Motherhood moments

Our Sunday lunches are few and far between. That’s because we are a global family scattered not only in different parts of the world but in distant points of Mega Manila. But we got together to celebrate my daughter-in-law Faye’s birthday, the first in their new home. We were incomplete, of course. My mother lives in Vancouver. My eldest lives in San Francisco. Another daughter stayed home with her sick son. Only two of my four children were represented there.

My children are adults with children of their own. My oldest grandson, Paolo, is 16. The most significant lesson I’ve learned in the past 10 years is I have no children any more. I have adults. And if I want to be happy, I must deal with these creatures who were once my children as I deal with other young adults I know – my officemates and more recently my classmates. I talk to them with interest, curiosity and an open mind; accept and love them as they are; and never, ever tell them what I want them to do not because they’ll resent it (though more often than admitted they do) but because I will be disappointed when they do what they want. I am a wise woman. I have learned not to be the architect of my own disappointment.

My daughter, who is an animated storyteller, describes a recent vacation she took with her family. They went abroad and suffered from jet lag. She mimicked the whining of her older son and acted out how she would soothe him. She mimicked the response of her younger son and acted out how she would rush to him. "I felt like a bus shuttling back and forth," she related. "Then finally as my head hit the pillow and I thought I could sleep at last..." she mimicks the snoring sounds of her husband. "Look at me, I’ve lost all my pregnancy pounds." And she has. She looks terrific, in fact.

Not to be outdone, her husband tells us about the time when she really lost it with the children. "Then I really felt guilty," she said. "That was so awful of me."

"She was telling this little baby, ‘What do you want? You don’t want to sleep. You don’t want to stop crying. What more do you want from me?’" My son, coming home from work late one morning (he played in a band) found his wife upset, weeping, distraught over their little daughter. "It was really bad," Faye said. "I thought I was going crazy."

"All mothers go through this," I said. "Don’t feel badly. Don’t feel guilty. We all go through moments when, regardless of how much we love our children and how much we care about their welfare, we know we could hurt them, even kill them in rage. I think someone should write about this because most of the literature out there says that you must have all these positive feelings about your child. The negative ones are swept under the carpet. So when we have negative feelings about our children, we repress them and feel guilty. The trouble with repression, of course, is it builds pressure and pretty soon things get out of hand and you have child abuse. This is a good topic. Someone should write about this."

The table looked at me, I thought, curiously. I was the writer, right? I tried not to get it because I felt that they were closer to the problem than I was. Their memories were fresher. But then, maybe, precisely because they were fresher, they preferred that I write about it.

The children then were aged three, two, one. The husband had gone out to play golf. In the middle of the morning, my eldest threw up. I cleaned her up and just as I was bringing her back to her crib, she threw up all over me. I managed to control my own urge to throw up, a fortunate thing because then the second child did the same thing and before long, so did the third. They had a virus, it was going around. By the time I could get the pediatrician and the medication down three children, three mattresses, and a mad young mother were barf-soaked. Thank God I had household help to assist me but I had to threaten them, "You throw up and we’re really in trouble. Remember we have to clean up this mess."

There was a point in that day when I contemplated mass murder. A moment in the bathroom when I swore I would drown one of the children who refused to be cleaned and in the meantime just continuously basted me in barf. I thought of the romantic dinners her father and I had enjoyed while he was wooing me – the wine, the gypsy violinist, the roses early the next day. Why didn’t anyone tell me he would leave me with three barfing babies to play golf?

I imagined that we should all be dead when he returned. He would open the door and the house would be deathly quiet because the children and the yayas were all dead. I had killed them. I would be dying, drowning in baby barf, exhaustion and rage. But I would have just enough deathbed energy to pick up his golf clubs and wrap them around his neck so we could be one happy family in parenthood heaven.

Hey, I didn’t do it. It was just a memorable bad day. We survive those with the help of the good times and the spells and charms our children cast on us. But there are bad days for everyone. When you’re having one, just get a grip and say, "This is one of those terrible motherhood moments. Everyone gets it. It doesn’t make me a bad mother. It will pass."