When my mother stopped being a mom to be herself

Part of a series on our moms—or about being a mom—for Mother's Day


It's a saying in this profession that if your mother says she loves you, check it out. Since 2011, when my mother left us to go back to her childhood home in Cebu, I have been doing just that.

Until then, it had been an incontrovertible truth. After all, this was the woman who, in the much more straitlaced Philippines of the 1980s, was ready to have and raise me alone when my father initially wanted me to just be a pregnancy scare.

This was also the woman who, because it was the practical choice, brought home the bacon (sometimes in an actual sense because she worked for a processed food company at the time) while my father stayed home to raise us. Although she was tired from work, she was never too tired to help us with our homework and sing us to sleep.

She was never too busy, despite being an executive, to drop by for school events and to watch us get called when the honor roll was announced. (That didn't happen often once I reached high school, but only because I was a bad student, and not because she was too busy.)

When she had to go to Philadelphia—and later to Jakarta—to work, she insisted on coming home every three months just so she could be with us to check on us and she never left Manila without a bundle of notes with meal plans, instructions, and reminders for each of us to be good. We followed the meal plans, but did not do too
well on being good.

We never really felt abandoned, and although she was thousands of miles away, she was ever present through phone calls and postcards and food. It was only much later that I found out how much working abroad took out of her. She hid it well and was always cheerful when she came home to a house of surly men and a daughter who, while sweet, is also prone to mood swings and stalking away in a huff.

"There was really not much to do, so I worked a lot," she told me years later while we were talking about how lonely she had been and how the thought of her family was the only thing that kept her going.

Things began going downhill in 2007, though, when she burned out and decided to retire without telling us. She had been depressed about her mother's death a year earlier and had been going through a tough time at work. "I am tired," she told us before flying home.

That was the start of several bad years that our family is still recovering from. In 2009, my father and grandfather died on the same night cities apart, and she started withdrawing into herself because it is impossible to go through something like that unscathed.

She began spending entire days playing Text Twist and watching telenovelas on TV. She had essentially given up and it was the hardest thing to watch because she had always been the one who had encouraged us and told us that everything would be all right. She still did but the words rung hollow.

I wish I could say that her sons rose to the occasion and did their duty without complaint, but we didn't. We kept the family afloat for a while, but it became clear soon enough that she had to go home to Cebu and not be our mother anymore. It wasn't that she didn't want to be, or that we didn't want her to be, but it had been a hard 30 years and she needed to rest and focus on herself.

I resented her for it, of course, which is more a testament to how long and how well she had taken care of us than it is to my character as a person. And those lost years, when my siblings and I had nobody to turn to but each other, were the worst but also the most instructive.

We didn't talk much after that but she kept us updated through Facebook. Sometimes, she is at a zumba class with her high school friends. Sometimes, she is at a beach somewhere, or in Butuan, or in Bohol running away from the earthquake that destroyed churches there in 2013. She traveled more in the years since 2011 and has taken up more hobbies—she has a pet fighting cock, for example, a gift from a Yolanda victim in Bantayan whom she helped buy a fishing boat for—since she retired as both a full-time employee and a full-time mother.  

Through it all, she always had encouraging words, and always told us not to worry because things will turn out all right in the end.

I have never been prouder to be her son as I am now that she is no longer just my mother, but also Jennifer, my father's widow, sister to my aunts and uncle, friend to many, and every bit her own person now.

But mothers will always be mothers, and when, in 2013, I told her I could no longer keep supporting the family and save up for a life with my fiancee at the same time, she came back to take care of our youngest sister and also, incidentally, to despair at the squalor that we had been living in for the past couple of years.

She is working again and shuttles between Cebu, Manila, Bulacan, and Pangasinan on a regular basis. A week ago, she celebrated her 60th birthday and organized a reunion of her clan to celebrate it. She is in Bali today for a conference and to catch up with old colleagues. Instead of reminders to be good, she sends pictures of her meals now and updates on where she will be staying. She still reminds us to eat, but has taken to leaving us to figure out what to eat, and how.

Things are not back to the way they were before she retired, and before my father died, and before she went away, but it is better this way. I am reminded every day that aside from the gift of life, the best gift my mother has given us is letting us live that life no matter how tough and hopeless things can get. The greatest gift my mother has given us is teaching us we do not need her and, conversely, that she does not need to be our mother.

She still is, of course, but that is not out of obligation, and more out of choice, hers and ours. When my mother tells me she loves me, I check it out, but I always believe her because she doesn't have to do that anymore.