A mournful optimist

My mother is a pragmatist who believes in grand gestures if it comes as a duty expected of a mother, a wife, a sister, and a child. That might have implied that she is erratic and biased. In turn, this would insinuate that she is an oxymoron, per se. But the most beautiful things in this world are.. as I have come to realize.

When I was younger, barely a teenager, I had fears of the supernatural. For months, every night I was convinced that there was a ghoul outside of my bedroom window who was waiting for me to sleep so that it could capture me to torture me. One night I scared myself so badly, I burst out of my room sobbing wildly as I retraced my fears to her. Her reply was “Go back to sleep, the more you talk about it or think about it, it will catch you tonight while you are sleeping!”


I looked at her in terror and then quietly walked back to my bed, not sleeping a wink and heartbeat racing for the next four hours or so. Today, I have no fear of the supernatural. In fact, at times I feel as if they fear me for some reason. Back then, she would whip me with one of the three canes she keeps on top of the fridge and I would scream for dear life (my father) and after I was beaten and put in a corner I'd weep and she would say "Why are you crying? I'm not dead, your mother is standing here. You have no reason to cry. Stop crying or I will whip you again."

I am an optimist, but to a fault. I refuse to see danger when driving at 150km/h, I reject the philosophy of the “vicious cycle” and scorn the suggestion that smoking could lead to lung cancer which in turn, leads to death, as such.


My mother, in all her strange and odd ways, has blessed me with sight to the harsh reality of life. That in life, there is death and you can't sugar-coat that cruel fact of our existence. She does not believe in grieving for something that cannot be reversed, but she asserts that if something can be done, you do whatever you can. As severe as her methods could be, she has constantly been bracing me for the worst. Life is unkind as she knows it and my mother has unknowingly provided me with armor, just by being the way she is. Just as there is death in life, there is pain in love (not quoting Ja Rule -_- suburb boy).


She preached that to love is to be in pain, and to be alive is to be aware of death as it may come as a surprise. What I see in my mother is that she loves life to death, and because she loves most, she is made aware of pain.


I, her first child, am a part of this life she loves and in turn, I cannot escape from causing her pain. Irregardless, a mother’s love is beautiful, as love is, as life is beautiful, for to love life to death, is to live.

And that is why it's never, "to be the editor to the the fashion-est whatever-est magazine" or "to have made millions by twenty-five" or "to own the biggest most powerful whatever" or "to have had fifty different hairstyles by fifty. It's much closer to home.

I want to be a great mom.