My other mothers
Mitch Valdes has drawn a lot of laughs telling stories of her travails as a student of St. Scholastica’s College with hilariously funny and very true (though admittedly with some exaggeration for dramatic effect) stories about growing up under the watchful eyes of the Benedictine sisters. And no one enjoys her performances more than the Benedictines themselves, and those of us who went through the same iron discipline that we could now laugh about.
The casual audience might think that Scholasticans would have gladly put such trauma and our school way behind us as we got on with our lives. But the opposite is true, at least for most people I went to school with at dear old SSC. For many of us, St. Scholastica’s College is home, and the sisters who guided us, as varied as they came, were kind of surrogate mothers to us during our growing-up years. The Scholastican family is as diverse as most families, with its share of goody two-shoes and outright rebels, serious scholars and those who barely made it academically, the grimly politicized and the hopelessly flighty. But we have one thing in common — our affection for the school and our loving and often hilarious memories of our Benedictine teachers.
At a lunch with classmates graced by Benedictine sisters last Tuesday, Sister Mary Bernard, who, as a young nun taught us biology in high school, laughingly recalled her embarrassment at having to teach us lessons on the reproductive system. She related that Ms. Medy Salazar, who handled the other section (there were only two sections per year then) had handily gone from worms to leaves to frogs to humans, but she could not go further than frogs! Biology under Sr. Mary Bernard is, understandably, one of the enduring memories of our high-school class.
Sr. Mary Andrew Collantes was there too. My favorite teacher in high school, Sr. Andy was tasked with teaching history and Pilipino to us English-speaking colegialas. While she was an excellent history teacher, she could hardly get by in Tagalog. So she allowed us to pepper our compositions with English words, as long as they were in quotation marks! Sr. Andy went on to become an effective social advocate who worked with the local Church’s National Secretariat for Social Action. I later tapped her to help the Commission on Human Rights orient the military and police on democracy and human rights.
Sr. Frideswida Ick, Sr. Angelica Leviste, Sr. Bellarmine Bernas, Sr. Pauline Trivino, Sr. Lydia Villegas, even Mother Prioress Adele Igrubay also came to the lunch, making it a gala affair.
Of course we recalled our late dean, the legendary Sr. Caridad Barrion, who “terrorized†us with her unfathomable rules. She made generations of Scholasticans write every Monday morning on a one-fourth sheet of paper, a listing of how many times we went to Mass, received Holy Communion, and went to confession during the past week, and those who went only once were made to stand up and be questioned. It was revealed at the lunch how some of our classmates had more developed survival instincts and got away with the humiliation of having gone only once, by lying outright! Sr. Caridad would also make us kneel to show that our skirts touched the floor, and felt our backs to see if we wore the required chemise under our school uniforms. One girl reportedly had her upper torso wrapped in toilet paper by Sr. Caridad for not wearing the proper underwear.
Sr. Caridad made sure our parents came to the parents’ gathering every semester by saying that if they didn’t, she would think we “come from the bamboo.†Was this a reference to Malakas and Maganda emerging from a split bamboo stalk? I’ll never know, but when I had my own kids, I never forgot Sr. Caridad’s quaint imagery and made sure I attended every one of their school events.
But Sr. Caridad had a soft side that she chose to show when the spirit moved her. She loved the song Turn Around so much that she would order some of us to sing at school events, and we sang at the lunch with fondness, in her memory.
There are other nuns who are unforgettable for their kindness, their loving care, their teaching skills or their strictness, such as Sr. Josefina (Jonep) Nepomuceno, Sr. Irmengardis, Sr. Ancilla, Sr. Lioba, Sr. Stefana, Sr. Maria Bruno (who was later known as Sr. Elizabeth), and the late Sr. Mary Sylvester, Sr. Simeona and Sr. Soledad, to name a few that immediately come to mind. Perhaps one of the most memorable for her severe sternness is Sr. Odiliana, who Mitch spoofs with wild abandon, whose voice still rings in my head after she screeched from the back of the room, calling a classmate solving a math problem on the blackboard a “harlot†for wearing only a bra under her blouse.
These sisters were, in one way or another, mothers to young Scholasticans through the decades. Like our real mothers, we see them not only as the formators of our values and the dispensers of discipline and punishment (albeit sometimes archaic and unreasonable), but also nurturers who saw us through moments of teenage angst, grief and pain. Now, done with the formidable task of shaping us into “finished women of character,†they have become friends we still run to in times of trouble, our co-conspirators in fun and laughter, and a reliable collective font of unconditional love. At St. Scholastica’s, no matter where life brings us, no matter under what rock or cave we find ourselves crawling out of, we know we can go home again.
Tomorrow, Mother’s Day, along with my mom, I shall remember with great fondness my other mothers who developed my mind and nurtured my spirit, and who, dispensing unconditional love, have grown along with their former ward in wisdom, age, and grace.
