April is an interesting month in the Philippines.
It is wedged between March which is Women’s Month, and May where the second Sunday is Mother’s Day.
Lately, I have been doing a lot of thinking about the women in my life who became my second mothers in my life journey.
My biological mother, Maria Elena, is the rockstar of all seasons.
I’ll reserve the details in a separate column; but Maria Elena, in a nutshell, has four children and I am the eldest.
She let me fly and I learned to be independent. In my quest for independence, I met women who became my mentors and thereby became my second mothers.
I can very well count three of them.
First is Silvana Hermosa, my former humanities professor at the University of the Philippines Cebu.
Madame Hermosa was feisty and direct.
I was this insecure college student who graduated from a Catholic school in Ormoc City, unsure of my skills and my capacity to be good at what I chose to take up (Mass Communication) then.
In class, Madame Hermosa did not just teach me literature or the arts. She taught me the essence of being human: to be compassionate to people and to empathize with others even if the “others” are your detractors.
She was my coach in speech competitions and stood beside me in award ceremonies where she would be beaming like a proud mother because her daughter was just declared as an outstanding student.
I don’t know when Connie Fernandez became my second mother.
But my first encounter with her was one of the most frightening experiences I’ve ever had as a struggling journalist.
I was an intern and I learned the ropes about journalism from the school of hard knocks where Miss Connie was the headmistress.
After college graduation, I wanted to work for a nongovernment organization but she convinced me that journalism world is calling on me and that I should respond and wear the journalist badge.
At a time when business and economics reporting was not given the attention it is now getting, Miss Connie pushed me to find my niche and excel in it.
That was 2006–2007, and here I am more than a decade later still writing for the newspaper that gave me my first job straight out of the university. This is Connie Fernandez’s fault.
In 2011, while still contributing for Cebu Daily News and the Philippine Daily Inquirer, I decided to take on a job as the local expert of a livelihood program that built mutually beneficial partnerships between the company and the community.
I found myself paired up with Janina Wohlgemuth, a development worker of the German Agency for International Cooperation.
We were both placed in the Visayas Regional Office of the Philippine Business for Social Progress. There, I met Maricar Olivia Garces Jabido or Miss Olive for short.
Miss Olive is the mother you want to have. She nurtures everyone with kind words. She is caring and loving.
Best of all, she fed me good food. Her family, the Garces clan, originally from the old Parian, runs a catering company (Garces Royal Garden topbilled by her sister, Aster whom I address as “Mom”).
The family basically “adopted” me and I always feel at home whenever I’m in their compound in Talisay City. There is no shortage of laughter and stories with my Garces family.
When I got married, Miss Connie and Miss Olive were my principal sponsors alongside Raffy Escoton and Dennis Singson, CDN newsroom coordinator and CDN business editor, respectively. Madame Hermosa was in Indonesia that time spreading her wings in a foreign land.
They are family to me and I am the luckiest girl in the world to be standing in their midst.
These women may not know, it but they came into my life in times when I needed people to train me, comfort me, slap me and assure me that it’s all right to be me in a world that forced me to be someone else.
At certain stages in our lives, certain people will be presented to us by God (or the universe, if you believe so) to serve as our mentors and confidants. They will knock on our doors or leave context clues in e-mails, text messages or Facebook comments.
Do not — I repeat — do not tell them to go away. Let them stay and linger for a bit. Let their presence enrich and enhance your life.
You will not regret it 10 years down the road.