The day my mother broke my Orlina trophy

A few days before Christmas of 2015, I received a call from my mother. It was 5 p.m., I just finished a Saturday meeting in Makati and was readying myself to go home to Gulod.

There was momentary silence on her end when I accepted the call. The next thing I knew, my mother was crying. “I’m sorry. I broke your Orlina trophy,” she told me in the vernacular.

It broke my heart that my mother was crying. It broke my heart further when I found out she had been worrying herself how to break the news to me since the morning she accidentally dropped the glass trophy.  (Modesty aside, I got that Orlina trophy when I won the Outstanding Column Article on Youth and Education award at the 2011 Lasallian Scholarum Awards.)

“I only wanted to wipe it,” she said, her voice wobbly from crying. “I lost balance after tiptoeing to get it from the shelf.”

She wanted to inundate me with more details until I hushed her lovingly.

“As long as you’re not hurt, you’re not broken, it’s okay, I am okay.”

“But that’s an expensive trophy and I cannot replace it.”

“But you are far more expensive than it and if something happens to you because you worry about it, I cannot replace you.”

She stopped crying.

And my mother melted in my arms when I got home an hour after we talked on the phone.

A couple of months later, I melted in my mother’s arms as I presented her a trophy just like the one that broke into pieces.  The sculptor Ramon Orlina and his wife Lay Ann learned about how it broke my mother’s heart when she accidentally dropped my trophy. Out of the kindness of their hearts, they replaced the trophy; thereby replacing the worry on the face of my mother with genuine happiness.

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The best trophy I have in my possession is my mother. At 72, she inspires me to be a better version of myself every day. When my father passed on in 2010, my mother has become my sole lighthouse in moments when my life’s compass malfunctions in my navigation; my fortification when the enemies inside me surface; my Energizer Bunny when I’m down.

She makes the mundane meaningful. And on a few occasions that I feel unsure, all she needs to do is to hold my hand and I feel secure again. Her presence means the world to me.

Every weekend that I go home, she unwittingly teaches me the art of sharing. When she cooks, she saves a share each for my two brothers who do not live with us in the house. So in the afternoon when my brothers visit her, she has food for them.

On days when she has to treat herself to a McDo burger, she never forgets to split her sandwich into two. She eats the half and the other share she brings to my father’s grave.

She’s a raconteur. She regales my father with the stories about her grandchildren and sings to him as she fixes the candles she lighted on top of her husband’s tomb. She whispers to him sweet nothings.

My mother is a strong woman, not the bellyaching type, even if she is the one who injects herself with insulin every night. Her own infirmity does not shake her.

Once, when she went for her check-up, she was trapped alone for 15 minutes in the hospital’s elevator. She did not panic. She sat on the floor, illumined her constricting surrounding with the light of her cellphone, cooled herself with her sandalwood fan, opened her bag and snacked on Ferrero Rocher, SkyFlakes and her icy bottled water. She does not leave home without those items. When the elevator door opened, the janitor found my mother still munching. She stood up, left the lift, shared her crackers, sat on a bench near the information, and asked for that electric fan be brought near her. In that order. She proceeded to her doctor’s appointment after she whisked her face with Johnson’s baby powder and her lips with the red lipistik that is always in her bag.

She wouldn’t be named Candida if she were not candid with her thoughts. She is always honest with her opinion. No BS. She taught me that. Some neighbors run to her for advice.

My mother taught me that friendship is celebrated. She has septuagenarian friends in the neighborhood. They check on each other every day, even window shop at SM Santa Rosa. They have no problem taking the public transport as long as they hold hands when they cross the street. 

One of the most important lessons my mother taught me is to be true to myself, to live a life without pretensions, never to claim something that I am not.

To this day I have remained a dreamer because my mother teaches me to still dream.

With her, every single day is a celebration of Mother’s Day. I must have done something good in my life to deserve her, to deserve her love.

(For your new beginnings, e-mail me at bumbaki@yahoo.com. I am on Twitter @bum_tenorio and Instagram @bumtenorio. Have a blessed Sunday!) NEW BEGINNINGS by Büm D. Tenorio, Jr.