The Death of the Mother

There are hundreds of mothers who leave home to keep their families alive, only to return as strangers to their own children—as though they are no longer mothers at all; as if they do not exhibit the faculty of motherhood that a nursing mother may have; they are certainly alienated from their own blood, never to be granted a moment with them again. Yet a dire mother who desires to see her children will find numerous approaches—regardless of how arduous it may be. And to the common overseas worker, supporting the family is an expected burden; this pressure, however, multiplies tenfold for a mother trying to stretch a meager budget while her family's demands continue to grow. This relentless battle of math eventually concludes, and it is the greedy hands that prevail—such is the case of this mother.

It was an early summer noon when her phone call to her children was finally answered. What should have been a mundane habit was, for her, a hard-won victory.  After all, she could not call the children’s father, nor that side of the family—not then, not ever. They had alienated her from her own children as punishment for her inadequate and late remittances. Though the mother’s sorrow deepened, the world did not pause to weep with her; and the sun continued its indifferent climb. Her persistence was akin to a vulture’s nature, pitiful and decaying. One fails, however, to recall its tenacity as a scavenger—a quality that enables it to endure where others may perish. The children’s father may have alienated her, but the neighbors hadn’t.

It is worth noting what we often get wrong about a vulture. We call it pitiful and decaying. We picture it circling in the desert, patient for another creature’s ending, do we not? But there is also no more tenacious creature than it. And perhaps no other creature resembles a mother’s persistence in trying to reach her children. 

This mother had learned now, that even reaching her children was a triumph in and of itself, for this was fought in the time between work—in the humid quiet of a country not quite her own with nothing but the stubbornness particular to women who refuse to be made into ghosts. Her heart, already shattered by distance and alienation, struggled to repair itself. Her eyes were still swollen from crying over her earlier conversation with her daughter when the neighbors finally called over her son. 

“Hello, sino ‘to?” asked the boy, who was only in first grade, his voice thin and uncertain. 

“Si Mommy mo ‘to, nak! Kuya, si Mommy mo ‘to!” the mother replied alongside sobs and tears. 

“Huh? Si Mommy?...” replied the son with a hint of confusion. Silence followed for a moment.

“Buhay ka pa pala?” The first grader asked innocently. “Sabi kasi ni Daddy, patay ka na.”

One could not imagine what pain the mother felt. She who had been alienated from her children—who had stretched a meager salary across an ocean—was only to be rendered, in her children’s retelling of it, a corpse. And yet to imagine this fully is the reward she deserves: the innocent tone of speech, from the thin voice of your own first-grade son, that you have been declared dead. 

But contrary to what the father had told the children, she did not die that day. Instead, she did what scavengers such as vultures do: she kept moving, until the moment finally came for her to take her children back. 

To her:
Mommy, your tenacity is admirable. I may not have captured your experience perfectly, but I hope this piece gives it some justice. I hope your days are filled with the scent of home and quiet moments of peace, and that you will never again have to endure anything so heavy and distant as this.