The mother of all months

January is a great month, the first gush of fresh air after the frenzied holiday season. It is the month of good intentions, because it is the month when New Year’s resolutions are made ... and not yet broken.

It is the month of fresh starts and new beginnings, of hope and resolve. In the US, it is when their president is sworn into office after the elections of the year just past. It is the month when we wean ourselves from the sentimentality of the holidays, and yet in the first Sunday of the month, Christians celebrate the Feast of the Three Kings. My father-in-law Carlos Ramirez recalls that when he was a child, he and his siblings Fining, Nena and Ely received their gifts on the feast of the Three Kings. It was not to Santa Claus that they wrote their wish list, but to Melchor, Gaspar and Balthazar. In Asia and in countries with a sizeable Chinese population, January is the month of another New Year’s celebration, the Chinese Lunar year. There will be Vitamin C overload again in most homes on Chinese New Year’s Eve (the 25th in China itself) as residents prepare 13 kinds of round fruits in the belief that they will bring more prosperity. For the anti-oxidants that they bring, the fruits cannot be anything but buenas!

January is the month when lovers begin preparing for Valentine’s Day.

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January to me and my siblings is special because it is the birth month of our mother Sonia, who turns 71 on January 9, the Feast of the Black Nazarene.

Our attention and hers have been focused these past months on our father Frank, who is battling cancer. Dad is the Hercules of the family, but it is from my Mom that Dad draws his strength.

In the living room of their apartment in Anaheim, California, their home for the last 15 years, hangs a photo of Dad and Mom before a seemingly nondescript hill of stone standing proudly against the blue Mediterranean sky. It is their only photo of just the two of them together hanging on the wall, and the hill isn’t really very picturesque.

That hill is the Rock of Gibraltar. And Mom is our Rock of Gibraltar.

Growing up, I saw my dad hospitalized for gastroenteritis and I remember him having bouts with flu. But I don’t remember my mom getting sick! Mothers probably have a stronger immune system because they take care of the family and when the mother falters, the entire house wobbles.

In the four months since my dad was diagnosed with cancer, we have only seen Mom cry twice. The first time, after Dad’s surgery and we were confronted with the reality of his ailment, and the second time, when Dad spoke with healing priest Fernando Suarez over the telephone.

My sister Valerie, the only one who witnessed the second episode, said Mom cried because she saw a glimmer of hope amidst the struggle. (Father Suarez was able to pray over Dad in person a month later, and my dad continues to reap the benefits from that prayer session.)

She gets tense sometimes, but Mom is holding up very well. She moves with the briskness of a woman half her age and can do errands in no time.

Like the Rock of Gibraltar, she is not only our strength but also our refuge. You can bring home any problem to her, and she will make it as light as cotton candy. She can wipe the creases on your worried brow with her words of assurance, the way Photoshop erases wrinkles on a photograph. Mom has a built-in Photoshop that simply smoothens away the creases on your heart.

When I was younger, just getting on the schoolbus after classes was already a joy, because I knew I was going home and Mom was waiting for me.

Mom wasn’t really touchy-feely or tactile, but her presence was already like a caress. She was there to help us with homework and review us for exams, and sometimes do our sewing projects for us.

Mom was always conscious of appearances, and she guarded the family’s dignity like, well, the Rock of Gibraltar. She would always admonish us to be conscious of what other people might say about us, and though others couldn’t care less about what others said about them, Mom cared. Even in difficult times she wore a brave front and once, during a family crisis, a friend remarked that she was looking younger! “Parang hindi ka tumatanda, Sonia!” That’s my Mom. She would put on lipstick first before she faced a crisis.

To understand why Mom is strong is to appreciate her childhood. She was the much-awaited firstborn of Igmedio and Jovita Reyes, coming into their lives after seven years of marriage and two miscarriages. And despite being pampered and fawned over, she was sent to boarding school in Manila at age 11. It was big leap from the Bongabon Central School in Oriental Mindoro to St. Scholastica’s College in Manila, but Mom breezed through the transition. A self-confessed “promdi,” she recalls crying quietly at night in her bed at the St. Scho dorm, still a child at 11, but she steeled herself in the morning and graduated high school with flying colors and life-long friendships (her best friends to this day are her high school classmates like Angge Alday Soriano and Marcia Capinpin Jesena.)

 I think anybody who can stand up to homesickness can stand up to anything in life. In college, Mom went to UP Diliman and took up Business Administration — a promdi, then a convent-bred interna braving the “Diliman Republic.”

That she is a devoted wife, mother and grandmother is not surprising because Mom was a devoted daughter to her parents. She took care of them in their illness, and when she was already living in Anaheim, she would fly home to take care of her tatay in his final months.

Happy Birthday to the cushion that softened all our falls, the eraser that took out all our worries, the sunshine of our childhood, our refuge still in our adulthood. You are our Rock of Gibraltar.

Now, if only rocks wore lipstick!

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