Learning to accept

I visited my mother. She showed no sign of recognition. Just glanced blankly at me as if I were visiting someone else. She has completely forgotten me. I need to accept that so I can approach her, kiss her tenderly with affection, the old affection that has been buried deeply behind so much rising fear and trepidation. Alone in my home I find myself reconstructing my childhood, reviving a string of childhood memories that also lay forgotten for too long.

I must have been around two years old when one siesta hour she was putting me to sleep on her shoulder. She was sort of dancing and patting my back while she talked to Tito Willy, my father’s cousin. A few days later, he committed suicide. I remember him still sitting on the dark green rattan chair in the corner, beside the wide front door of the old house on Roberts St., Pasay, the first home I remember.

From there we — my grandmother, my mother, my aunt and I — moved to the upper story of their aunt’s house in Sta. Mesa. Maybe I was around four. I remember waking up in the dark to the delicious yeasty smell of bread baking. It was Mommy baking bread stuffed with delicious chorizo. It must have been around five in the morning, so dark and early. I stumbled out of bed and she gave me a couple of rolls to feast on.

In time, we moved into my Lola’s house at the end of that Sta. Mesa compound. I must have been around seven then. I remember watching her bake a chiffon cake. She used the mixer she had ordered from the States. The cake rose beautifully and she frosted it with light aqua frosting to give to someone who was celebrating a birthday.

At that early age I dreamed of becoming a baker. I had a little gray cookbook my aunt Hilda, her younger sister, had given me. In it was a recipe for orange cake that I always wanted to bake. I still did not know then that to bake a cake all your ingredients had to be room temperature, not refrigerated. So my early cakes did not rise as expected. I broke too many eggs when I put them on the table and they just rolled off. Over time I got to be a pretty good cook.

From Sta. Mesa we moved into South Syquia Apartments, just Mommy and me. By then I was 13. There I baked the Proposal Hi Lite Chiffon Cake, a recipe from the Manila Chronicle cookbooks. It had pineapple-orange juice and rum in it and was delicious unfrosted. There also I learned to stuff and roast my first turkey for a Christmas lunch. I enjoyed cooking and baking many things. If the schools today were open then, I might have decided to go to chef’s school. But no, then you learned to cook simply to become a wife.

I learned to cook a mean Italian spaghetti and meatballs recipe given to my mom by one of the fellows she dated. My mother was a widow, single. She went out on thousands of dates. The recipe was absolutely delicious, so good I cooked it for a man and got him to marry me. Married, I remember baking pies and cookies for my children. They were tiny then and now that they’re big I doubt that they remember. Once when they were sick and I was nervous, I made pancit molo from scratch, including making the dough for those little wontons. I used to bake bread, too, and pizza, making my own pizza dough.

I guess I got my cooking skills from my mother, who learned them on her own (she later wrote a column on food called Kitchen Witch). That was in the early days, the happiest days of my childhood. Then I thought my mother was the most beautiful woman in the world. She was tall and always stood straight. She also always wore red lipstick then. She was to me definitely the most beautiful woman in the world.

I remember all this now as I wonder whether or not I should write a book about our lives with lessons on motherhood and daughterhood; what I have learned, am still learning, about both. I have to recapture the wonder of my childhood between my visits to her so I can accept the need to say hello and goodbye, the need to love and not fear this stranger in the wheelchair who no longer bears any physical resemblance to the beauty and charm of my known and well-remembered beloved mother. I need to learn to accept all this and hold it as an essential part of me.

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