Thank you, thank you, Sarah Jessica Parker

After watching Sarah Jessica Parker’s latest movie, I Don’t Know How She Does It, I saw my life the past three decades rewind swiftly before me. For those who didn’t get to see this movie, it is not about Sex or any exciting passion in the City. It is about how a career woman has to juggle motherhood and career, and at the same time preserve her marriage.

In the movie, the guilt-tormented Sarah Jessica is shown often hugging her baby boy and daughter an apologetic goodbye as she has to fly to another city for yet another business conference.

The first shocks of motherhood jolted my being when, after giving birth to twins, I discovered that twin babies don’t cry and wake up and get hungry for milk at the exact same twin times; they’ll wake you up when they want to. So after a sleepless night, you rise in the morning feeling like a zombie. You realize that after childbirth, you lose not only your waist but your sanity as well.

Such are the cruel afflictions of motherhood. Instead of your usual soul searching at night, you search for diapers but first you must clean up the poo all over you. Instead of doing aerobics, you jump and run after toddlers who run amuck in a pool of wee-wee. But then motherhood is such a beautiful thing, you find it the best career you can have.

The other best career you can have.

Because you also love newspapering. But when you have a newspaper job, that means leaving the house at noon to attend a press conference, fixing your pages the whole afternoon and putting your section to bed, when you should instead be putting your babies to bed. Now make that three babies. That means going home anywhere between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. the next day, depending on the time of year. During the “ber” months when newspapers are thickest, you sometimes feel you can’t bear any more sleepless nights.

A scene from I Don’t Know How She Does It: When you’re a working mom, you’ll just wake up one day to find your kids all grown up, and you don’t know how the heck you did it.

Especially when you hear your youngest, Raya, then in high school, tell you this: “Please don’t make me take up journalism in college, okay?”

What is the problem, you reply.

“I want to be like you, but I don’t want to be like you.”

What do you mean?

“I want to be a writer, but I don’t want to be an editor... I want to have decent dinners with my children at home every night...”

Ouch!

    “...and I want to see them grow...”

Ouch! Ouch!

“...and I want to have a life.”

Oh, I see. Well, then, you can take up any course you want.

With a mixture of guilt and self-pity, you realize that you have spent most of their growing-up years with a deeply flawed schedule of parenting. You go home from work around midnight when they are all asleep. So you wake up at 5 a.m. to have breakfast with them and discuss their schoolwork, and then drive them to school yourself in your nightgown with a cotton trench coat on top. Then you go back to bed, and wake up before noon for work. In the afternoon, they call you up to say they have to fax their homework to you so you can double-check it (that was in the pre-computer era).

During summers, they are bored. So as you leave the house, you find the three grade school kids all dressed up just like you, seated at the back of the car. “Can we go with you to the office, pleeeze?”

Apologetically, you ask your officemates Ching and Ricky to bear with your three noisy apprentices. Tita Ching has a brilliant idea: “Let’s order pizza for them!” That should keep their mouths busy and quiet.

Tito Ricky has another brilliant idea. Seeing Robby restlessly drawing superheroes while at the same time screaming blurbs from comic books, the entertainment editor sure knows how to keep kids entertained. He gets a huge sheet of newsprint and a red crayon, and tells the young artist: “Draw a complete map of the world. Then I will give you a prize.” That should keep him busy in one corner.

The other twin, Rissa, cannot stop talking about how she wants to be a ballet dancer and keeps quiet only after you have given her a tour of the production area. She wants to see how a newspaper is made.

The next summer, the three apprentices led by Rissa make a neighborhood newspaper of their own. They combine drawings and pictures with handwritten stories on a huge typing paper, pay the village office to have the paper xeroxed at 25 centavos per copy, and sell each copy at P1 each.

You smile. And then you want to cry again when the three kids tell you: “Mom, how come we see the mothers of our classmates always busy in the kitchen, cooking apple pies and chocolate muffins? You never do that for us.”

Seeking to redeem yourself, you find salvation in a raclette maker you got as a Christmas gift from a friend who knew that your children love eating raclette at Chateau 1771. All you have to do is plug in the machine and put sliced raclette on top. Success! They love it!

Then you stumble upon another epiphany: from now on you will be a good cook. (Read: You will make a yummy but easy feast for them. It’s called a salad bar. Just chop all the veggies, lay out the mushrooms, olives, cheeses, mangoes, tuna and whatever pretty leftovers you can find in the fridge, and let them choose between three dressings.) Of course, they love it, too.

Soon you pay for your wicked laziness and busy-ness.

You find out you cannot make up for shortcomings with instant salad bars.

Every Saturday afternoon, your 12-year-old Robby tells you: “Mom, can I go over to Carlo’s house next street to go swimming?”

Finally, one Saturday, Robby confesses that he has been going to the neighbor’s house to enjoy their Saturday special for dinner: grilled lamb chops with mint sauce.      

Then you feel even sorrier that you have not learned how to cook lamb chops with mint sauce.

One thing that absentee mothers like you should never ask kids is this type of question: Whom do you love more, our dog Madonna or me?

The kids’ answer: “Mom, please don’t ask us hard questions.” 

So there. You realize that the dog has spent more hours embracing and kissing your children than you. You are so busy working nights with your dream job, your dream career, and suddenly one day you just wake up, as if from a dream, to find your babies all grown up.

After watching Sarah Jessica Parker’s movie, you feel relieved that you are not alone. But then you feel happy that somehow, despite the instant salad bars and instant raclettes, you might have found redemption.

Because one day you read your kid’s homework where the teacher asks the class to describe, draw and color their mothers.

Raya’s description of you reads: “This is my mother. Color her blue because even if she has to take care of us and work all day and night in the office, she remains calm and serene. I cannot imagine life without her.”

As Sarah Jessica Parker would often say in the movie: “Thank you, thank you.”

And yes, thank you, thank you, Sarah Jessica, for sharing with us those truths and epiphanies about bringing up babies and keeping the dream job as well.

Today, my grown-up kids politely appreciate my salad bar.

And of course, they still love raclette. At Chateau 1771.

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