My mother, my first art teacher
October 22, 2001 | 12:00am
A mother’s day column in October? Why not?
It is not everyday that I walk through life and find myself in the threshold of a celebration of a milestone in the family. Two days from now, my mother turns 100 making her one of the few Filipinos who have lived to witness all the changing of guards in Malacañang and in fact outliving 10 of them–Emilio Aguinaldo, Manuel Luis Quezon, José Laurel, Sergio Osmeña, Manuel Roxas, Ramón Magsaysay, Elpidio Quirino, Carlos García, Diosdado Macapagal, and Ferdinand Marcos.
Cliché as it may sound, I owe my life to my mom. She was my first art teacher. And the lessons she taught me early on in my life, I still earnestly pursue and live, now that I am in my living 50s.
My mom has always been a great source of pride and inspiration to me. Together with my late father who was an intellectual and a rigid disciplinarian, she prepared us to grapple well with life. To this very day, she continues to provide our family with a rich fount of deep spiritual strength.
I first learned from her to appreciate the inherent beauty in the things around me. She would painstakingly bring me along in her trips to the city and so that I didn’t fall asleep nor get dizzy during the trips, she would tell me to keep my eyes open to the vistas that unfold before me, paying particular attention to details, like haystacks, carabaos, crooked coconut trees, amidst a forest of vertical trees, the number of red, yellow or blue shirts I could spot, etc. And when leaving the city for Lucena at night, she would tell me again to open my eyes to appreciate the rhythmic movements that attended the neon signs that Manila has always been known for.
Mom has an uncanny eye and feel for crafts. During her most active years, she excelled in cross-stitching, crocheting, and embroidery. She is also a music lover, she being a piano player and teacher herself. At this point in her life, whenever she hears music, she taps her foot or claps her hands in consonance with the rhythm of the music.
My mom introduced me to recognize the value of things, not to throw away things indiscriminately but keep them for future use. This was the time when recycling was not de rigueur yet. I would help her gather scraps of textiles from dress shops in our neighborhood. These were her initial materials from which she would create those decorative items out of emptied bottles. She would untangle the textile warp after warp, or weft after weft, then fill the bottles with the unraveled threads and yarns, depending on the color composition she had in mind for a particular bottle.
I marvel at her craft. During those days when she was most productive (this was some 40 years ago long before cross-stitching became a fad in the city), she would do her cross-stitching and exhibit her admirable sense of artistry as she switched from one color to another to capture a desired effect in her design.
When it was her turn to look at my works, she would engagingly encourage me to go on with my drawings and other art projects I did in school. She would display my drawings on top of our old piano in the sala and present them proudly to her friends, my ninangs included. I remember one time when I did a little sculpture of the Beatles in the early 1960s from eggshells and colored paper. The product of that initial foray into artmaking stayed on top of our piano for quite some time.
My mom, Rafaela Perea Faustino vda. de Defeo, was born to Gregoria Perea and Nicodemus Gahutan on Oct. 24, 1901 in Ligtong, Rosario, Cavite. (Her mother was from Ligtong, Rosario, Cavite, while her father came from Candon, Ilocos Sur). She was the only girl in a brood of seven. Two of her brothers are still living, Magno in Pasay City, and Esmeraldo in Cavite.
She took her early primary education up to Grade IV in Cavite. Soon, the Faustino couple, her uncle and aunt (Cenona) took her, to Tondo where she was raised like the couple’s real daughter. In turn, she fondly called them as Papa and Tia. She finished her elementary education at the Instituto de Mujeres in Manila.
While on school vacation, she was taken by her Tia Nona to an evangelistic meeting. The sound of the organ playing attracted my mom a great deal. Every night, she stood beside the organ throughout the service, leading to her eventual conversion and baptism to the Protestant faith. The Minister then noticed her and asked if she wanted to study and play the organ. She readily answered yes and was sent to the Ellinwood Bible School on Tennessee in Manila to study organ playing. She also had the privilege of having studied piano under the tutelage of Dr. Francisco Santiago.
She completed her Bible course certificate at the Ellinwood where she was also the assistant matron attending to the needs of other students. After her graduation in 1923, she was assigned as deaconess at the Tondo Evangelical Church, which at that time was under the ministry of Rev. Salonga, father to former Senator Jovito Salonga. Apart from her duties as a deaconess, she also taught organ playing to would-be deaconesses at the Ellinwood Bible School for 10 years.
In 1933, Miss Ruth Swanson, an American missionary, took her to Lucena. She held in the evangelical work in Lucena and stayed at the Mission House, now the site of the present Magill Memorial Church.
A year later, she married Gregorio Barcelona Defeo, then a travelling deputy in the Office of the Provincial Treasury and a widower with four children. She served as a second mother to the four who all called her nanay. She begot seven more children, four are still living, me being the youngest.
In Lucena, she conducted the church choir from the mid-1930s to 1965, making church members aware of their gift in singing, honing their skills, teaching them to read notes, and developing their voices for SATB choral arrangements.
As a church worker, she served in various positions such as Sunday School Superintendent, teaching Bible to old and young alike; as President of the Dorcas Society, now known as the Christian Women’s Association, teaching church women handicrafts and family planning and making them cognizant of their role in the church, home and community; and as church elder of the Magill Memorial Church.
She became the first President of the Southern Tagalog Christian Women’s Association (STCWA), a position she held for 10 years. As such, she planted the first seeds of women empowerment in Southern Tagalog and which my sister, Julia Linda, continued when it was her turn to serve as STCWA President from 1976 to 1984.
Nanay had to stop going to church in 1999 when her body began to physically weaken due to advancing age. But one thing remarkable about my mom is that she still says her daily prayers up to this time and regularly receives her communion every first Sunday of the month.
On Wednesday, her birthday, we all troop to Lucena City to celebrate this milestone. The entire family is grateful that we have reached this juncture in our family life to come together and honor our mom, first with a thanksgiving service to the Lord, and a simple reception in our house at the Capistrano compound. You are invited to come and join us.
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