Time Turner Number 2: *Mercy, Mother, Mercy

My mom is about to enter the asylum.

She is beyond my comprehension and I don’t think I can stand her going ballistic every now and then. I am already bloody insane and if she, herself, hops aboard the neurotic crazy label, then I’m certain things won’t be going to be nice and easy in our own little dwellings. Magnetic fields of the same signs repel each other and two negatives–me and my mom–dont actually arrive at a positive result, thereby inadvertently defying the laws of physics.

I have an idea why she acts like Miriam D nowadays. And the reason also begins with M. M as in Money… Yes, Virginia, money is driving her into this state. Or more appropriately, the lack of it. My mom has suffered the tremendous low and it’s making her abnormal. She had been jobless since God knows when, hopped from one pathetic unstable job to another, started a sari-sari store and forced to close it just the same because the sales just inevitably leaked out of the kaput stall like a running water, even wore Mary Magdalene’s robe and loaned some doe to almost any single being she knew out in the street.

Now, she is twiddling her fingers in the hope that the annoying mannerism will bring her a switched-on lightbulb in her head. As of this moment, she is a nomadic agent of some goddamn loan company, tirelessly roaming the streets to look for clients who want to borrow money, promising heaven and earth, sweettalking anyone who would care to listen about her current preoccupation. Sometimes, a number would listen, many of them actually interested, but among the dozens she has submitted in the head office for credit investigation, only one or two would get the loan approval.

So what do you expect from this kind of job where your take-home pay depends upon the number of freakin’ persons you submit, who should have a business, a house and lot, a car, a tricycle, or any other collateral in order to get the OK signal? If you’re a middle-aged woman who happens to be a single parent with two bright (ahem!) kids in college, the elder one about to graduate and the other entering her upperclassman year, you can readily put two and two together and take the conclusion that the equivalent of your almost-night-and-day sales talking out there isn’t enough to cover the family pie chart of expenses. And to think that she’s a Business Ad graduate from one of the more respectable universities in Manila.

She’s had jobs, decent ones, before this sickening dilemma and when I remember those times, they never fail to put a smile in my face. Those were the days, the happier times when every 15th and 30th day of the month, my mom and Sean and me would go to the city, dine at a fastfood restaurant, and just have some guilt-free fun in the mall the whole afternoon. When I reminisce the time when mom was working a 9-to-5 job, wearing corporate clothes, walking in stilletoes, and dabbing her face with some respectable make up, I can’t help but sigh and say, gawd, I miss those times.

My mother is the living testament of the old story about the boy who lost a horse because he wanted something better. (If you don’t know what the helluva story am I talking about, just try to get the drift.) In my mom’s case, the horse was her nice-paying bank job here and the something better part is the dinar currency she can get from a land beyond this border. After ten years or so, she went home heralded as one of the new heroes of this country but in shortage of all the moolah she was supposed to earn outside.

Oh, yes, that was how all this little money mayhem started and I really thought that the shortest way to fatten your emaciating back-pocket is to raid the Western lands with your distinct Filipino labor. (That doesn’t deter me, however, from going to Rowling’s situs in the near future…haha…Pounds, baby, pounds…)

So nowadays, I’m the canine to my mother’s feline existence. We shoot each other with invectives almost every single day, some of them as potent as sending the most wicked teacher-villain in my school to slopping state. She starts her verbal rage about how bloody bastard I am in speaking my thoughts infront of her, about how all these parental retaliation will boomerang one day when I’m old and gray and already a doting parent to my own son, and I don’t give a damn (because I’m certain that when I have my own family, I will give them all they need..nay, even their insatiable wants). I still answer back even if one of the Ten Commandments is “Honor thy father and thy mother.” I still speak up my mind because I think it’s better for her to hear what I would like to say to make some sense out of her, about how she seems to be so incompetent in this folk tag, about the way she seems to bungle on some of the most important things we’re all expecting her to accomplish.

My mother is a good mother, and I have nary an argument in that, but what I find ludicrous is how sloppy she deals with some tough things that require clear-cut decisions. Perhaps because my mother is only learned on the maternal things-to-do list. Maybe because at the time my half-genes donor abandoned us, she wasn’t prepared, even trained, to act like a tough mama. Tough as in earning a living for the whole three mouths, religiously acing through Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, rearing the children like Marcos in his Martial Law era, or making a hard-headed son behave like a marshmallow.

I don’t know if I have to be hateful about the way she handles all the family matters. I know I shouldn’t. And I know, deep down inside, I can’t. Because she’s my mom, she’s the reason why I’m here existing, slowly beginning to be realistic and trashing-slash-shunning the youth idealism outright, currently breathing foul language and foul thoughts to this endearing (!) world. I have never greeted her Happy Birthday (she’s blowing another candle when October falls her last leaf) or Happy Mother’s Day (I know this one’s in May) and while I’m in this rotting cynical mantra, I know that I won’t ever. I have never kissed her or hugged her (ugh!) or even said Barney’s magic words to her. I don’t recall doing all of these mushy acts to her and I think depriving her of these things is not synonymous to hatred. (Before labeling me as the ultimate “prodigal son,” allow me to utter my saving grace that I take the “mano” before leaving and upon arriving home.)

I know that I will forever be grateful to my mother. Even if she gives me an allowance that is so Third-world you couldn’t even afford to have the luxury of a two-day Unlimited texting. Even if she makes a fool out of you because she doesn’t say she’s given you the day’s allowance from your own pocket, cautiously getting your hard-earned bucks while you’re still asleep. Even if I recall her reducing to bits and ashes my first Jollibee wristwatch because Sean wanted it and I don’t want to give it. Even if she almost always leaves us stuck in our tuition fee problems, of which my sister has always been the piteous victim. Even if Sean and I can remember her shortcomings more often than her plus parent points. Even if I know she’ll end up at the bottom pit if there’s a Mrs. Single Parent contest. Even if she failed miserably, in our standards, rearing her children. Even if she’s so trying hard to be a perfect mother. For she is my mom and at the end of the day, the thing that will most leave an indelible mark in my short-term-memory-loss-suffering skull is her triumph of overcoming the adversities, the obstacles in becoming the best person that she could be so that she can perform her duties to both me and Sean.

My mother’s name is Mercy.

*One of my numerous emo posts. I remember writing this when I was really fed up with my mom’s way of dealing  with our pathetic lives.  I thought it was the last single straw.  Thought of running away, leaving everything behind, moving to some faraway, gawddamn place I’ve never been to like Bataan or Siquijor and start living a new life incognito. It never happened. Turned out I had a lot of “last single straws” and a greater love for her and my sister.