Mama Bear
My mother, who is the alpha female in our family, the think-tank of many projects, and the grammar authority, has always inculcated in me the power of critical learning. She also tried her best to make me learn commas. Unfortunately, I didn’t inherit that skill, but as her cub, she has learned to endure my flaws, my misplaced commas, and my brave attempts at semicolons.
Other than DNA, political beliefs, and certain festering frustrations, my mother and I share a few other core things: We both have a disdain for cooking—or maybe that word only applies to me. She, on the other hand, tolerated it, stating early on, “I learned to cook (at least, a few dishes), otherwise we would have starved.” Meanwhile, I only decided to stick to boiling pasta. We travel the same spectrum in our humor—she says “Don’t strain your lips,” I say “My brilliance is fleeting.”
When it comes to conversation and discourse, we both understand the necessity and timing of the eye roll, the smirk, the pause, and the one smug laugh to punctuate our points, although admittedly, my smug laugh isn’t as robust as hers. And we both enjoy watching specific films—“Equalizer 1 and 2,” “Get Out,” “Nobody,” “Sound of Metal”—over and over and over. Whenever the movies are on cable, we watch them as if for the first time. (Wait. Are we among the few people left on this planet still watching cable TV?)
We also have our own opposite peculiarities—my mother, the avid reader, finds it amusing (although with eyebrows are raised) when I (finally) finish reading a book. It takes me weeks, months, what would ordinarily take her only a day or a few days. I see images, she sees texts. She has a highly developed sense of smell, I can hardly smell anything. She loves paksiw na bangus, I’ve never even tried the dish.
While we tend to follow different food selections, I also have been highly influenced by her preferences. One of the staple stories in our family is that when I was a toddler, I was open to eating anything edible. I wasn’t picky (yet). Until that one fateful day when my father offered my mother ice cream with nuts, and my life direction changed. My mother refused the dessert—“I don’t want it. It has nuts.”
Little did they know, with my toddler butt seated on my high chair next to her grownup chair, I immediately took claim of this statement and officially declared: I don’t want it. It has “nash.” And to this day, my mother and I still piously live by that creed.
So yes, here’s to the lasting effect of maternal influence and of language.
And here’s to my mother, Rosario A. Garcellano, who is exceptional in her prose, in her essays, in her ability to convince people to think of life more meaningfully, in her skill at cracking crabs open for her kids who at their age are still petulantly clueless in that art—and who still manages to bring home an occasional (non-helium) balloon for me.
Rosario “Chato” Garcellano—former Philippine Daily Inquirer editor, author of “Necessary Contexts” and “Mean Streets: Essays on the Knife Edge,” and executive editor of Coverstory—is the mother of artist and “Elsewhere: Writings on Art” author Lyra Garcellano.
