How do you make your nanay proud?

Going through the list of names who volunteered to share their thoughts for the Make Your Nanay Proud (MYNP) Book reminds me of the diligence of people who worked to gather them.

At first glance, you will be amazed at the celebrity power the list conjures. Yet, flipping through the pages and reading the reflections convinced me that the book’s selling point goes beyond that “list of who’s who.”

The childlike wonder, the playfulness, the love and sincerity of the messages provide the soul of the book with the weight of the names who shared them just serving as extra “gravy” to the great value of their insights and musings. Making one’s mother proud is not exclusive to anyone. As Bemz Benedito, MYNP Foundation, Inc. managing director, puts it, “We honor our mothers based on love.”

Content is king, and as far this collection of anecdotes, poems, doodles, songs, drawings is concerned, all of the entrants equally share the credit and applause. Besides, they’re all stars in their own right.

For a quick run-through, MYNP Book, which we launched at the opening of the first Philippine Literary Festival last October, includes notes from prominent personalities like Kris Aquino, Herbert Bautista, Coco Martin, Charo Santos-Concio, Luis Manzano, Janice de Belen, Anne Curtis and Carmina Villarroel. These are but some of the celebrities who contributed their stories in the book. Public servants come in plenty, led by the country’s president himself whose quotes were excerpts from an interview I did with him for my social development doctoral dissertation on which was later aired in The Bottomline.

A couple of sports stars are also part of the book: Kiefer Ravena and Nonito Donaire, while the corporate world is well-represented as well. Dr. Sansan Hortaleza, Samuel “Boy” So, Jeffrey Ng, Vay Ng, Melo Esguerra, Katrina Ponce Enrile, Miguel Belmonte, among others, shared stories of how they make their mothers proud.

Ai-Ai, daughter to her biological mom Gregoria Hernandez de las Alas and adoptive mother Justa de las Alas, simply expressed, “My two mothers have always been there to pick me up whenever I fall and I make them proud by making myself whole again (each time).”

These words we printed for hitting the right note to the question “How do you make your nanay proud?” — the question we asked everyone in the book to answer.

Again, as Bemz noted, “Maternal love is not exclusive to the biological.”

I take pride in saying that this stemmed from my thesis that “Maternal love is a transformative force that can nurture leadership qualities of Filipinos for social transformation.”

Businessman Willy Ocier, son of Ng Siok Dee, gave one of the more touching answers, “It is enough that she knows I have grown into someone who looks at the bigger picture, creates jobs for more people, and into a human who strives to be humane every day.”

The MYNP Book is available at the National Book Store.