My Midlife Call

“I do not think it is mortality that seizes you at midlife. Nor is it anxiousness about your accomplishments. What consumes you is, rather the challenge of self-understanding – to know in your heart, independently, what kind of person you have become, and then to reconcile with this person and to figure out what needs to be done in the remaining years to make this idiosyncratic life hopefully a work of art.” Randy David, Public Lives

My mother has a pinched lumbar nerve in her lower back

My mother has a pinched lumbar nerve in her lower back, causing her back pain, and more pain in her hips, buttocks and legs. The picture her doctor gave us is that of a plant whose branches have dried up, no amount of watering will make it green again; it has withered. As she walks, she concentrates on each step, but sometimes she is unable to steady herself and she trips on the ground. She now uses a cane, while her arm links into mine for support.

Although my mother's illness has slowed her down, she has insisted on her old routine. This morning, we went to the market. She likes going to the market since this is good exercise for her. After getting down the jeepney, she struggled towards the meat and fish sections, proceeded to her sukis and bought chicken, pork, bangus. Then we inched our way towards the vegetable and fruit sections. When we got home, she took her time organizing everything inside the ref as usual. For lunch today, she cooked sinigang, fried chicken, and rice.

Even on a Saturday she would be up and about before 6:00 am, folding the wash or dusting paraphernalia. Her motto is to finish all tasks at the time they should be accomplished, otherwise our 54-square-meter dwelling will become even smaller with a pile of things sitting undone in nooks and corners.

At one time, we found our house in total disarray after my mother and I came home from the hospital. She got confined for five days because the radiation therapy caused ulcers in her intestines. As soon as we arrived home, she went straight to the bathroom to get a pail of water for her plants. I in turn cleaned the windows, dusted the tables, mopped the stairs, swept the cobwebs away. A mountain of dirty clothes needed to be washed. When we got home, we were immediately into the house chores. My mother initiated the general cleaning and pressed on until she was satisfied. By nighttime, I felt secure, knowing she could sleep peacefully, without mice and roaches roaming.

Trustworthy maids are a dime a dozen nowadays and my mother would not hire anyone who could accomplish less than she could. Recently, I have become more aware that I need to wear her domestic shoes. I have told my mother that she should now retire from this never-ending housework. But she argued with me saying, “If I stop, everything will stop.” She seizes her days in slow motion, filling her time with routine.

My mother insists on maintaining order in the house

My mother insists on maintaining order in the house herself. Every day, she scrubs the floor and sweeps every corner meticulously. She also has this habit of repairing everything that seems to have become useless. In our house, no scrap of used cloth is wasted; they become what my mother desires them to be: seat covers and coasters, tablecloths, bed sheets, and dusters. She sews the retasos, combining the pieces of fabric according to her whim in a kind of gut-trapunto. Even when I was a toddler, she had already been turning her unused 50s dresses into diapers and baby clothes. (She used to pattern her dresses after her idol, Gloria Romero’s wardrobe, which used up three yards for the balloon skirt alone. The petticoats became sturdy bed sheets for each newborn.)

Pale yellow curtains are hanging in folds in our living room and they match the new brown and brick checker seat covers she made. This has given our little sala a cozy country look. She planted bougainvilleas, five fingers, and varieties of San Francisco in pots and placed these side by side on our gate.

Sixty-six years old, she wakes up at four, starting the day by watering the plants and ending it the same way. While my mind wanders on earth and sky groping for object lessons and meaning, commitment to the mundane has become her passion and her joy. In her house, I cease to question the blights along the paths I take. Her patched curtains and laborious checker designs on throw pillows suggest coherence. Simply provincial and practical, the ambiance at home makes my diversions converge in one center.

My mother's middle years

She was around forty and busy with the “ordinary”; single-handedly caring and providing for five children; and selling beauty products to all sorts of women. She sewed parts of baby dresses, cooked and sold packed pancit and sa malamig to offices near our house, and saved and sold old bottles and newspapers so we could have coffee and pandesal for breakfast.

I think about her at midlife.

We were in a hospital, she was due for a thyroid operation. She had waited for her husband to be with her. He had not gone home for at least two months, and for many years before that, he came home only when he felt like it. He was not there when I was born, when my sister died when my brother got lost in the market.

My mother learned about her husband’s infidelity while having her check-up. Immediately she looked for her husband’s address. She took me along to “visit” her husband’s home. The morning we came to that place, we caught his mistress, a mestiza who danced at a night bar, filing her nails. We also saw their child.

The husband came out, and my mother slapped him and nearly wounded him with a wooden statue she picked up from a table nearby. The mestiza ran to the telephone. My mother swung her left hand and hit her with the umbrella. The woman screamed and the child wailed long and hard, calling “mama.” Many hands pulled my mother by the waist and they threw her out. Her husband hurried to slam the door on her face. My mother cursed her husband and his mistress. I pleaded for her to stop and she noticed me for the first time. She found her breath. We went back to the hospital. She had her operation. She steeled herself from crying.

I remember her in midlife.

Very early one morning, the owner of the house we were renting rammed his fist into our front door. He had been urging us to look for a new place to live. My mother did not plead but fought for another month of stay, during which she scoured the city for a house to rent. At last, we finally found an old, bahay kubo-style house. My mother fixed the pipes, hammered new nails to make the stairs stay put, waxed the bamboo slats until they shone, sanded the window panes, scrubbed the wooden stairs, brushed the capiz windows, and cooked and washed clothes, and knocked on doors to sell beauty products and cradled my youngest sister to sleep.

Everyday in that house, we would wake up early to a breakfast already prepared, our school uniforms sewn and patched, and our bags ready, each with a plastic bag of pastries to sell to our classmates. On a Sunday, she would tell me to iron one week of wash, and that was my only contribution to the rigorous chores. During this time, she was a regular top-seller of beauty products

Peeping through a gap in my middle-age

My mother has not had many friends come to the house for small talk or harmless gossip. She often took us to the barrio, to my grandparent’s old house. Those were my mother’s times of rest when she would feel the comfort of her own family and the light rhythms of life.

In the old house, I remember some happy reunions with my cousins. Being the eldest among the brood of children, I would always look out the window to the young ones who would be running up and down the hill. Although we were always forbidden to run down the beach, we went anyway, gathering shells and black and red seeds of dama de noche. My mother would watch over us as we climbed the sineguwelas and slept under the camachile tree. After we had played much and were all tired and dirty, she would wash all of our naked young bodies by the well. I can still remember the salty taste of water in that well.

The only furniture in the old house was the long, heavy narra table and two long benches, an old baul, three mats, and one tapayan. When I was three years old, my mother told me that I used to peep into the crack in the sawali in that old house because I was making sure she would stay by the well a few meters beyond. When she washed clothes, she would sit me where I could see her. I could watch her through that hole in the sawali and be assured that she had not gone far away. She told me that I had always been very quiet during those times, and until the washing was finished, I watched and watched.

Peeping through the gap in my middle age, I feel much love and care as my mother sews used garments, cleans the house, and waters her plants. I stay still and quiet in my place, secure in her presence. I see her seizing every moment as if she were the dainty folds endowing our home with happy colors.

(c) April 8, 2003/ February 25, 2004/May 25, 2024

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