Article was first posted here but has been edited to suit our present situation.
I will always admire my own mother for her zest for life, her nurturing ways with her children, her gift as homemaker, her stick-to-it-iveness as a wife.
She has faith that, as the cliche goes, can move mountains. Though she is not the party-going type, she exudes a positive energy about her. She tirelessly putters around the house, straightening stuff, cleaning the cheap rugs, dusting and wiping and scrubbing. She has a small business that augmented my father’s income at the nearby US naval station and helped send me and my brother to school. As a small entrepreneur, she is good at calculated risk taking.
She stood her ground when she and my father had a marital crisis. If she wasn’t so strong and resolute, our family might have collapsed.
Inside the tough exterior is a softness. She easily cries — when she remembers the past, when she watches a teleserye*, when I confide my problems. Some of her text messages brim with sadness — sadness that’s often not really hers but my brother’s or mine. When I am sad, she is doubly sad. I didn’t like this facet of her much. “Overacting,” I used to describe it in my mind.
I also didn’t go for her mommyisms or mommy cliches. “I told you so.” “Go ask your father.” “Brush your teeth, comb your hair, shower before bed.” “Look at me when I talk to you.”
In my mind, I called that “over-fussiness.”
When I settled into a family of my own, I wanted to be like her and yet not like her — if you catch my drift.
So you might ask .. how am I doing?
Try as I might to be a good homemaker like her, I fall short of keeping a squeaky-clean polished floor (even if there are rugs that can be used to clean it or even area rugs to use for cover). The yard is full of overgrown grass instead of the flowers I like to look at. I don’t take to yard work much. My excuse: I am too busy.
As a wife, I try to be tolerant and steadfast. There are times I dwell on wrong decisions of the past which are trivial compared with what my parents went through years ago. I still don’t know if I’d be as strong as my mom when faced with a major crisis in my marriage.
My firstborn is now an adolescent a teenager (a few days from now). She is in that confused stage where she is changing fast physically and not quite able to catch up emotionally. We have clashes because we are both lost. I find myself crying shameless tears. Sometimes, when tears fall, I hear that long ago word echo: “Overacting.”
As my children grow and I try to show them right and wrong and instill in them discipline that will mold their character, I find myself chiding them. “Do your homework (or in my case, finish your homeschooling lessons). Fix your room. Do this. Don’t to that.”
The look they give me before turning their backs had “Fussy!” written all over.
The other day Last school year, I was talking to my daughter over how she was summoned by her teacher for writing vicious thoughts of a bullying classmate : “Look at me when I’m talking.” It turned out she was keeping her angst to herself and decided to fight back in writing. (I am glad that classmate has transferred school for this school year.)
That same night, I dismissed my son’s request to watch a dvd movie with a curt: “Go ask your father.”
And I find myself saying more frequently than I want to: “I told you so.”
Am I my mother’s daughter … or what?
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*teleserye - drama on TV
