Mothering my granddaughter

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

Dear Ava,

Christmas Eve at the end of a hard year finds us suspended on a very thin thread between an old and a new life. Time to remember how life came at us this year.

Lola O passed away at 91 on Jose Rizal’s 150th birthday in June 2011. We were both your mothers for the first 12 years of your life after your birth mother left you to your father’s sole care. Now you have only one mother, a grandma at that. Perhaps your unique experience of “mother” was meant to give you a deeper understanding of life.

We were still deep in mourning when your dad had an untimely stroke last November, leaving you and me alone in our family home. One night I came home from visiting him in the hospital and found you frightened by dark presences you felt in this house. I won’t deny that powerful memories both good and bad still linger in this 60-year-old house.

But let’s forget the dark presences for a moment and remember the time when you first came to live with us. You were a bright and curious 10-month old just learning to walk when I took you home, just like the time Lola O invited me and your dad, then 16, to move back here so he wouldn’t be alone in our flat when I traveled for my job.

You became everyone’s baby, Ava, the fourth generation in our home, with great grandmother, grandmother, father, aunts, uncle and cousins, all basking in Lola O’s radiant motherliness with her steady helping hand. When your weak lungs took you to the hospital several times, she and I helped you regain your health.

You really surprised us one day as you got well. You were only two years old when I found you clambering up the last step of our staircase on your hands and knees. When you reached the top, you turned around, grinned and raised your arms like a little prizefighter. You didn’t even have the words then but your look of triumph said it all, “Look at me! I did it!” You had just announced your fighting spirit!

A year later I began teaching you the alphabet. At first you had trouble telling P from R, J from I, G from Q. We kept working on that until you gradually learned to tell the difference. When time came to put them together into words, however, you had a new problem—you’d write B and P facing the wrong way and mix up the right and left letters of words. But before we could have you examined for dyslexia, your fighting spirit came through again.

On your own, you discovered that when letters face the right way and line up in the right sequence, they turn into words—and words tell a story! To your great delight, Charlotte’s Web opened a whole new world for you that summer. Do you remember how many times you read and reread that book all summer? I lost count but it must have been at least ten times. From there you became a voracious reader. Now the problem is where to put all your books!

And so life continues flowing, Ava. Each morning shows a different face to greet with love and hope, no matter the sadness and worry of some days. Lola O’s departure, though painful, has been a precious reminder that life is ruled by change. When she left us, our family sped up the sale of our ancestral home so we could all move on. It was alternating pain and joy but soon after, my friend Evelynne invited us to live with her to heal as we look for a place of our own.

So, in an uncertain Christmas season that began on your 13th birthday, we both got the best motherly gift ever—a long spell in her lovely townhouse facing the beautiful garden of tall trees and the fragrant herbs she planted in an empty lot with dozens of birds singing at dawn and the moon peeking through soaring bamboo trees.

Ava Amica P. Yuson, 18, and her grandmother Sylvia Mayuga, on the day of Ava's high school graduation last March.

As we move on now, we face a new challenge. There will be far less room than we’ve been used to wherever we move to in this overcrowded city. As we pack decades of my life and twelve years of yours, we need to ask: What of all this do we really need for the rest of our lives? Where, among all these books, paintings and stories you and I have written are the clearest tracks of the past we need to keep and take with us?

Last month you confessed that mythology makes more sense to you than the Catholic catechism you’re learning in school. At 13, you’ve already discovered that “myth” is not just a fanciful, invented story but offers deeper truth with an open hand. There could be no better time than Christmas Eve to embrace the most important myth of our Christian world—Christ vividly present in cold nights and the brightest stars of the year.

You’ve also begun to see that all things are connected, just like letters of the alphabet that turn into words, and words that turn into stories. Time for you to look at this book by Matthew Fox with an even larger understanding of “mother.” The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance speaks not of “original sin” and the “fallen nature” the church says man is born with. Instead it celebrates every human being as an “original blessing,” each one “a unique face of God”—a deeper truth to live by.

The Cosmic Christ is a different face of the Jesus born in time and place, tortured and crucified for preaching the Kingdom of God we learned about in school. This Christ is the whole of life, seen and unseen, who helps us fulfill our humanity. But Fox believes Mother Earth is dying, and us along with her, because the men who rule our planet have failed us by choosing wealth and power over the love, creativity and imagination that is the Cosmic Christ.

Doesn’t that make sense? Look around you. Our river in Parañaque is choked in plastic and the human waste of generations. Remember when came you home all upset over its esteros completely dry under so many squatter shanties? What about the air in the streets you pass to and from school? It’s grey, the color of all those bus and jeepney fumes. And the sky! I’m sure you’ve noticed that it’s blue only for a brief while in the early morning; by midday it’s light gray; by sunset, it’s like a dark gray death shroud over our city. It looks and feels so desolate. Doesn’t that make you long for everyone to know and love the Cosmic Christ?

“What are the things you love most in life?” I asked you once. Quickly, you answered: “Books, music, friends, art, knowledge, the complexity of life—it can be hell but also funny; an infuriating, beautiful and intricate web.” Not to forget, you added, “I also love recognizing who I am.” Your words gave me the same kind of jolt your climbing those 14 steps gave me a decade ago. Is this what our times do to our children?

I feel a time bomb of creativity inside you, Ava, something completely new only you can bring to the world. I see the signs. You’re already reading the “Collected Works of William Shakespeare” on your own. Late into the night, I hear you chuckling over Mark Twain’s fables. Why, you’ve even begun writing your first novel!

But what about love? How well do you love people of flesh and blood around you with all their pain and foolishness? That’s the real final test, Ava, the last step of the staircase of life. With over five times the years I’ve spent on this earth compared to yours, I’m still struggling up that step. Don’t you suspect that life put us together to learn from each other in this lifetime?

Right now I brood about your declaration, so young, that you can hardly wait to leave our country to make a life abroad. I look sadly at the lifetime collection of Filipiniana books I had hoped to pass on to you. Your indifference to our people’s journey from centuries of a lingering colonial past pains me, but hope makes me lay aside books like Jose Rizal’s “Noli me tangere” and “El Filibusterismo,” and Agoncillo’s “Revolt of the Masses” for some future day when you glimpse how special our country and people are.

Now your Lolo suggests that you get ready to live with him and your dad when you start high school. If and when that happens, the change in our lives will be complete. As our twelve years together begin to end, what can I give you as parting gifts, Ava? Perhaps I should begin with the most precious thing I’ve discovered in my life—that stories shed light on our lives. So here, I lay aside for you some of the best storytellers and poets, that most special of storytellers, I’ve known and loved throughout my life.

Let’s begin with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and his sensitive, all-seeing finger on the pulse of the human soul, and his fellow-poet Pablo Neruda whose every poem is a healing incantation of love, beauty and pain. Here, too, is that storyteller of the marvelous, Jorge Luis Borges, the magical Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the elegant Vladimir Nabokov and the masterful Nick Joaquin who can guide you to the depths of Filipino soul, if you let him.

Oh, and here, too, is Matthew Fox’s precursor, the mystic scientist and seer, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who tells no less than the story of Creation in his biography, “The Spirit of Fire.” After you’ve studied more science, you could turn to his first book, “The Phenomenon of Man” revealing human destiny intertwined with the unfolding cosmos. (It was banned from publication by the Vatican in his lifetime.)

Right now as your teen years begin, you’ll surely enjoy the music of unfolding creation in Pere Chardin’s “Divine Milieu” and “Hymn of the Universe”. Here, too, is the “Eternal Feminine,” with the deeper meaning of being born a woman. May you someday discover this visionary as wise and compassionate guide to your own life.

Till then I pray that the girl with fighting spirit whom I’ve loved and cared for as a daughter for twelve years will continue growing in love and grace, courage and wisdom.

Love,

Mama Lola Sylvia