Make your Nanay proud

When my nanay was diagnosed with mild dementia, my life turned upside down. I started to look at the world differently. I was dealing with the mortality of Nanay, my fears, my love and devotion for her, my relevance to the life of the most important woman in my life against the frenetic schedule of one who has gotten used to the “chaos one has to live with for a comfortable life.” I went through “disorienting dilemma” that triggered a major shift in my life. The “disequilibrium” made me simplify my convoluted life and career.

Ironically, with Nanay’s (mild) dementia, I eventually saw clearly my priorities and made the resolve that I wanted to honor her with the best of who I am.

I also realized that I had a “voice” and I wanted to share my learnings with children and parents out there that while they have the chance and while they have all the time, they should just love each other more and spend more time with each other. Okay, but the next question was, how do I get that message out? That’s when it hit me. I may have a “small voice” but it’s a voice heard by people. At the same time, in my doctoral studies, I was studying a lot of transformative strategies, transformative learning theories and transformative leadership. I was devouring volumes of social development books and discourses. At one point, nagkahalo-halo na lahat, and I said, “I want to do a paper.” I don’t know if it’s possible, but I wanted to do a dissertation on mother’s love being the first love that a human being experiences. It’s the most powerful enabler among all loves.

I kept toying around with that idea until I did the Salamat, Nanay campaign for P&G. That was for the London Olympics 2012 which was basically trying to say that even before your child joins a competition, to the heart of a mother, her child is a winner. So nagkapatong-patong na ang kuwentong ito until I said “I want to serve this country. I want to be more relevant. I want to be more useful.”

People have long been suggesting that I get involved in government service, and I would always say that I don’t close my doors, but it was more important for me to listen to “the rhythm of the falling rain” — and when Nanay was diagnosed with her ailment, it forced me to ask the difficult questions. I realized that some people spend money, time, love and effort to save the environment. Others, children. Others, the elderly. Others join the anti-drug movement. Others go for education. What is closest to my heart and what is most natural as far as I’m concerned is my devotion and love for my mother. You translate that to a social movement, you have Make Your Nanay Proud (MYNP).

MYNP was the answer to my wanting to be more useful and relevant. It could be the platform where I can use my voice to keep telling people that this country will be better with people loving their parents, with children making their nanay proud. MYNP recently convened its council of advisers headed by the venerable Washington Sycip. MYNP will be launched in May.

I’ve been asked what the point of MYNP is. Is this just something personal that I got into because I want to pay tribute to my nanay? It actually goes much deeper than that. Think about it carefully: When you ask someone to “make your Nanay proud,” you’re actually talking to the child of a mother — and who, in the world, is not the child of a mother? Even “fathers” are children of their mothers.

 MYNP is an organization, an exhortation, an invitation to everyone in the world who is a child of a mother, to make this world a better place by making his/her mother proud. MYNP also believes that by making nanay proud, one makes tatay proud, too.

What does this mean? It’s an invitation to do good and be good. It’s premised around the concept of being good. Because if you do something good, you affect another person in a good way. You affect the environment in a good way. You affect governments in a good way. You affect communities in a good way. And if you’re able to organize that into a powerful force, can you imagine what a gentle, happy world this would be? It might not be a perfect world, but it would be as close to that as it could be, and we’d all have a hand in making it so.

Simply by “making nanay proud.”