Mamita

I honor my grandmother today on her 76th birthday.

MY GRANDMOTHER, YOUR GRANDMOTHER
originally published in Cebu Daily News

There are people who are easy to write about; say, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela. It helps that their lives are laid out in a platter like Wikipedia, but it is having read so much about them that makes it easier. We are already familiar with the range that writing on them entails as to not downgrade, overrate, or falsify their lives.

The stories of our grandmothers would have been easier baits to a blank page. No persistent editing and the four sides of a webpage bind it to any limitation. In place of Wikipedia are their lives as they share it with us. But too much familiarity, I dare say, breeds the apprehension to even start, for fear I might miss something. However, as grand-motherhood hits a woman at any point later in her life, so should her story begin.

It was an August day 27 years ago that first introduced my mamita to the role of a grandmother. This she would play 33 times over again and would master throughout the years. What she shares with all of us and we to her is best exemplified by an unassuming cross-stitch frame that hangs on a wall at the beach house. Stitched beside a lovely illustration of little kids cuddling with their grandmother are the words, “Had I known my grandchildren would be this fun, I would have had them first.”

She delights in seeing us all gathered together. We do not go by the holiday calendar and wait for December or birthdays to schedule jamborees; ordinary weekdays are options, but Sundays at the beach has become a family tradition. In these gatherings, she is a queen who is difficult to pin down to her throne as she insists on taking care and making sure all is prepared. As we would discover, being up on her feet is her energizer, and sitting down a power-drainer.

To her, traveling for more than 5 hours in one day, from one city to another, is just like a walk in the beach. It is because of this that having her around is as much a pleasure as it is a relief; it means taking time off from her city-hopping.

Yes, she is still a working woman at 75, a choice that reflects that time in her 20s, when she was called back to the province from her college studies to work for the family. Ever since, mamita has always had her hands all over things, from the farm to her business, to her 10 children, and now to her 34 apos. An aunt once quipped that when God was raining skills on earth, mamita was not able to bring an umbrella.

To her children, she is an amazing mother. To us grandchildren, she is a wonder grandmother. To all of us, she is the foundation on which the strength of our family stands on.

There is an image that’s etched in my mind from six years ago. Seeing her daughter trying to sit up in bed, mamita briskly walked to her bedside and bent down to help her up. It was a motherly instinct that was brushed off as quickly as it was offered. My tita’s cancer has reduced her spirit to frailty that she had a hard time moving in any way, but she did not accept the help as she knew it might aggravate mamita's back pains. That moment’s exchange between a mother and a daughter imprinted in my mind the selflessness of love, and just how much mamita has of it coming out of her as there is going in to her.

Perhaps of all that she has given us, her greatest legacy would have to be our parents. It is but the natural order of things that they came before us; but it is a blessing of a great woman that they came to be the kind of parents any mother would have been proud of having brought up.

This is the first that’s written about mamita, but some of you would have probably known of her kind and witnessed yourselves in your own grandparents. Theirs is the universal story of selflessness and love. It runs along the same lines as that of King, Jr. and Mother Theresa. But while these modern day heroes are heralded by a page or two in Wikipedia and the history books, the stories of our grandparents are heralded by our lives and the many ways that they have touched it.

edited by Ms Annabelle Tan-Amor