure that their school paper will definitely land a place on the Top Ten. Even when we were little, we were used to her out of town trips/seminars/workshops and competitions that could sometimes last for a week. And by the time she came back, specifically from those District/Division/Provincial/Regional/National School Press Conferences, she’s sure to brag few of her new accomplishments and awards. We’re used to it. And personally, the long hour she spent away from us can sometimes makes me sad in the same way that the awards that she’s always taking home makes me happy for her.

I even remember this time, when I was in high school and I tried to join our school paper. In one of the workshops conducted, the schoolpaper adviser read a feature article I wrote then asked me how I am related to her (my mom). I don’t really know then if I have the talent or he just said I have inherited it from my mom upon learning how I am related to her. Nevertheless, I know the awards my mom took home from those conferences, and trusting the schoolpaper adviser’s skills and judgments, his complements had really made me proud of myself.

Now here’s her one trait that I said many will surely agree.
My mom is a nagger. And because she’s a nagger, she’ll surely complain if my siblings and I are not doing the household chores the way she told us to. And I hate it when she’s nagging while I am really about to do just everything that she’s telling me to. When I was younger, I swear I thought that the series of instructions that she’s giving me are too many that it seems to contradict her previous instructions.

And sometimes, I swear, even if I think I am doing it right, she’d still say I am doing it wrong. I don’t know. Maybe mom is a little bit of a perfectionist too that most of the time, every chores she assigned us to do ends up with her doing everything and telling us to leave her alone and stay away from where she is working.

Back then, I can always remember myself sulking at the end of the day, believing that I’ve done everything wrong. I don’t know If maybe I am just trying to justify my laziness, but I think I’ve also come to a point when I don’t want to respond anymore to any of her instructions believing that I can’t do it right anyway…thinking that I’ll just waste my time on it as she would surely do everything I did , her way again.

It took me a long time to accept that no matter how worse I think my mom is, she still knows best. I’ve proved that when I enter college and somehow live on my own.

It’s ironic that when she’s not around to nag and tell me what to do on most of my things, It was then that I’ve learned to keep my stuff in one place as I hear her voice repeatedly on my head…as if it was recorded since the very first day she instructed me how I should do some things and how to store my personal stuff.

And even now that I am working and renting an apartment with my officemates, when I see most of their things lying around in every corner of our place, I suddenly think of home and mom and how she used to remind me that I should learn how to store my things properly because one day, I will live with other people and they might not like my things lying around the room.

I think about mom and thought about hearing her voice telling me to lower mine whenever it’s too late and others are already in their beds.

I think about mom when I’m doing the dishes..when I’m doing my own laundry…when I’m ironing my clothes…when I am trying to cook my own food.

I think about mom and her voice echoes asking me if I am disposing it properly whenever I am throwing away the tissue or the cotton buds or whatever it is that I used personally.

I think about mom and now I understand why she doesn’t want to let us touch or use or go through most of her stuff without even asking for her permission (even if it’s just a pillow or a comb)… I understand her now why she don’t want our things to clatter with her things even if we are sharing the same house..Why she wants her things to be in one place and our things in another.

I think about her on my first heartbreak…how she endured the process she went through when our father left us. I think about how strong she was when she dealt with the pain and the loss in her own way… how she’s trying to continuously raise the four of us even without our dad… and I think about what she might tell me under those circumstances.


I wonder how will my mom react if she would pay me a visit and learn how I keep my things stored neatly in one place and how I usually act just the way she often told me to, yet at home, I am still bounded to commit the same mistakes that she repeatedly forbid me to do.

I see mom now in ways that I don’t understand before…She may not be affectionate, but I know she cares..She’s astute and an achiever and we surely inherited her genes (‘nuff said). She’s independent and sometimes a perfectionist but I know she only wants us to learn and do more good things in our lives

So whether the content of this article is good or bad in her opinion, for sure, parts of this will unleash the Grammar Nazi in her.. However, I am just happy and expecting her criticisms and nagging not because this is her day, but because I know my mother too well…