Motherhood statements
Before I knew I wanted to be a writer, someone else did. Her name is Cyan Abad-Jugo.
We were classmates in first year college, in, of all classes, P.E. Cyan and I are not built for physical activities. She was spritely, like a wood sprite; a kind of enchanted creature in spirit and demeanor. She still is until today, possessing a kind of youthfulness that can only be explained by an otherworldliness. As for me, I’m just not built for physical activity, period. No spriteliness in me or youthfulness.
But there we were in P.E. class, aware that some parts of life are about surviving necessary human milestones. The first week we were assigned to do a series of physical fitness tests to ascertain how fit we were. I was instantly gripped by fear, aware already of my lack of fitness. In the first round we did the step test and I immediately fainted.
But right before I slipped into unconsciousness, it was Cyan’s face I saw. For some strange reason, she was smiling. She claims now, 20 years after the fact, that it was I who was smiling. No matter now which truth is truer; it only matters that this friendship began in the melting pot of fear and grand smiles.
Over time, our lives would bump into one another’s but our lives were not congruent — she lived in that rarefied air of campus writers, a group I could never quite penetrate. I moved in other kinds of flamboyant groups of mostly performers and activists. I would see Cyan from far away and envy her stillness and the productivity that ensued from such. I’d open campus literary tomes and see her name and envy her.
By some grace or fate, Cyan and I would finally find our own pocket of time where we could explore the frictions of our friendship — this time as newbie teachers. There are many ways of cultivating friendship, and so much more limited these were back in the day. No cell phones or gadgets to keep one abreast in present tense. The Internet was a new thing and it was not part of our lives. Working in the same department, information was still passed along through mimeographed notices posted on a bulletin board. If there was urgency in having to disseminate specific information, Ate Jossie, our beloved secretary, would walk around with announcements and ask each faculty member to sign the document — proof that we had received news of changes and whatnot.
Cyan would watch me grow into my motherhood and something about that place and time pushed me to finally become what I always wanted to be — a writer. The seed started so small then — a suggestion to Cyan that we would keep a journal together. We had very simple rules, actually just one rule: that we would take turns writing in the journal. The journal was baby blue with a bouquet on its cover. It also had a simple title: the Friendship Journal.
For years, close to almost 10, Cyan and I would share this notebook and in it write all kinds of things: teaching worries, sad love stories, fragments of possible stories and essays, gripes and whines. Cyan is a fastidious chronicler, one who kept several journals at the time and I know that this little journal of ours meant more to me as it was my one and only place where I could exhibit myself freely. The journal ends when Cyan finally marries.
It is now the everyday of motherhood that binds our friendship. Our pregnancies prayed over; the children shared through baptisms; our lists for gift-giving lengthened with such joy; texts frantic with the everyday concerns of hatid-sundo, ailments, medications, quick salves, longer, philosophical worries of what world we have created for our children. The solutions we’ve come up with always provisional.
There is something about motherhood that makes the act of vulnerability such a part of the job. Pregnancy teaches us the lack of privacy inherent in the process as you realize it takes more than one person in the room to deliver a child. Everything else that ensues after childbirth necessitates a community in our culture. Everybody — thank God! — wants to hold the baby! The village is always ready to be counted upon to feed, bathe and watch a child.
It is perhaps this long history, and this specific quality of motherhood, that would eventually move Cyan and I to create a book together. This, we could birth together. We called our book Motherhood Statements, a term we call universal, general statements we all agree on to be true about the world. In this book, published by Anvil, we tighten the focus of the idiomatic expression — perhaps inviting our readers to critique and question our long-held beliefs about what it is to mother and what it is to be mothered.
We opened our conversation to other writers and in this anthology they share their own stories of motherhood — as mothers, as daughters and as sons. As we write in the introductory essay: we all come to the world through a mother. What other relationship is more necessary to plumb and plunge into than this? Thirty writers come together in this anthology, the best and the brightest in our country, including Gilda Cordero-Fernando, Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo, FH Batacan, Mookie Katigbak Lacuesta, Ambeth Ocampo, Lawrence Lacambra Ypil, Charlson Ong. Come to our launch on May 9, 2013, 6 p.m., at National Best Sellers, 4th Floor Robinson’s Galleria.
This week we celebrate Mother’s Day, and we invite all you readers to come celebrate with us our mothers at the launch! We celebrate having been born and we acknowledge the graciousness of all mothers who agree to be one.
