mum.

bruised, originally uploaded by happyvanny

yesterday was mother's day, and i spent the day asleep in my room. or trying to sleep in my room. a change of schedules at work meant i will be doing the night shift again, so i was trying to force myself to get used to sleeping during the daytime.

it fails. every so often i'd wake up because my brother would open the bedroom door while preparing to leave for someplace. or i'd overhear the neighborhood kids on the street. or i'd catch something or another showing on tv just outside my bedroom.

i got out of bed around 5pm to pee and i overheard my mom saying nobody greeted her happy mother's day. agh, a pin pricked my chest.

of course by then, i can't say happy mother's day and say it with any sincerity. it'd come out so artificial. i'm not sure i believe ib celebrating mother's day, either. it's like the put-on spirit of cheer and sharing most people adopt during christmas, and i hated that.

much as she annoys me (especially when she knows i'm travelling someplace far), there is something endearing about mom that i'd rather not tell her. it'll ruin that special something because by then it's be something that's done consciously. like greeting someone happy mother's day after they said nobody greeted them.

i've said before (i forgot to whom i said it) that most of my neuroses are from my mother, products of a kid's hero worship on those days the kid's dad wasn't often home because of some military assignment in some remote area of the 'pines. for my young self, my mom was the greatest, smartest human being. i may still have kept a small portion of that belief somewhere, despite my best efforts to relinquish it.

when i went to bicol, i kept trying to imagine how the place looked like, 30+ years ago when my mom was living there. i didn't realize it then, but i was attempting to imagine how my mom was like at that time, see the place that molded her into the woman she'd eventually become.

i don't know. me and my relationship with my mom has always been a tricky subject for me to talk about, full of surprising emotional potholes and sudden spilling of hidden feelings. i'll stop here for now; i need to catch my breath.

***

the photo above was taken by my friend vani. i saw her mom when i went to their place in bicol, and her mom's condition was one of the things we hardly talked about. i could make myself to bring it up, and we both could see how she was.

at their house, i saw a photo of vani on her college graduation, maybe 3 years ago. she was with her mom and her maternal grandmother. i compared the women with her on the stage with the women they've become a few years later. so much has changed since then, and yet i think i still saw the woman in the photo in the woman on the wheelchair.

when i arrived at their house, vani's mom just got out of the hospital after an extended stay. i just found out that vani'll be going back to bicol again. her mom was confined to the ICU.

there's another pin prick to my chest.