A Mother Herself
brief illuminations on daughterhood
“It’s only now that I can imagine what life was like for my mother when she was pregnant; a secret world that only she knew.”
“…that I once lived inside my mother, that I fed from her and was part of her.”
-Jazmina Barrera, Linea Nigra
There is the steady hum of the AC. A crib turned into a diaper changing area with one wet diaper waiting to be thrown. A baby who has just fallen asleep on the bed beside his mother and is about to wake in an hour or two. There is the mother, her pink sleeping blouse half-unbuttoned from the top, too unbothered by the cold (perhaps too far removed from herself) to even think of covering her left breast—which is still engorged, another new kind of pain—as she watches the apricot curtains gradually turning blue, signaling the break of dawn.
Two hours, she thinks. Her mind wanders around the house. Images of dishes in the sink, baby bottles, and a breast pump unwashed. In the bathroom, a blue pail filled with baby clothes yet to be rinsed and dried. A list of today’s tasks for work written on a yellow post-it note barely glued on the screen of her laptop. She comes back to herself.
Instinct tells her to turn off the AC and turn on the fan to condition him to a deeper sleep. Instinct is what informs her decisions nowadays. Not that she never relied on it before, but she relies on it now more than ever, more than anything—sometimes even against the doctor’s advice.
She fixes his blanket. Her eyes drift onto the two books on her bedside table, considers for a second which one to pick up, and, unable to decide, abandons the idea of reading altogether. She looks at the boy, kisses him lightly on his forehead, looks at him again, adores his cheeks, adores his eyelashes, lightly rubs her nose against his, marvels at his tiny thumb that always manages to slip out of his onesie’s built-in mittens. He coos. She smiles. Sometimes, she still cannot believe the boy is her child. Once upon a time: someone’s body within her body, someone’s life within her life, a heartbeat other than her own—a quiet announcement of life amid all the noise of things.
She tries to avoid thinking about the future where this intimacy will be gradually lost on both of them. That’s what growing up does anyway, between a parent and a child. She remembers a time when she was having a conversation with her mom, something about their plans in life. She gave her an analogy that she just borrowed from a podcast she listened to during the pandemic. Having grown-up children is for a writer like getting her books published, she said. Once the book is out for the public to read, her book is no longer hers alone. It may be hard for you but it will also be hard for us too, she told her mom, we just need to learn how to accept it. She still believes this analogy. But now she regrets not having said it with more compassion. Now she knows that as time goes on, acceptance will be harder to follow.
She rests her head on the bed once again and relaxes her elbow, which is now numb from leaning on her son. She stares at the ceiling as if a projector flashes these random memories she is now eager to relive.
Weeks after giving birth, deep in the trenches of postpartum, in an attempt to find humor in her situation, she sent a message to her family’s group chat. It reads, “ Nagriring sa utak ko lately yung litanya ni mother na ‘Maiintindihan niyo lahat ‘to kapag nagka-anak na kayo,’ my dear brothers and sister.” (“Our mom’s litany, ‘One day you’ll understand all of this once you start having your own child,’ is ringing in my mind lately, my dear brothers and sister.”) She had the urge to send another message, a famous GIF from an iconic scene from the movie Four Sisters and a Wedding, where Toni Gonzaga’s character takes her mother’s hand saying, “Ma, I’m sorry. I’m sorry Ma,” but she didn’t. Or maybe she did, she can’t remember.
The truth is, she always thought she understood her mother best. That she could feel the loneliness of what it must be like to be widowed and have all of your children all of a sudden wanting to live their own lives when you devoted the rest of your life to them. Her mother’s hackneyed litany, often sounding flat and resigned when said, is borne of the belief that none of her children truly, deeply understood her. But she prided herself on believing otherwise, and as a result, every “I know ma,” comes off a little short of sensitivity, a little bereft of empathy, as if her knowing could relieve her mother of that sense of estrangement the litany embodies. Proving she knows somehow seemed more important than what she could have done better: to sit with her in silence, perhaps give her a warm embrace, and to truly listen.
She remembers a statement from Frankl’s highly revered book, Man’s Search for Meaning: Only the man inside knows. He concludes this upon remembering what the victims in Auschwitz often said post-war, that “No explanations are needed for those who have been inside, and the others will understand neither how we felt nor how we feel now.” She thinks it’s inappropriate to conjure a passage borne from the horrors of World War II and liken it to motherhood, but it represents exactly what she’s beginning to understand now: there’s a limit to which we can empathize. There is a fine line between wearing someone else’s shoes and being the one who owns them.
Only a mother knows. The paradoxes run endlessly. The pleasure and pain of no longer being alone, the pleasure and pain of knowing this togetherness will one day end. The soul-sucking exhaustion, but also a stamina she never knew she possessed, from a reserve within her she never knew existed. The wholeness she shares with his boy now, and the looming anxiety for his future. The unprecedented loneliness she can barely scratch the surface of, but also the absolute joy that veils the pain she refuses to confront.
Even now, especially now, she realizes there is a great unknown in the life of her mother that would remain forever a mystery to her. Even as she tries, she can only imagine through the lens of her own experience; after all, they are two different human beings becoming mothers in different generations, situations, and circumstances. But paradoxically, the fact that she never could completely fathom her mother’s life—or anyone’s life for that matter, let alone hers—brings her this newfound understanding of un-understanding, giving light to what her mother meant all along.
It’s as if giving birth to her son also gave birth to all these reveries of their time together. Groceries—her mother choosing a small push cart so she could be the one to push it. Walking inside Lotus Mall with her eyes on Jollibee, hoping her mother would notice and ask if she wanted to eat at Jollibee, to which she would definitely say yes. Waking her up, bathing her, putting her socks on, putting Cream Silk leave-on conditioner on her hair before tying a Bubbles hairstyle, rushing her outside because the tricycle driver had been waiting for more than five minutes already. There was a time when she was a young girl and her mother’s touch was everything to her. There was a time when she was also her entire world. To think that she was once inside her, absorbing the grief that could have killed them both when her father died five months short of her first breath. The loss before a new life can even begin. The persistence to give life even through it, both of them surviving the mourning.
Sarah Manguso writes that motherhood is “a shattering, a disintegration of the self, after which the original form is quite gone.” If motherhood is an earthquake, she cannot help but think of how every day is a series of aftershocks, and her mother has had it for decades and counting. Beyoncé is right, it is girls who run the world.
The baby moves his arms a bit, his lips form an involuntary smile and soon fade. She watches him, later realizing she’s holding her breath, her entire body tensed not to make a single move or sound. Never in her life did she ever find a roaring motor speeding in a village more annoying than she does now.
She closes her eyes, aware that her thoughts cannot hold time still. Thirty minutes must have passed. She can still make breakfast and do her work. She can play crossword on her phone, or finish that extreme level sudoku, or doomscroll, or view her friends’ Instagram stories, or watch videos of adults imitating babies or AI babies imitating adults or readers discussing books or current local and international news, or pick up any of the two books on the bedside table. Or finally throw that wet diaper. She looks at the baby once again, checks the rising and falling of his chest. She can drift once and for all into a sweet and strongly desired slumber and forget about everything else. From the looks of it, she still has at least about an hour.
At last, she thinks about writing, as she often does when she’s running out of things to think about doing. Or she thinks about writing first before her mind scoffs at the absurdity of conjuring the very idea when the tremendous pile of things to do seems to have closed in around her. Whatever she writes may be constricted by time, may only be half-written, whatever time permits. Writing has been a battle against the passage of time lately. What did she read from the book Linea Nigra again? That, according to Ursula K. Le Guin, mothers who write are almost a taboo topic because they “have been told that they ought not to try to be both a mother and a writer because both the kids and the books will pay—because it can’t be done—because it is unnatural.” If she gives in to that then she’ll be a hypocrite for advising her mom one time to try to live her life again for herself. She doesn’t want to believe that motherhood should be an erasure of the self.
So, she carefully gets out of bed to pick up her notebook and a pen. After all the remembering, despite all the demands of productivity, against all the perceived taboos, she chooses to write this—as narrowed by time as it may seem. For her mother. For them both. Now that she is a mother herself.
😭😭😭 crying this was beautiful. Happy Mother’s Day lovely 🤍