If there’s one word that a child will speak for the first time, it should be mother. After all, she carries the baby for nine months. She takes care of the newborn. She breastfeeds, she changes the diaper, and she puts the fragile human being to sleep.
That was what my mother did to me when I was growing up. I remembered the time when she accompanied me going to the school when I attended my first grade. I remembered the laughter she displayed when she learned that I was an honored pupil. I remembered the time when she visited me to see me acting in a high school play.
I remembered the days when she traveled to Davao City just to give my allowance (there was no LBC or Western Union at that time). I remembered one afternoon when she bought several copies of a national magazine where my first article came out.
But I am not the only one she took care of. There were nine of us. She guided us. She has endowed us with words of wisdom. She has shared her life experiences, her struggles, and her hopes.
She cries like a baby when she recalls her long lost sisters (whom she had not seen when they separated). There were three of them, and she was the eldest. When she was five years old, her father was reportedly poisoned when he didn’t sell their land to a rich man. Her sickly, uneducated mother died almost one year later.
But before that happened, the three children were given to different families since they didn’t have distant relatives living in the area. And it so happened that after her mother’s death, the person who adopted her brought her to Davao. And that was the end of her life story with her own family in Zamboanga. Nothing was heard of them after that.
In his tribute, Edgar A. Guest, one of the world’s highest-paid verse writers of his time, wrote these lines: “Mothers never change, I guess, in their tender thoughtfulness. All her gentle long life through, she is bent on nursing you. And although you may be grown, she still claims you for her own. And to her you’ll always be just a youngster at her knee.”
In his autobiography, film actor George Raft talked about one of his favorite fan letters. “Dear George,” it said. “You are my favorite movie actor. I like all your movies. You are a greater actor than John Barrymore. I love you. (Signed) Your mother.”
To a mother, her own child means so much to her. One of the Holy Bible’s most quoted examples of the unselfish quality of a mother’s love is the story of the two harlots who consulted King Solomon in a dispute involving a newborn infant (I Kings 3:16-28). Each had become mothers at the same time, but one’s baby had died and now each claimed the living child as her own. Solomon listened to their pleading and when they were finished, called for a sword, and ordered, “Divide the living child in two, and give half to one and half to the other.
One woman agreed to the King’s plan immediately, stating, “Let it be neither mine nor thine.” The other was aghast at the suggestion for, as the King James Version puts it, “her bowels yearned for her son, and she said, ‘O, my Lord, give her the living child, and in no way slay it.’”
On the basis of the latter’s response, Solomon, imbued with “the wisdom of God,” decreed that the baby be given to this woman, for, he said, her unselfish answer proved that “she is the mother thereof.”
“The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world,” W.R. Wallace once said. In other words, without mothers, man is nothing. Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed this out when he wrote: “Men are what their mothers made them.”
Thomas Alva Edison subscribed to the idea. He admitted, “My mother was the making of me. She was so true and so sure of me. I felt that I had someone to live for – someone I must not disappoint.” Walt Whitman was even more apt: “I am the part of the woman the same as the man, and I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man. And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of a man.”
What is the true measure of a mother? The great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda used to spend afternoons in Madrid drinking with a close group of intellectuals at a favorite café. During the rehearsals of Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding, they missed not having their playwright friend with them.
One day, they got tipsy and decided to call Lorca – although he had said he would respond to no one at such times – except his mother. The group decided Neruda was the one who could get away with calling Lorca. After all, Neruda was, many of them thought, the greatest poet ever to write in the Spanish language. Neruda called from the café and said it was Lorca’s mother calling. When Lorca came to the phone and discovered it was not his mother, he insulted Neruda and said unforgivable things. Lesson of the story: Thou shalt not use the mother’s name in vain.
How do mothers discipline a child? Each has their own methods, of course. In Times to Remember, Rose Kennedy shared how she did it: “People have asked me if I ever spanked Jack (American president John F. Kennedy) when he was a boy. I suppose it is part of the mystique surrounding the presidency that anyone who occupies the office is endowed with qualities that are extraordinary and he must have passed through childhood in a glow of virtue. I can state that this was not the case with Jack, nor was it with Bobby or Teddy or any of the others, and whenever they needed it they got a good old-fashioned spanking, which I believe is one of the most effective means of instruction.”
Of course, not all children love their mothers or the other way around. Novelist Henry Miller hated his mother, and the feeling was mutual. His mother was a rigid, puritanical woman who refused to read anything her son ever wrote and who never forgave him for not becoming a tailor like his father. Avoiding both ambivalence and ambiguity, Miller laid it right on the line: “I hated my mother all my life.”
Indeed, it takes all kinds of mothers.
