My mother’s child

My mother had me when she was 24. She was still in medical school then. For most of my life, I never really thought about how much strength she’d had to muster to break the news of her unplanned pregnancy to her conservative family.

Six months after my parents’ June wedding, I was born. Soon after, my mother went back to school without skipping a beat, breastfeeding me while she pored over huge medical volumes. When she finally became a doctor, I was still too young to appreciate the enormity of passing the board exam.

For most of my life, I used the timeline of my mother’s life to measure mine. She had her first period when she was 10, I had mine at 11. She graduated from college when she was 18, I was annoyed when I did so at 19. When I was 22, a four-year relationship I was in, which I had thought was marriage-bound, met its dramatic end. My parents came to the rescue. My mother came to stay with me in my apartment for a week to help me deal.

When I turned 24, unlike my mother, I brought home neither a kid nor a husband, but a license to practice law. That’s when I started to separate what I thought to be the course of my life from my mother’s timeline. I left the country to be an au pair and a foreigner’s girlfriend—two things that my mother never considered doing. I traveled to places that my mother had always dreamed of visiting. I lived some of her dreams while trying to figure out mine.

I returned to the Philippines for a while—two years I will always look upon as bittersweet. I began to practice law. I began to assert more of my independence, including a certain decision about the way I wanted to live. After extensive discussions about lifestyle choices and comparing Western and Filipino ideals, my decision stood. My father being less receptive, my mother served as our go-between. That’s when I knew they had realized that while I was still their child, I was no longer a child.

Time eventually revealed that my decision was a disastrous one, and it was primarily my mother who came to the rescue and helped me pick up the pieces. Afterwards, my mother often came to my condo (that my parents were paying half for) and I started getting to know her more. An image of her separate from “Mamang” began to take shape in my mind. She’d come to Manila for seminars and exams, and I’d realize that she was this doctor who continued to improve herself professionally. We’d go to restaurants, and because I was no longer a small child she had to peel shrimps and crabs for, I found that I actually enjoyed her conversation. We’d go shopping and I’d know to point out frilly clothes and bejeweled shoes that she might like because I knew her type.

When I left the country again, I didn’t realize that I would be losing the best years of getting to know my mother as “Diana”—the doctor, the woman, my father’s wife, my grandma’s daughter, an aunt, a friend, a boss, an employee. She is something different to everybody, and I had but a short time to get to know those separate selves. While I still talk to her every day, technology can only do so much. This realization makes living away from home a little harder. I miss my mother so much.

I’m almost 30, childless and unmarried. The path my life is taking seems worlds apart from my mother’s. But even as I grapple with the thought that my future years are probably going to be spent away from home and my family, I know that Diana will wear her mantle as my mother for the rest of her life, and I know that I will always be her daughter from the beginning to the end of mine. That’s where our timelines will always be the same.

Though late, Happy Mother’s Day, Mamang Diana.

I love you.

Charmian Lim, 29, is a UP-educated lawyer currently living in the Netherlands.