A CHRISTMAS WITHOUT LIFE

My mother used to be a very very terrible disciplinarian- no; executioner would suffice for her meanness. There was nothing to be compared to her wrath over my clumsiness, my disobedience to her rules, i.e. dirty feet, and stinking from playing to long under the sun, and the way I did to my childhood, which was to displease her always. That’s why she exacted punishments using the foot-long ruler, a brown one, she being as dressmaker that time, and made it uniquely acquainted to my flesh, especially around feet. She would make me and my siblings, kneel before the altar where an electric lamp flicker endlessly beside a small Sto. Niño, and beat us to stupor. We could cry loudly, and I the loudest, my siblings remind me now. But who would not cry and lament for one’s transgression when that ruler always make its mark on the flesh?

I also learned too early that I was scheduled to be aborted when I was in her womb. Three children were already a crowd, and a lot of mouths to feed. I was the fourth, and I was appointed to be under the abortionist scalpel. Luck has it or it was the bad variety, the abortionist did not come, I was destined to live.

She used to do all the household chores-doing the laundry, washing the dishes, taking us to the artesian well for a bath and taking us to the preparatory school every afternoon. Aside from that she did dressmaking in clothing factory for school uniforms and PE shirts; she’d take measurements of the students of a university which the factory was servicing. She was the extrovert type, having that kind of talent to make acquaintances felt like they were long-lost friends of hers. She was jovial, always laughing boisterously. She cracked jokes to her workmates while at the peak of working on her sewing machine. She was not difficult in forging friendship with and for that, she proudly claimed, she had me twenty godparents when I was christened, most of them students at that time and probably rich people by now. Unfortunately, only five were known to me every Christmas.

How we children wished that our mother’s cheerfulness was rubbed on us. No, she was always the tyrant when she dealt with us, always promulgating house rules, always exacting punishments, discipline and orderliness in the house, always getting what she wanted and never accepting short of anything of her expectation. She loathed dirt, much more if such dirt were us. No wonder then that all of us graduated in kindergarten with the Most Neat awards.

When I was in grade two, she fell so sick. Terribly. That for a moment, the one who used to be very beautiful and healthy woman; the terrifying tyrant whose days were spent on impressing the ruler on my skin has turned to someone who’s balding and thin; extremely weak and shriveled. She coughed very hard, her ribs protruding from her flesh like metal grills. Her rows of teeth were gone, very pale, almost meter away from the graveyard. She stayed on her back on bed, day in and day out, had to be assisted for her excretion, for her meals, for the time to take those formidable array of medicines. She was battling for her life against tuberculosis, and remained so for the next eleven years.

So consider the first shock of my life; a strong fearless executioner turned weakling almost overnight.

She had to stop working and we were in dirt poverty. But she stuck it out with the family under that one house at a time when she had regained a portion of her life and strength. She went back to dressmaking, tailoring and measuring other people’s garments to my relatives’ protests. No, she was not the one to be convinced that her life is more precious than ours; she accepted patching jobs, sewing, hemming, and whatever work could be done by her sewing machine even if she was still frail and thin. Just to have fare the next day, just to have money for electric bills, my projects, my acetates, my report, and a host of expenses I wished I never had.

She stuck it out, through the worse and worst, through the tickets of electric disconnection, the wet blankets at the dead of the night whenever it rained since the nipa roof drips; through deepest of poverty, through debts incurred and verbal onslaught from vendor the next morning, through a lot of prayer and charismatic seminars where I knew God is a happy, healthy God, who could rub his health on my mom with the strength of a snap. But he never did that. Her favorite prayer was that of sacred heart, to which she claimed to have seen. The Man in robes, whose heart, was bleeding in brilliance of white and red. She was sure as heaven she would be completely healed and restored complete health, which never happened.

She stuck it out with the family, through times when did not anymore celebrate birthdays, and contented ourselves that were still breathing. It’s a miracle she said, we’re still alive, given that we sometimes substitute dinner by sniffing whiffs of air just to fill our stomach with something. She shared poverty as we did, and did not resort to beating if I came home late, even when the number of her rulers increased in number and in length which most of the time left idle on the sewing machine.

I loved her most when she was rushed to the hospital one day during Christmas season; she refused to be carry like a baby but walked bravely to walk to that corner where the tricycle was waiting, when that alone could exhaust her strength to its last. I loved her when she was repeating “Holy God, Holy Mighty One, Holy Immortal One…” over and over. She would drift to sleep, close her eyes but would rouse herself up, and say the prayer, as if tricking death that was coming.

I loved her the most when she was in an ambulance that was speeding like a bolt of electricity; she was hooked to the tube, her brain bleeding profusely, the doctor was telling, and I was the storming the heavens, “Holy God, Holy Mighty One, Holy Immortal One, have mercy on us and on the whole world.”

And the day before the New Year, she was gone. I loved her most when she was laid in the coffin, already cold, a sorry remnant for the woman who conspired to kill me and was stopped-but loved me with no condition, without fail, expecting no recompense for whatever kindness shown, having demonstrated to me that there is strength in weakness, health in sickness, life even if one is on the deathbed, that there is richness in poverty, to build in the midst of shatters, to find hope in the space of desolation. She demonstrated to how to be sick physically but healthy morally, to never wane at the brink of letting go, that in disappointing extreme poverty, there is a wellspring of willpower, even life-despite of warnings of death, and that the greatest enemy against life is losing hope. She has shown to us that sacrifice is never self-deprecating; it is self-affirming, and the only way to gather and gain dignity.

I loved her when I laid flowers on her, remembering that I never did kiss, hug nor give her some flowers when she was still alive. At least she was not anymore alive when father was fled with that married woman and is now living afar, without worrying if his children are alive. She was dead when our house’s wooden walls were eaten by termites and where falling to stand on its own, and we have to cover them with Sandara Park’s Canon camera and calendars, when our roofs are still dripping wet when it rained hard, when we have electric disconnection often for being a delinquent costumers; when we are scheduled to be demolished for squatting on the land where our house is standing. More than two years form now, she’s dead, gone, lost in our life. It was unbearably painful whenever I saw a sewing machine abandoned in the corner with the rulers, scissors, the cloth left untailored and her work half-done. God has his reasons, taking her away from us; I am still trying to understand what those reasons are. I’m really still trying.