You have given me all I need, remember?

She left two daughters on her last heartbeat. I had laid my hand on her breast, feeling her heart sputter as I prayed the litanies she taught me. 

In the end, not I, as she felt in a diary entry, broke away first, but she, with silken wings, that’s how.

“At the end of the street in the fading summer light as she turned to meet her bus, I felt she was gone and she had finally broken away,” she had written that summer I left for university studies, her only child for 11 years.

She had me at 25 years old, the perfect age for bearing a child. It’s when a daughter-once reaches the peak of womanhood, or so I’ve read, and the spring of her life—in my mother’s case, a teaching career.

Like most young mothers shortly after the horrors of World War II ended, orphaned and displaced by the war, the birth of a child must have been a joyous, though fragile event with her absentee husband, newly employed in Manila.

Her in-law’s home, like those of most families then, also ravaged by deaths and the war, leaving only the matriarch disabled by aging joints and a teenage niece, I imagine, must have heightened her twilights.

She could have chosen to bundle up her child and roost back to her large brood, in whose care she could have entrusted me while in school. But she stayed to carve a new life, and as it happened, I grew up with two other mothers, each a block away—quite a strategy, as I look back now.

With mere friendship and by faith, apparently discounting risks, my mother arranged for me to be brought to either homes on weekdays, both of my father’s nieces her age—one, a

nurse married to one of the town doctors, the other, wife of the town judge, a dentist. Both had chosen full-time motherhood after their first child.

I sat at the table with the doctor’s seven children then and the judge’s four, served whatever they had—often checked by the gentle nurse for my only-child tendencies to want-it-all—staying through Angelus, romping and staking out corners until Mama fetched me.

My sister’s birth three months after I turned 11 changed my life, as if forever—where I had always slept with her, Mama moved me to another bed. Where she used to cuddle me when I fell ill, she would wash my fevers, then leave to nurse the baby.

Soon I stopped fretting, even shedding my childhood along with my rag dolls. But I would write her letters about those university exam nights that left me drained and I longed to curl in her arms.

She never took her eyes off me, though wordless at my wedding. Later, when I would cry on the phone asking what to do when drugs for my husband’s stroke rendered him distant, my mother sustained me saying simply, “Pray, anak ko!”

But I hadn’t really rooted on my own. That morning, my sister called, telling me cancer cells had ravaged Mama’s colon to the fatal stage, I melted into a chair, but my “little” sister braced me up saying, “You can’t break down now. We have a lot to take care of.”

She sank farther away each day, yet, she held on. One morning, I learned why: I had asked her if she would want to wear a St. Anthony’s habit for her first Holy Mass, as soon as this dark night passes or she goes where she’s being called, she asked me in turn, “What about you? How then will you manage?”

I bolted out to cry in the corridor and later, calmed in an even voice like hers, I said, “I will be alright. You have given me all I need, remember?” She smiled.