It’s Mother’s Day tomorrow; and I won’t be in Cebu to celebrate it with Jeff and the mutants: Nicholas Louis, Antoinette Elena and Jeffrey Peter Jr.
I’m flying to Manila and then Tokyo as part of the Japan-East Asia Network of Exchange for Students and Youths (Jenesys) Program Batch 9 with six other young professionals from the Philippines. The program is implemented by the Japanese government through the Japan International
Cooperation Center and the Japan Information and Cultural Center of the Japanese Embassy in Manila.
The program is implemented in the Philippines in partnership with the National Youth Commission as it aims to promote a global understanding of Japan’s economics, society, politics and foreign affairs.
The nerd in me loves this because my batch will be exploring economic partnerships, trade and investment so that involves visiting companies and factories and learning about businesses and enterprises in Japan as well as how they work on building partnerships with different trade players.
As I pack my bags for this 10-day trip, my son Nicholas — the bookworm and believer that the moon is actually the sun in the evening — told me that his younger brother is not a baby anymore because he doesn’t drink milk from my breasts.
Nicholas’ declaration surprised me.
How can a three-year-old understand the concept that babies breastfeed for nourishment? My husband and I have discussed this a number of times, but we can’t quite figure out how Nicholas reached this conclusion.
I may have said something in the past that made him realize that people stop being babies when they are not breastfed.
Nicholas’ twin sister, Antoinette, is the feisty one. She chooses and changes her clothes — on her own! — at least four times a day. She has now reached the conclusion, after his three years on earth, that the sun is the circle that comes out in the morning and the moon is the semi-circle that comes out at night.
The baby (or the not-baby according to Nicholas) is Jeff Junior whose vocabulary has expanded to include laptop, banana, environment, blanket and
“Great Grandfather Tree” after lengthy hours of playing and listening to his older siblings. My one-year-old resident cutie pie eats anything from Utan Bisaya to fried chicken.
There is always a tinge of sadness every time I leave for a trip no matter how excited I am to be in another land.
The most difficult part of pursuing my dreams as a woman is the fear that I might be sacrificing my role as a mother because time spent to improve myself is time spent away from them.
I was told before I embraced motherhood that no matter how good a mother is she would always have that “mom guilt” hovering above her head.
Nothing you do as a mother will ever be enough. You would always feel that there is something you can do better.
I badly wanted to perfect the motherhood formula, so I tried being a stay-at-home Nanay.
I also tried being a working Nanay. But I learned in the last three years that there is no perfect and ideal situation to fulfill your job as a mother.
Instead, you just thrive in whatever situation you belong. Jeff would say: “You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit.”
One day, in the not-so-distant past, Jeff and I were in our living room in the little nook we had in the US. He was deep in thought and then said, “You know, children will never know what their parents did for them.”
I broke down in tears when he said that as I thought about how I gave up Cebu, lechon and the warmth of the Philippines to raise a family in America.
My mother, Maria Elena, was 18 when she got pregnant with me. Four days after I was born, she turned 19. Every after two years since I was born, she gave birth to my siblings: Stephanie Marie, Hendrix Gil and Kevin Ken.
With a seaman for a husband, who eventually left our home to start another family, Maria Elena single-handedly raised all four of us while receiving minimal financial support from the husband.
But she made it work.
She always did.
I don’t know how she did it, but all four of us finished college and have turned out to be decent individuals.
My mother and I are not the best of friends. We cannot be together in one roof because we turn into fire-breathing dragons ready to engage in a battle of the century.
But I love her.
I understand that better now that I face this huge responsibility of raising three kids.
Goodness, it’s overwhelming! Congress should pass a bill declaring that mothers be given a monthly salary plus incentives for the amount of dishes they washed, the diapers they changed and dishes they cooked to nourish an army of hungry mutants.
All my love for all the mothers out there in whatever form, shape or size you are in.
Special shout out to the single mothers who work doubly hard to raise your children. No sisters, hindi ka na-ano lang!