`Let us, I pray, return to as “almost normal” a life as we had pre-pandemic because so much time and opportunity and even lives have already been lost.’
YEARS ago, I asked my mother who had three sons all delivered by C-section, whether she ever regretted not having a daughter. I figured that most women would want to have one, and that my mother was no different. In fact when she returned from the US one time in the 1970s, she came bringing a baby doll, one whose eyelids shut when you lay it down as if to sleep, and which came equipped with a small bottle which you could fill with water and put in her mouth. A few minutes later the doll would pee.
It was, I figured, the closest thing that my mother had to a daughter.
Anyway back to my question. Did she ever rue the fact that she never bore a daughter, I asked. Her response was quick. No, she said. Being a professor of Nursing at UP Manila with years of experience as a nurse in PGH, she said, she had seen countless of babies born with difficulties of every sort imaginable (and more) and so she never had issues with her baby’s gender.
All that mattered to her, she stressed, that her baby was normal.
Hearing that I understood two things instantly: First, why she never ever showed any such signs of regret over having three boys and no girl to bring up. And second, that she thought I was normal.
I should have told her: Middle kids are never “normal.” Haha.
Of course when my older brother finally became a father himself and had a daughter to offer my parents as their first (and as far as they know only) grandchild, my mother was the happiest lola. She immediately found time to visit her apo in Canada, made the baby wear her huge sunglasses and naturally took a photo for posterity. Unfortunately, less than three years after her apo was born, my mother was dead, so she had only that short span of time to enjoy having at least a grandchild that was both normal and female.
But I am grateful she had that time to be happy.
In less than four weeks, a new administration will be born. It’s what 31 million voters wished for, but 15 million wanted something else. Up to this time – and surely for some time to come – there will still be regret in one camp and sheer joy in the other, a clash of emotions which could lead to some issues in the household we call Philippine society.
Difficult as it will be though, a big part of me hopes that those who are not part of the 31 million can look at the new administration the way my mother looked at her babies: It’s what God gave and let’s do what we can with what we have and pray that everything will end up for the best.
Whether we are of the 31 or the 15, we all are parents of this new administration and as citizens, it is incumbent upon us to help “raise” it the right way. We cannot shirk our responsibilities just like a father cannot wash his hands off a newborn baby simply because it is not of the gender he wanted his child to be. It is what it is and it is what we have to work with and guess what – just as a wayward child eventually becomes a headache to the parents and to the rest of society, so will an administration that fails be harmful to all of us.
Let us, I pray, return to as “almost normal” a life as we had pre-pandemic because so much time and opportunity and even lives have already been lost.
