His mother's son

Perhaps you should get over being a momma’s boy.”

While said in jest, I found the joke truly ironic given its source. For while I can readily admit to being guilty as charged, my “accuser” was widely — and far more legendarily known — to be much, much guiltier than me.   

From the perspective of a lifetime, former Cabinet Secretary and Retired General Angelo T. Reyes and I crossed paths all too briefly. We mainly came to be acquainted because Gen. Angie was one of the primary driving forces that brought about the revival of the school alumni association we both belonged to. I was fortunate enough to come along for the ride. 

Gen. Angie could be quite intimidating in person. Not just eloquent and comfortable in articulating his views, he enjoyed keeping people on their toes and in a constant state of urgency. If you got the opportunity to go beyond his forceful and decisive character, however, you would have found a soul with a soft heart and all the mushiness of a marshmallow.

I can say this because I experienced this firsthand during our initial meeting a few years back. General Angie, having just been elected president of the club representing the school of government alumni, became curious about the relative state of inactivity of our mother association. True to character, he took it upon himself to get everyone organized.

Despite his schedule then as a Cabinet secretary, and perhaps because he was the host, he was over an hour early for that first caucus held at the Tower Club in Makati City. Purely by chance (no one else from my own board of trustees was available that night to represent the law school alumni), and only because my own meeting with a client nearby finished early, I arrived half an hour after him. 

Circumstances having provided us with a length of time to spend together, we could have easily run out the clock with trivia and common pleasantries; except that it was Gen. Angie who really broke the ice when he recalled that my grandmother was one of his mother’s mahjongg mates. And once Gen. Angie got going about his mother, his ease with words went into overdrive. Swapping stories of our loved ones, our conversation inevitably arrived at my apparently perpetual state of single blessedness. Hence his advice, which I quote word-for-word above, that took the form of a jovial charge, but delivered with eyebrows raised in a stern and deadpan tone and an almost conspiratorial voice. I cracked up laughing. Two momma’s boys had just formed their own club within a club.  

Those who know him more are far better versed in recounting the lengths Gen. Angie would go to be with his mother, as well as the affection he lavished on his family. Daily visits, year in and year out, regardless of one’s professional schedule, manifest a genuine commitment only a minute few can really match. And those were just the visits.

Spouses, girlfriends, and significant others often make the dangerous mistake of competing with such a love, not realizing that its source is quite distinct and unique from that which they build with the son. For the total and unconditional love that real mothers provide to their sons is neither founded on attraction nor value judgments about what their son has to offer or bring to the table. It is almost the purest of loves, creating a drive to give that for instance allows a mother to patiently and meticulously correct the language in each and every letter in the constant stream her son sends while she is abroad and away from her family.

I am certain of incredibly few things in life, but having been on the receiving end of just the same kind of love as that provided to Gen. Angie, of this I am relatively sure: his mother’s total love not only became his comfort zone, it also primarily influenced his own love and sense of duty as a husband and father.

The events of this past month must have eaten at Gen. Angie, not because he was drawn into this tragedy himself, but because some of his accusers must have figured out his genuine soft spot. Having as a model of family love and duty someone like his mother, one can only hint at the depths Gen. Angie’s concerns would have reached as the attacks began to diverge from him and move to his immediate family. Perhaps that was what he could not bear; the possibility of not being able to provide the same kind of unconditional protection and support to his family in the face of this new storm, as his own mother had given him so totally and willingly throughout his life. The irony of it all is that neither his wife nor his children had anything to do with the supposed original subject of this current congressional investigation — a plea bargain agreement in a criminal case his family was not even a party to.

A man makes many calls in life, and if he has any character he will address such decisions when he is made to account for these. But what does a man of such character do when it is his own loved ones who are made the targets of attack, in litigation that does not involve them? There are those who are so quick to condemn suicide when what we may really have in this instance is the deliberate, unconditional sacrifice of a loving and dutiful husband and father. 

He had a model. And it is telling that he chose to undertake his final act literally before her memorial, perhaps to emphasize that all that unconditional and total love could indeed be returned. All of us momma’s boys should therefore raise our glasses in a toast to Gen. Angie. For unlike so many of us he never once took his mother’s love for granted.

He truly was his mother’s son. And justly so.