ROLE REVERSAL

Becky stood in front of her grieving mother and wrapped her arms around her so that her mom’s head rested on her bosom. When I caught her gaze, she looked at me sadly and said, "I could not allow my mother to see my father’s remains being pushed inside the crematory furnace that way. It was brutal." I agreed with her.

My friend was not probably aware of it – this reversal of roles. Her mother has become the child, and she has become the mother. She’s now the guardian, the head of the family, the matriarch.

I’ve seen it happen to my contemporaries. You come to a realization that your life is like a movie with the camera set at high speed. The milestones in your life are flashed in quick, succeeding frames. You were someone’s daughter, someone’s wife, someone’s mother, and now, a matriarch?

The makeover was subtle.

You left school full of plans and dreams. You got a job and you said, "This is just the beginning." The world was your oyster.

In contrast, your mother’s life was slowing down. She gone past the empty-nest stage. Trappings of the world did not interest her anymore and she was ready to let go. Clothes, jewelry, even her friends were slowly disappearing.

At the vigil for my father, I brought my mother to the front row and whispered, "Mama, don’t worry about a thing." She did not resist. She gave me a faint smile and was relieved to be left with her private thoughts. I even caught a hint of acquiescence. A young relative approached her and she raised her finger to point towards me as if telling him, "She’s in charge."

Members of the family took turns to sit next to her to hold her hand. When we rose to leave, I steadied her the same way she steadied and guided me in the past. I slowed my step to walk with her.

I had always admired my mother’s strength and self-control and boy, did I make sure not to ever put them to the test.

The later humorist Erma Bombeck once wrote that the trading of roles between a mother and her child has a lot to do with marriage. "It affects the way you live, the way you think, and the way you are and are going to be."

Marriage also opened my eyes to my mother’s crucial role in my life. There was never a time when she was not there to ease me through all my transitions whether I accepted it or not. She was like the wise owl that perched on my shoulder constantly pecking at me to "use your head, use your head."

When I became a mother, our relationship became reconciliatory. Gone was the defiant me. I scolded myself to think that there was a time in my adolescence that I wished God could have given me another "nurture giver" instead of this "strict disciplinarian" who followed the rules and expected everyone to comply.

Mother has mellowed. There were things in her life that she could not understand and she felt too old to have to bother about it. She was also scared. Her memory has become selective; vivid and detailed when it concerns the past but checkered and botchy when it concerns the present.

The mother who nagged me constantly, who parried my twisted logic ("You don’t hang your jeans on the floor, young lady") now needed her daughter’s advice on pension plans, endowments and how to navigate this moving staircase called the escalator.

One time I caught her chatting animatedly with an old classmate. When I asked her for the name. She giggled and replied, "As if I’d remember, heh? She doesn’t remember me either."

Have you seen the Disney movie Freaky Friday where the mother and daughter exchanged bodies? The parallelism was startling.

At the wedding of a grand-niece, I led my mother to the restroom even if she said she didn’t have to go. My cousin Remy decided to bring her mother to the restroom too. While my mother was in the booth, I yelled from the outside, "Are you all right in there?"

Remy repeated the same question to her mother in the next cubicle. At that moment, we turned to each other and said: "What’s happening to us? "I can’t believe I said that!"

"What do we think they are doing?" Remy laughed, "Placing bets in the toilet?"

The day has finally come when we were surprised by how much we acted like our mothers. What we were doing was what we had collectively observed from growing up with these two accomplished women.

The table has been turned.

One day mother called and said, "All right. You can sell the house. It has really gotten too big for me to maintain. Come and choose what you’d like to keep."

I had never seen her house before when there was no one in it. There was a constant flow and exchange of people and food. The kitchen was always crowded. The table always set. Music and chattering filled every corner. Even the bees in the tall pine tree outside kept buzzing and stinging.

It was the only house she truly loved. The house where she and my father poured their joint resources to make it safe and comfortable for their large brood. This is where she let lose all her creative and housekeeping flair. I’m talking big-time mania here. My mother OD’d on OCD.

When I checked her bathroom, the tiles were so spotless, you could have eaten on them. The living and dining areas smell of ammonia mixed with wax. The family in fact loved to recount the story of that unfortunate burglar who got lost inside the house and made a loud, crashing, solid thud when he slipped on the newly polished floors.

Mother finally moved to my sister’s house armed with what she called her "streamlined necessities": her Bible, radio and chocolates. Whenever her grandchildren and great-grandchildren visited her, she’d smile and laugh and was obviously happy and relieved to know that these naughty and scruffy children were somebody else’s concern, not hers.

After one New Year celebration, I hugged and kissed her and reminded her to "Listen to your doctor, Mama, and go easy on those sugar and salt. I will see you next year."

She winked and blew me a kiss and with a lilt in her voice sang my late brother’s favorite song, Quizas, quizas, quizas.

Mama was 82. She finally let her hair down, kicking up her heels after a lifetime of sacrifices, tears and triumphs. She lived for her family. She filled her world with love and laughter, much like she filled ours.

Just like a child.

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Author’s note: Some thoughts and observations were lifted from Erma Bombeck’s book entitled A Marriage Made in Heaven or Too Tired for an Affair, Harper Paperback, 1993. She devoted a whole chapter on role reversal and she called it "Metamorphosis.