This week’s winner
MANILA, Philippines - Rosario Patino-Yap, 39, is an English teacher at Cagayan National High School in Tuguegarao City. She encourages her students to develop love of reading. A weekly reading period is allotted to enable them to catch up on reading.
Just a few breaths away, the world will be in a frenzy to celebrate Mother’s Day. The sentimental yet commercialized celebration will make even the most stoic mother thank the high heavens for being a vessel of new life.
I will again welcome the day with trepidation and feel the bittersweet pangs the day always brings me. But why these emotions?
Mother’s Day. There is something to the term that makes me hold my breath till the day takes its exit on the orange-red skyline. But fate can sometimes be serendipitous. Just a few breaths shy of The Day, I happened to open The Last time I Saw Mother by Arlene J. Chai.
My mother. They say memories are distorted recollections of the past. Yet I see and hear the past now. The Last Time I Saw Mother was cathartic. Nostalgia beckoned me when I was not willing. Like a wave that rushed back to shore after straying in the ocean. The memories came back unbidden after 26 years.
When was the last time I saw Mother?
The wheels of the gurney turned. They left behind unseen tracks on the sterile hospital tiles. The attending physician’s face was unreadable. A storm was brewing. And I was drowning. I couldn’t keep afloat. Just when I was falling deeper into the chasm, I woke up from that nightmare.
Fear clutched my heart as I wondered why Papang and Mamang hadn’t arrived yet. Surely they could have not stayed the night in the hospital. “I hope Mamang is okay now,” I whispered into the misty dawn.
But like Caridad in Chai’s novel, I, too, was handed bad news. Similar to the song lyrics “Bad news on the doorstep; I couldn’t take one more step.” It was on that wet August morning when my Mamang arrived home. In a white coffin. A heartrending opposite of the mother who was in good spirits days before awaiting the birth of what could have been my fifth sibling.
Unlike Caridad, I see visages of me in her. However, in a different light. My mother did not have secrets that went with her to the grave. Neither did she have skeletons in the closet. After all, I was her firstborn whereas Chai’s Caridad was adopted. Mamang did not have choices. But I recall that she was like a narra tree, hard and unbending when discipline was the call. Nowadays, she might be labeled a Tiger Mom, or that overly vigilant neighbor might do the “Bantay Bata thing.” But I am what I am today because of that upbringing my siblings and I had.
Very much like Ligaya, I have spent a few years singing a dirge that marks the years I spent trying to conceive. On the same boat with Ligaya, I was in a hurry to get pregnant. Just when I thought my husband and I had an answered prayer, the reality of our baby turned out to be no more than a breath in the cold. Ashes gone the moment they hit the air. A puff of smoke. I could have easily pretended that it never happened. But the longing for that unborn child lingers.
A dirge echoed in my mind as I kept on reading Chai’s first novel. Inang Baket arrived for Mamang’s mansayag. The wake was like a slow-motion teleserye. A septuagenarian that time, she was a remnant of the World War II of the old Spanish-bred generation. She made her dung-aw in what I knew now as Spanish. And 26 years later, I still hear Inang Baket’s throaty voice:
Duermete, mi nina Duermete, mi sol Duermete, pedazo De mi Corazon.
As I turned the pages some more, I read how Ligaya entered their house on her knees the day her father died. She was a penitent begging for forgiveness, for healing. And on two painful instances in the past, I did the same. The first time was when I blamed myself for not praying hard enough for Mamang’s safe pregnancy and feeling a sense of foreboding each time I would iron her clothes when she was alive. And the second time was when I was not a better daughter to my cancer-stricken Papang.
I was told often enough that I was loved too much by them to be angry at me. But still, I wish I had hoarded their words to last a lifetime. I wish I had heeded her instructions on that fateful August night. And had gone to the public market instead of cooking that dinengdeng ng saluyot. Had I done that, I would have been able to caress her belly and showed her how much I loved her.
The sun was slowly sinking behind the Maddarulug Hills when I finally closed The Last Time I Saw Mother. I was discomfited reading my own gamut of emotions and experiences in this novel. There was a heaviness in my heart as I came to terms with many ghosts in the past. I was all spent. I had lived all those 26 years in just a few hours. I wanted to blame the novel for the catharsis it had lent me. But I found it more enduring and more significant that I can now confront the reason for my aversion to Mother’s Day.
Do you see a child pulling at their mother’s hand? The child pulls her mother forward. But the last time I saw mother, I was pulling my hand away.