To be like my mother

My mother and I grew up together. She got married at 18 and gave birth to me at 19. While I was learning my ABCs, she was writing down her household routine. While I was trying to understand why one plus one equals two, she was solving the mysteries of motherhood—and maybe how to cook the perfect sinigang, too.

Armed only with a high school diploma and the meager salary of her truck driver husband who was nearly twice her age, my mother never made excuses for herself or for anyone. What she lacked in formal education, she more than made up for in her resourcefulness.

Whenever I was running late for my nursery class, and the bathroom we shared with my grandmother and aunt was occupied, she would lift me into the kitchen sink and bathe me in a makeshift bathtub.

Whenever we had homework, she would sift through moldy pages of old books given to us by my teacher aunt and cut illustrations of trees or zoo animals or whatever was required of us. She would then paste the cutouts on my notebook using grains of leftover rice.

Whenever I would throw a tantrum and refuse to eat the fish sinigang she had prepared for dinner — a dish I still despise up to this day — she would scoop equal portions of rice and fish with her hand and stuff it in my mouth. “Poor people cannot be choosy,” she would often say.

My mother grew up in poverty. She had a farmer for a father and a gambling addict for a mother. At times when she reminisces about her childhood, she recalls how she always had to be the one to call the midwife when it became her mother’s yearly habit to give birth. Her father, on the other hand, was a man who resorted to draconian ways to discipline his children. My mother was once whipped by a leather belt until she wet herself in pain for a mistake she no longer remembers.

My mother must have inherited my grandfather’s mercurial temperament. I was in second grade when my father left the country for a blue-collar job in Kuwait. My mother then became the sole authoritative voice in our household. Whenever my younger brother and I would act foolishly in the presence of a visitor, our mother’s eviscerating stare was enough to keep us in check. We also learned to refrain from justifying a behavior she found unacceptable lest we get beaten by a plastic hanger or flip-flops.

But my mother always had her way of protecting us. She always stood up to men who loved throwing their weight around. One summer afternoon when I was nine, my equally reckless cousins and I were out playing in the streets. I didn’t know what came over me when I decided it was funny to jump on the water meter in front of my grandmother’s house. This caught the eye of our two neighbors — retired military men — who then proceeded to chastise me within earshot of our other neighbors. When my cousins told my mother about the incident, she quickly applied baby powder on her face before storming out of our house to confront the two men.

Growing up, I wanted nothing more than to make my mother proud. She always told me to study hard so I wouldn’t be like her. She never failed to remind me to aim for a college degree so if I decide to marry in the future, my wife’s siblings and parents would not have the chance to belittle me. As a student, I buried my head in books and basked in the glory of outranking my classmates. This culminated in a full tuition grant to an exclusive all-boys’ high school and, eventually, admission to the state university for college.

In college, I proclaimed myself a feminist with much fervor and pride. The feminism I espoused was the one that encouraged young girls to be world leaders or corporate executives or scientists. It was a kind of feminism that considered “housewife” a horrifying word. It was a philosophy tailored for women who existed in the rose-tinted world of Instagram and left no room for those who lived on the margins of society—women who fall prey to a system designed to uphold the status quo. The irony was lost on me.

Perhaps I honestly believed that if I just studied and worked hard enough, my mother would never have to desire anything for herself. My achievements, after all, also belonged to her. But dreams are not like bits of leftover food that can be flushed down the kitchen sink. When an altercation between my parents reared its ugly head due to my father’s lack of a stable job ever since he returned to the country, my mother confessed something out of spite. She said she was deeply ashamed for not having the means to buy things she wanted for herself: soap, shampoo, new underwear. My father, ever oblivious to my mother’s internal turmoil, brushed it off and told her to mind more important matters. I wondered if there was something more important to one’s self as self-fulfillment.

Mama is getting older. Last year, she snagged a small job under the office of our city vice mayor—a woman she has doggedly campaigned for in the past two elections. It doesn’t pay much, but it keeps her busy. For the first time in her life, she doesn’t have to depend on a man for her sustenance.

Our roles have somewhat reversed now. I remind Mama to eat on time. I scold her gently for deciding to wait until the extended quarantine period before she complained of an eye pain that she has been enduring since January. I remind her to take a bath immediately upon returning home from her daily duty of repacking our city’s relief goods with her colleagues. I teach her how to discern fake news.

A month before I turned 22, I finally mustered the courage to show Mama my rainbow heart and tell her that I don’t intend to be with a woman. Mama said she always knew, but that it didn’t matter to her.

“Do you love me?” I quietly asked her. I asked the question two more times until tears started to well up in her eyes.

“Why would you even ask that?” she replied.

Mama was wrong — I didn’t manage to get this far just so I wouldn’t be like her. The reason I strive every day to be brave and selfless and steadfast is so I can be just like her.

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Erwin B. Agapay, 22, graduated from the University of the Philippines Diliman with a degree in business administration. He currently works as a branch banking officer.