“Hi, ‘anak.’ How are you doing?”
“I’m good.”
“Do you still have money?”
“Yes. By the way, I just got kicked out of my flat. I’m homeless.”
“What? I’m calling.”
“I’m kidding. I’m all good.”
“Okay.”
This is a typical conversation I have with my mom whenever she checks on me. She messages me once every week (or two weeks if things get too busy). It typically starts with me replying three hours to five hours late and ends within five minutes.
She tends to reply immediately as long as I don’t message her past her bedtime.
I’ve never really hung out with my mom back when I was in Manila. But we did spend time together regularly. It’s usually when she wants to be driven outside so she can do one of three things:
I always refused when she wanted to get groceries or buy flowers. I was too lazy to carry groceries or heavy potted plants to the car. However, when it came to driving her to work, I agreed (grudgingly). I’ve always hated spending an extra fifteen minutes looping around Ortigas just so I can drop her off at her building.
But, I did it anyway so I could get free gas for the car.
In fact, every time we passed by the street of her office building, my mom would ask how I was doing with gas. And, each time, I would look at the fuel meter to see if the arrow pointed below half. If it did, it was an instant gas top-up of five hundred Philippine pesos. If it wasn’t, I’d still stop by the station to make sure the tyres had enough air in them.
I was perpetually terrified of getting a flat tyre every time I drove out. Back then, an exaggerated highlight reel of what could happen would occasionally play in my head. It would always involve my car careening all over the highway, zooming and bouncing around five speeding vehicles like a Pinball machine before crashing into a random tree.
Looking back, I now find this very strange. My dad taught me how to swap out a busted tyre with a spare one. In fact, it was the first thing he did as soon as he saw the used 1999 Toyota Civic my mom bought for me. The second thing my dad did was express his utter disgust when he found the car had an automatic transmission. It was as if this car spat on the legacy he started with my oldest brother — a legacy built on driving vintage automobiles with manual transmission and no power steering.
I would always stare at the steering wheel whenever my dad pulled out of the curb in front of the house. I would watch as his hands turned the wheel until it made four complete counter-clockwise rotations. He would then engage the stick shift into reverse, pull his vintage yellow Beetle into the road, and repeat the same process with the steering wheel, this time in the opposite direction. If that were me, I’d probably leave the car running in the middle of the road, go back to the house, and take a nap right after.
Thinking about the effort it took just to get his car in the middle of the road already makes me sleepy.
Anyway, going back to my mom. She always had this habit of making sure I had everything that I needed. I remember the random phone calls I would make to her office. These calls would always go in one of two ways:
I knew I could always buy myself a pen at school. But, I would much rather have my mom buy me a pen. It never crossed my mind that this would require her to spend another thirty minutes right after work just to line up and buy me a pen.
I just wanted my mom to buy me a pen.
As for asking her when she was going home, I always knew she arrives at the house at around 7:30 PM — just in time for dinner. But, asking her even if I knew the answer was just an itch I had to scratch.
These insignificant and somewhat annoying requests and questions may not matter much to most adults. But, the consistency my mom had when it came to giving me what I needed transformed her from “typical mom” to “mom that has E V E R Y T H I N G.”
I think I was already in my twenties when my mom explained to me the things she had to do to keep up with my requests. Aside from her yearly ritual of keeping my Christmas money from my aunt (which was in US Dollars by the way!) for “safekeeping”, my favourite story with her would always be the first time she took me to an ATM.
As I’m writing this, I can already hear the giggles she would make every time she tells me this story.
I think I was around seven years old. My mom is holding my hand. In front of me are a bunch of adults, lining up for their turn at this strange machine right outside the mall entrance. Every so often, a grown-up would take something from the device and walk away. Then, the line would get shorter, which made it easier for me to see how the machine looked like.
Eventually, our turn came. I saw my mom pressing a bunch of big, shiny, metal buttons. In reality, it was just her typing in her PIN. But, from my seven-year-old perspective, this looked like the coolest thing ever.
“Mom. I want to press the buttons.”
She then picks me up, slightly bends her left knee, and anchors my seven-year-old ass on top of it. This made it significantly easier for me to see the screen and all the shiny buttons I could press. My mom then grabs my wrist and guides me to the buttons I need to press so she can withdraw her usual amount of two thousand Pesos.
Eventually, the money pops out, and I am immediately amazed. Being the logical kid that I was, I look at my mom and tell her the brilliant idea I had in my head.
“Mom, you should get more money.”
Not only would this save us time from having to line up again, having more money would allow us to buy more stuff. It made complete sense, and I saw no reason as to why my mom only withdrew a measly amount of two thousand Pesos. Of course, I had no concept of what bank accounts were and how you could only withdraw the amount you actually had in your accounts. Nevertheless, I was profoundly confused and maybe even a bit disappointed with my mom’s poor decision-making skills.
It would be several years later when I would find out that my mom genuinely wanted to get more money from the ATM. It’s just that two thousand Pesos was all she had at the time. This desire to provide whatever she could to her children was a recurring trend when it came to my mom. And, if I had to guess, the drive that she has to do this consistently even up to this day comes from the fact that it was her generation that brought her side of the family up from poverty to middle-class standards.
Now and then, my mom would tell me stories about how things were when she was growing up. Some of these stories were about Papang, her father. She told me of the times when she would run in panic as soon as he heard Papang’s bellowing voice thundering through the streets as he beckoned my mom to get her ass back in the house before it got dark. I also heard tales of Papang’s lighter side and how he would craft slingshots from scratch for each of my older siblings. But, among my mom’s childhood stories, the most entertaining ones would always be about the jingles she had to sing whenever she sold food along the streets. The deal was, Mamang, her mother, would make “Turon na Saging”, a Filipino delicacy, at home. Then, my mom would go out, sing her jingles, and sell them to bystanders. To this day, my mom can sing these food-jingles on command, with all of the goofy intonations down to a tee.
The circumstances my mom had to live through forced her to act like a fifteen-year-old at the ripe age of seven. I think this is the reason why her parenting had a firmer, more masculine tone than what people typically expect out of mothers. She eased up over time and was significantly more lenient by the time I came around (my siblings would always make sure to remind me how I got off easy). But, her masculine approach towards raising her children still shows, especially when it comes to giving dating advice.
While my father, the calmer, goofier, more introspective of the two, would always expectantly ask how I’m currently doing with the ladies, my mom rarely gives advice that doesn’t fall into her patented five-step guideline:
While I started off apprehensive and confused, my emotions when it came to dating eventually morphed into frustration, detachment, and finally, resigned acceptance. I used my mom and her personality as my framework for dating, and I’ve come out sorely disappointed with how much women have changed.
As kids, we are told to do what our parents say without question. As teenagers, we learn to question everything that our parents say. But, now that I’m in my twenties, I’ve come to appreciate my parents.
Respect can be given. Genuine respect, on the other hand, will always have to be earned. I look at my mother not simply as the women that happened to give birth to me, but as the woman that still does whatever she can to help me become a better man to this day.
Thank you, mom.
Yes, I still have money.
Nope, I’m not homeless.
…at least, not yet.
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