Remembering ‘The Last Time I Saw Mother’

This Week’s Winner

Lizette Dato is a technical support representative at Convergys in Makati. She has a 13-year-old daughter and a 6-year-old son. She studied at St. Scholastica’s Academy in Bacolod, UP Diliman and La Consolacion College. She also does watercolor paintings.

I have always been partial to Asian authors. It all began in my second year in high school when Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth was on our assigned reading list. My mother, being the literature teacher that she is, immediately procured a copy for me. So I buckled down to tackle the seemingly boring task of reading the fine print. The book’s pages were somewhat coarse and yellowed and the font was not what I was used to seeing on the teenybopper novels I devoured at the rate of one to two per day. After the first three pages, I was lost in the world of old China, unexpectedly captured by the richness of Chinese culture, by the resilience of man in the face of adversity and the fallibility of human nature when it comes to matters of the heart. Pearl Buck’s language was straightforward and simple unlike the complicated literature being forced down our throats at the time. For the first time in my young life I knew what it meant to have words fill your heart and capture your soul. Every time I laid my hands on a book, I longed to turn the pages and hope it wouldn’t disappoint.

Unfortunately, I never had much money to begin with. Buying brand-new books was an occasional luxury. I often had to settle for previously owned books. Yet each payday would find me wandering up and down the aisles of my favorite bookstores in search of something I could afford. One day I chanced upon a book by a Filipina author with a review by Amy Tan (one of my favorites), published in New York. I turned the pages. The book opened up to the prologue. It felt like looking at a water-colored landscape of a place you’ve already been before.

"I am writing this so I can finally lay my mother to rest. For she continues to live inside me."

There are always secrets between mothers and daughters, a lot of them not entirely pleasant. Like the time my mother refused to speak to me for a year when I was 12. This continues to live in my memory like it just happened yesterday and not 23 years ago. Or like the time I told her my drama club adviser decided against staging Romeo and Juliet because it was too "fanciful." I still flinch as I recall the way she looked at me and asked "Do you even know what fanciful means?"

I’m forever a child at my mother’s mercy – small and insignificant, striving with all the resources my small mind could muster to gain her approval.

"I am writing this to make peace with my past for there is much I have not understood…."

I always say I don’t really care anymore, like Caridad, in The Last Time I Saw Mother but I have come to terms with the truth: that inside me is a child longing for approval, yearning to be the person my mother can really be proud of, the way she is proud of my brothers and sisters.

Then the memories come to the surface again. Elementary school graduation day, in a salon having my hair and makeup done. The stylist is done with me and she summons my mother to take my chair as I stand up and check my reflection in the mirror. Then I hear my mother’s voice, cool and detached, "No, that won’t be necessary, my daughter’s not an honor student and I wouldn’t be going up on the stage anyway."

When we are physically cut from our mother at birth we proceed to create another cord, an emotional one that couldn’t be severed, no matter how long we live away from our mothers. No matter how old we grow and how many times over we become mothers ourselves.

"I read somewhere that we may change our path, choose our future but our beginnings stay with us forever"