Chapter 3 My Mother

My mother was a strong mother and a brave woman. But she was no longer a mother, she was a granny and therefore there was no need to be strong. As she got older, she saw less and less reason to be strong, so she started being weak. Her feelings were easily hurt. It became harder to please and make her happy. She became a glass-half-empty person. She could not come to terms that she was no longer needed as a mother to depend on, but as a mother to be loved, to be made happy, and to be a granny.

She could not take her hat off as a responsible parent and start her transition to being a spoiled mother and a grandchildren-spoiling grandma. Her strong personality prevented her to accept this fact of life. Nevertheless, my mother remained a brave woman, to her last day. In the face of adversity, she grew stronger. This spirit permeated every one of her children.

She was so good at taking care of us that we feared nothing, and whenever she was around, we felt invincible. We even felt that being sick was more enjoyable than being healthy since when we were sick, she would quadruple her attention to us. That much attention from her? Well, it surpassed any good feeling coming from being healthy. Her dedication to her children-oriented her entire adult life to taking care of us, in every detail. So much so that she got no chance to develop any hobby of her own. All hell broke loose when we became independent adults. With no hobby and lack of own personal interest, she was left with nothing to do in her old age.

Physically, she was so frail and easily affected by the notion of being sick, a hypochondriac. This only got worse as she grew older. Many times she used illnesses as a way to get her children's attention who she believed didn't listen to her anymore. She had asthma, vertigo, upset stomach, indigestion, diverticulitis, and insomnia. Many of those were thought-induced, or at least exacerbated by her excessive worries, concerns and feeling of insecurity.

She loved her eldest son, my Brother, very much. She adored his love towards her, his fresh thoughts and guidance, yet often failed to understand and follow. She always sought his approval to validate her feelings. And this was where the same problem always started, most of the time she got invalidated, and that stirred turmoil in her emotions. This turmoil in turn, caused her to seek even more of my Brother's validation, and when she still didn't get it, the turmoil inside her mind grew wilder, thus the vicious cycle formed.

And my Brother loved my mother very much. Ever since he was born. He once said, half-jokingly half-serious, that anybody who wanted to defeat him mentally must first kill his mother, for therein lay his true power, his second life. You could call him a mommy's boy. He said to me that he feared nothing of this world as long as his mother was by his side. And I could see why he felt that way. My mother thrived and even grew stronger under fire, especially when it touched her children. She proved that quality again even as she moved towards her death. She knew the tremendous financial difficulty my Brother had since COVID hit the earth, and therefore could not continue supporting her daily life, let alone pay for her serious illness. She knew that her son was very troubled by this, and so that became her one and only focus. She painted a rosy possibility of rising back up to my Brother, and remembered how we had gone through similar things in the past and we always pulled through. She said not to worry about paying her bills for she had always saved a portion of the monthly money that she got from my Brother. Behind him however, she was trembling, for the money problem was serious. She was thinking less of her illness and more about her two grandchildren, Bo and Bea, if my Brother could not continue supporting all of our lives.

But no matter how much my Brother loved and depended on our mother, he loved more rationality. He was a highly rational person, so rational that sometimes he appeared as if he had no emotion. But don't get it wrong, he was a highly emotional person, flammable in fact. He was aware of this and didn't like it. To him, succumbing to emotion was weak, and an emotional person was a weak person. A weak person is the root of all trouble.

Digressing a little to my other brother, Dungi, I would draw a contrast. Dungi was a weak person. He liked to cry in front of an audience. He always craved a pat on the back and sympathy. He succumbed to his emotion after years of failing, or unwillingness, to develop his prefrontal cortex. As he grew older he became greedy, delusional, an acute liar and a hypocrite. But that is a whole other chapter on its own, so for now, let's not talk about him.

So, let's go back to my Brother. My Mom often made him choose between his love for rationality and her. Never failing, my Brother always chose rationality. But that didn't mean he left my Mom in the dust, he always tried to make her understand and be rational. Intellectually, my mother would agree with him, but not emotionally. So she would be with him on one solved problem, but back to being emotional on the next similar problem. Over time, my Brother realized that he could only treat the symptoms, but not the real problem. My mother would be with my Brother on a case-by-case basis but she would never be a person as rational as my Brother would like her to be. This wore him out. He quit trying to transform my Mom. But as he quit trying, he also quit listening to her problems. And so the downfall of my mom started.

In retrospect, I probably would have warned my Brother about our Mom's incessant emotional problems with Pilos. That there was more than meets the eye about Pilos. As a woman I could sense something off about Pilos, then probably my mother, as both a woman and a mother could sense something more. Something that she could not articulate to my Brother. My Brother should not have written her off too quickly when she persisted in telling on Pilos. Sometimes I thought that my Brother stood on Pilos' side a bit too much when she went against my mother. I was wrong then but after finding Pilos' true color, I was damn right today.

As for me personally, I looked up to her when I was a little girl and growing up. She hand-held me throughout my childhood, teenage and adult years. Especially when marital relationships rocked me. She was the pillar of my strength, and she would smile with pride whenever I let her know it. She was always there for me, and her strength became my strength. Our relationship soured when my life took another detour to the trouble zone and she felt she was unable to help. But we made amends in the five months before she died. Beautifully so.

I felt every fiber of her being in me. I loved my children as she did hers. I was strong, and I hoped to stay strong. This strength, like my Mom's, came from the immense love that I had towards my children. I was brave too. Like my mom, I had suffered many times because I chose not to sacrifice my principles. Like my Mom who loved her eldest son very much, my Brother, I also loved him wonderfully.

I was my mother.