2 posts tagged “mom”
I'm now in her bedroom on the computer. After the eating and polite conversation, they drop something on me. Well, my mother did with the prodding of the others. Now I'm in her bedroom digesting. Both the food and the new information. My mother is singing along with Ver's singing and his accompanying on the keyboard. A second man has just left the bathroom and creates a third voice. All slightly out of tune but singing with passion. Ziggy snorts in amusement while sitting on my mother's bed typing out a science paper on my laptop. Though the auditory ridiculousness does hit my ears the same time it does the boy, I'm still thinking deep thoughts.
My mother's considering leaving me. Leaving me to go back to the Philippines. Leyte is so very far away.
Leah and I were discussing families over noodles. Earlier that day I felt I got a slap in the face when I picked up my phone at work and found my mother crying on the other end.
"I miss you!" she sobbed out.
"Mom- What's wrong? Are you okay?"
"I'm fine, Joanna," she uttered sniffing. There are only a few times in my memory I've heard my mother crying. Hearing such sounds are the scariest for a child, no matter what age this child may be.
"Where are you? At home?" my eyes were wide in slight shock and panic.
"No. I'm at work. I just miss you. I haven't seen you in so LONG!"
And I felt horrible. I mean, I thought I was doing my end. Make sure the bills get paid, Speak to her on the phone every other day. Take her out to dinner or to get a facial every couple of months or so. Ziggy sees her practically every day... I thought she was straight. But then I tried to count back to recount exactly what day I did see her last and once I was going back past three weeks I felt like shit.
Sure, I can have excuses. Plenty. And frankly the main one is that after ten hours a day at work, I'm exhausted. Her home is the polar opposite in direction to my home. And she works on Saturdays so that's not an option. And then she tends to be busy on Sundays...
"Mom. I'm so sorry. How about tonight? I'll come right over tonight and-"
"Oh, no. Not tonight. I'll be out late dancing..."
"Leah-" I said fueled with more than a couple lychee sangrias and in-between bites of duck noodles. "Am I evil? Am I a terrible daughter or something? My Mom was crying, Lee. Crying! Holy shit, yo-"
"Girl... You're not evil." And then we proceeded to play a version of Mom Go-Fish. My mother is like this sometimes. Child, one day she did that. And we giggled and laughed while the makeup of our dining neighbors changed several times. I abandoned the obviously weak sangria and upped it to mango mojitos.
And I told Leah about how Ziggy and I are the only family of my mother's here. All her other siblings are back in the Philippines. She was the one who had to leave to find work to send money home. And she fed them all, clothed them all, educated them all from so far away. And had my dumb ass. Leah asked when my mother would be retireing. I said "soon". In age it would be soon. In reality I want her retired NOW. She's been either a domestic or a housekeeper for so long. Longer than I feel comfortable with. She's older now. Her body is showing its strain. I wanted her to retire last year but she kept throwing up excuses for it being too soon. The social security check would be severely cut. She would lose the amazing health benefits she gets from the union. Always something more along the lines of security. She needs to work in order to make sure that everything is met, her health and fatigue be damned.
Which of course ups the pressure on me. I should be the one taking care of her. My mother's been working for others for so long in her life. As the theoretical "man" of our family unit, I should be the one providing for her so that she wouldn't have to be on her knees scrubbing toilets. This is my mother, man. I should be the one making sure that she has enough health insurance so she doesn't tax herself anymore.
"Oh stop, Joanna," Mom would fuss as she tries to shoo my spoken concerns to her. "What would I do all day anyway? I would be bored."
What?
"Do you think she'll go back when she retires?"
"Well, I dunno," I answered Leah. "I mean, she used to mention that she wanted to go back to the Philippines when she retired. But she hasn't said anything like that lately. And, you know, she loves Ziggy and stuff, so why would she leave us?" I thought I sounded reasonable. But to be frank, this was the first time I was thinking about this possibility in a long while.
"Word," Leah chuckled. "Cause she thinks it's hard seeing you NOW..." she prodded.
"Straight UP. I mean, cause that wouldn't be like rolling over to... I dunno... Philly or anything for a visit and such. I mean, DAMN."
Leah agreed with her laughter as she reached with her chopstick for another helping of beef. I stared at my own bowl as I started mentally flipping through the concept, the alternate reality. It was twelve hours of straight airplane time to Japan for the first leg of the trip. Then to Manila. Then another damned plane to their island. Then from the airport through the mountains to the other side of the island where her home village was. I mean, DAMN. And one plane ticket then was like, what? Two thousand dollars or something? And that was fifteen years ago with fifteen years ago dollars and stuff... DAMN.
"I mean, I would never see here again, would I?" I looked up at Leah with wide eyes of realization. She sympathetically shook her head 'no'.
Damn.
Now they have taken out my old acoustic guitar, tuned it up and have begun playing it and singing. My mother, Tito Ver, the other guy whose name I never remember but I'm too polite to ask for, and Connie, my Godmother. The new border at my mother's house with the last one moving back to the Philippines now that her body gave out from her domestic work keeping her from working. Tita Connie just gave me a pair of gold hoop earrings. I told her she didn't have to but she waved her hands at me stating that she has a lot of catching up on her gifts to me from so many years of her and I not being together. Her life and my life had different roads for a long while, now meeting up again... at my mother's house. I smile and give her a kiss. The last gift she was able to give me when she knew she would see me was inexplicably a crucifix. With it a card expressing her apologies and personal guilt... for she feels she's been a lacking godmother to me which is why I am not a practicing catholic. Our roads took different turns.
"So tell me what you wanted to talk about, Mom," I kept pressing while eating the turkey on my plate. She was next to me on the couch pouring more sparkling apple cider into my glass goblet which was on my snack table. She put the dark green bottle on her snack table beside mine. Ver was on a chair between the kitchen and the livingroom. Other!Guy on the other couch. Tita Connie the only one actually eating her plate at the kitchen table. I would just like to add, on my plate was also some green salad with dressing Ver made, cocktail shrimp with the sauce, cold mussels, a chicken wing and rice. A very odd, eclectic buffet of food. Now you get a sense of what made me.
"Oh, well..." she started carefully. That got my hackles up. I stopped chewing and looked off into a blank corner of the room, waiting for whatever she was about to drop. What the hell was she about to drop? And in front of these other people who always seem to be here. From her church, of course. Were they trying to sell her something and she was asking, in some unnatural way, my blessing? Were they trying to sell something to me by-proxy? Going through her? Using my odd style of filial piety as an in? More insurance? Some seminar? As some here may know of me, I don't trust much, Especially when it comes to things very important to me. My money. My home. My Mother, especially. Of course, my heart.
"Well, I want to go back," she stated. I looked at her, trying to gage her meaning. It sounded somewhat non-committal. Like she said 'I want to change my look' meaning a new hairstyle and not a nosejob. "I want to go back to the Philippines and get a new lot. Someplace for me to stay whenever I go back there..." Whenever? What was she, planning on globetrotting all of the sudden? I didn't fully understand.
"I don't understand, Mom. Don't you already have land there?" I saw it, I was there. It was mostly jungle with a couple of ricefields, sure. From my memory, there was an agrarian family there who collected fruit off the land and would sell it for money. I thought she had built a house there. I thought- "What about that land there? You're just going to leave it? Not do anything with it?" I'm a American. We know the value of land.
"No, no, Joanna. I want to-" then she sucked her teeth in slight frustration. She knew it would be difficult to explain to me, especially since I went from polite, breezy daughter amongst her guests to a cut-and-dry, all about business and what-about-my-mother flat demeanor quickly. She shuffled off in her sandaled feet down the hall to her bedroom to get something to show me.
"I don't think you get what she's meaning," Tito Ver said as she disappeared down the hall. I looked at him wondering if this was his hairbrained idea. And whether he was trying to stiff my mom out of any of her cash. "She wants to buy another lot. She will show you, I drew up how the apartments would look. And it's only about 200 pesos a square meter, so it wouldn't be very much..." A peso? What the fuck is a peso in actual money? "She just wants to have something over there... you know."
Know what, I asked myself. She returned with three pages stapled together. On the first page was a hand drawn picture of a two level building shaped like an L. There was a terrace along the outside of the second floor. The remaining rectangle outside the L was an open courtyard. The second page was a floor plan of the first floor cross section. There would be a gate so it would a closed courtyard...
"See, Joanna," she began. "It will have four 'doors', we will rent out three of them and the bigger one will be for us when we go there." Again with the slightly non-committal language. Stop trying to okie doke around the real intentions here. The third page was the floor plan of the second floor. I flipped the pages constantly. Brought the papers up to my eyes close, squinting at the lines, the arrows indicating windows, stairs, where the laundry would be. And occasionally in-between the sounds of confusedly turning paper, they, mostly Ver, the artist whose rendering I was handling in shock, and mom kept trying to explain. And I cut through their rough English and Filipino terms. A 'lot' being obviously a section of land. A 'door' meant a form of apartments or rooms but it would be more applicable to say apartments in this case. They were talking in pesos...
"So how much are we talking about here?"
"About twenty thousand."
"Huh," I uttered. They kept quiet looking at the blankness of my face.
I tried to sift through the many questions in my head to find the one that would get the most information from them. Again with the non-straight talking and the trying to sugar coat. "Sooo... you're going to be renting out apartments here, right?"
"Right."
"So you'll need 'somebody'. Somebody to watch the place and collect the monies and such, right? When you're not there, right? Not your brother, though."
"Yeah, um... I guess."
Okay, it's getting clearer to me now. "But what about the 'lot' and the house you bought and built for your parents?" Lola and Lolo died many years ago. "what about that house?"
"Oh, well we would have to divide... you know. I would want my own." Ah, divide... with the other children, meaning her brother and remaining sisters. The only one with sense there is my Aunt Iluminada. With the money sent back, she went and became a midwife. Now she's very successful with her own practice and a large house. Her brother on the other hand, Juan, is a dumbass. I know this. I knew this years ago when I saw him last. I was seventeen. He of course was older by at least ten years. Spoiled. Irresponsible. My mother brought me back there and being the head of the family started handing out money as well as old clothes we didn't want to help out. Juan had his young children and his hardworking wife. He had no job. He took the money and rented a scooter and joyrided up and down the dirt roads. Not your brother, I had said to my mom. Not him. He's a man and needs to not live off of you anymore. She would chuckle and look up into the ceiling in thought when I would fuss about him. But he's my brother, she would say. Yeah, well you're my mother.
So I looked at the papers again. Looked at the plans. Looked at my mother. In my mind floated the reality of plane trips, limited electricity and phones in such a far off section of the world... much less a dense, overgrown island. My mother's lack of email skillz. My not wanting to be lacking a mother. My being twelve years old again, picking up the phone from the hospice that morning and then announcing outloud in numbness I was half an orphan. My not wanting to be more than the length of an island away from her.
In the silence, Mom, true to form, started to shush and wave her hands again, as if to fan out any stresses or concern. "Oh, foo-! It's nothing. Just something I'm thinking of. When I go back this year, this is just something to see. Don't get worried about anything. Just wondering. It's nothing!"
I looked at my mother, shuffling around again. Keeping busy collecting plates and offering dessert. Pouring drinks. How she left her own parents, brother and sisters back home to go to a strange place so different from her village just to provide for them. How she's seen them only about once a decade since, finding out by telephone about the death of one then two parents. I heard her cry that night while she was on the phone. I remember that well. I am her only family here. The rest are over there. But she was my only family here as well. And I knew she missed her sisters. And i knew she missed her language. And I knew that concrete buildings can't house all hearts and spirits...
And I wondered when I would finally hit that lotto so I could make it happen for her.
What does she need? A few thousand dollars for a lot and her own roof? A way to take in income while over there so she doesn't have to work... only some thousands of dollars? Okay, I guess I could try. For her. Okay, if that's what it takes.
Wait- is she going to be like Landlady in KungFu Hustle? Shit- she doesn't even know Lion's Roar.
Maybe if I work hard enough, she'll have that place she's always wanted. Be surrounded by her family again. And maybe I'll hit that lick and have enough money to make the house nicer for her. And be there more than once a decade. Maybe more than once a year. Maybe more than that.
I'm still digesting. The music has stopped. The men have left. I hear my mother and Tita Connie speaking Tagalog in the kitchen while eating pineapple. Connie's kids are grown, one married with two babies. Connie's marriage over. She took advantage of the realestate boom of Bayonne and sold the house for a "very good price" and has moved in with mom in my old room for the next few years until she's finished working. So she can go back home to Cebu. Back to her native language Cebuano. As Ziggy and I stood by the front door to respectfully say goodbye to the departing men, my mom mentions that we have to still 'talk'. So I still have a talk to do. About future plans. Future happenings. More work to do. More things to think about.
Now the only music is pouring out of Ziggy's ipod headphones while he's still typing his report. The music's too loud. He'll go deaf, in time. But for now, I'll let him enjoy the music. Looking at the slight smile on his lips as he types, stops to check his notes and then types some more, I think his few minutes of enjoyment into his own little world is worth it. At least for now.
It's really quite remarkable when it hits me once in a while that outside of my workplace, my world tends to be very female-dominated. That fact has no bearing on this post per se. Just something that came to mind as I pressed "compose". Now let's begin.
I'm a mother. My mother's birthday was last Wednesday. Carinda's a mother. Her mother's birthday was last night, which I was unable to attend. Why? Parent/teacher night which soon became "the boy sits on a chair while his mother his various female teachers the female principal and his female advisory surround him asking ad infitnum what happened with his Math". Again... maybe two male teachers out of his roster of eight - with the second male teacher being for gym. Then there are mostly mothers and not fathers attending these things. I dunno, a very female-driven culture I live in though it's the men who try to dictate the rules and play with all of the toys.
I wonder if I'm more man than woman though sometimes... but again, this is not the reason for this post.
I apologize to Cassandra for not attending her birthday dinner last night. Heck, I missed my mom's surprise party in Queens put together by her friends last night. And happiest of birthdays to my mom who I treated to a large steak dinner at Spark's (sans any mobster hits) and half a bottle of red wine.
And now, to the obligatory pics:
