Some mothers appear to have figured out everything.
Because social media is a curated version of every person’s life, the pages and accounts of these mothers are filled with positive, energy-boosting, utopian posts of an ideal Mom; the kind who seems to have time for every single milestone or development in her child’s life.
I acknowledge that I do appear to be one of those mothers; one with the never-ending energy to help the children with their assignments on weekdays and then take them out to camping in the weekends.
Motherhood is not a set of tasks that I perform effortlessly.
To accomplish the responsibilities of motherhood requires sacrifice and a daily decision of putting my family first in everything that I do.
I will be a big, fat liar if I say that I enjoy being with my children every day.
I don’t.
That doesn’t make me a bad Mom; that makes me human and a woman with dreams of her own that does not necessarily involve diapers and temper tantrums. Hence, the decision to still work while I’m managing a household with a living room that serves as a play zone/art room/ nap area and whatever my children think of that space as fun and silly.
Some days, I think about my single life living abroad and how easy it was when I only had to worry about what to have for dinner or what city or town to explore next on a long weekend.
The last week had been brutal with my three children sick from what the pediatrician described as a viral infection. Antoinette and JJ were okay by Friday, August 30, but Nicholas was so sick he was delirious at 2 p.m.
I had very little sleep in the last six days. It was worse than the alcohol hangover I experienced in my early 20s. When you’re 33 and you’ve undergone two cesarean operations, your body has a way of reminding you that you cannot do everything at the same time or with little sleep.
I dozed off in between work shifts and subsisted on Camiguin coffee that my boss generously provided to me. I am no coffee drinker to begin with but the happenings of the last week had me caffeine-fueled I could swear that coffee was running in my veins, not blood.
The good news is that — as I am typing this on a rainy Sunday evening while I’m seated on the couch with Nicholas to my right and his siblings sleeping on a cushion that had been moved to the living room so we’re near all the conveniences of this house — the children are cleared from what I was so worried about… dengue fever.
On August 6, 2019, the Department of Health declared a national dengue epidemic in the Philippines.
Cebu and Central Visayas are not yet on that level but you can never be too sure.
Dengue has always been a scary disease to me. When I was close to seven years old, my best friend and first cousin, Mitchelle, passed away because of the disease. Before she was admitted to the hospital, she told me that when she dies, she wants me to give her beautiful red roses, or at least the same kind that our grandmother used to grow in her backyard.
The doctor said that with the range of medicines she prescribed to the children, they should be fever-free by Sunday. If the fever persists, then it will be time for a complete blood count.
I woke up on a Sunday morning, the first of September 2019, with the sound of little footsteps running inside in the living room.
I heard the mutants request for pancakes, not French toast.
So we started the month of September with a prayer of gratitude. We are grateful that our children are back to their normal selves. Nick and JJ were fighting each other like wrestlers on television. Toni complained that she is stressed out about her brothers. So stressed out that she decided to place eye peel masks on her “eyebags” because, according to her, she needs to lessen the puffiness.
“They’re giving me headaches,” she said.
So like me.
All these tell me that we’re back to regular programming: noisy with outbursts of energy and constant requests for food and drinks.
I am thankful.
After enduring this challenge, I have learned that there is no such thing as striking a balance between work and personal life.
I learned that in this life, I need two things: stability and variety.
Stability pertains to my constants. I am stable with my family and my job. They ground me; they’re my reality check.
Variety refers to my travels, my interests, my hobbies. They make my life exciting. They give me a lot of things to do and enjoy.
There is no such thing as striking a balance between work and personal life.
Rather, it’s a scale; that set of numbers or amounts that you use to measure or compare the level of something.
For example, in a scale of 1 to 5, with five as the highest, how would you rate your commitment to your ‘stability’ today? Trust me when I say that there are times that your stability has to take a back seat, at least for a day or two, because you have to give way to your variety because your variety will give you the sanity that you need to serve your stability.
Does that make sense?
I take periodic breaks away from my husband, my children and my job so I can breathe and spend time with myself. Traveling gives me that variety. If I can’t travel because there’s too much work to be done or it’s not part of my monthly budget, I drink. A bottle of wine sometimes provides my needed variety.
Maria Elena, my mother who’s fighting Stage 2 breast cancer these days, did not have the same options that I now have when she was my age. Life was more challenging for her especially on the financial aspect. Admittedly, I have more means than her to work on my stability and variety scales.
I know that there are many Maria Elenas in the world who had to drop variety in favor of stability. That was not even a question for them. There was no other option. There was no middle ground. It was either variety or stability. Period.
They chose stability.
While I am no queen or billionaire to effect massive change in the world, what I can do is to just be a role model of honesty; that it’s okay not to figure out everything when you’ve become a mother; that you still haven’t figured out why it’s so easy to love a person only a minute after you thought of leaving her at someone else’s doorstep because she threw an embarrassing meltdown in public.
When my daughter was performing a dance number with the rest of the students last Friday, August 30, I was the stage mother who took out her phone and recorded the entire performance.
I cried the entire time. I sobbed in between. I felt so proud of her but I was also worried about her twin brother, who was so sick. I wanted to share my daughter’s happiness because she participated in her first ever school production. But I couldn’t enjoy the performance 100% because the other half of me was thinking of my sick boy. I wished I could be at the same place at the same time. I wished I had Professor McGonagall to hand me a Time-Turner, in the same manner that she gave Hermione one so she could get to all her classes.
I was so exhausted. I badly wanted to sleep but there were tasks to be accomplished at work as well. I was so overwhelmed with emotions and responsibilities that the only logical thing to do was to cry.
I am good at that: crying.
Motherhood puts you in a lot of mess. Some mothers describe it as a beautiful mess. At this stage of my life, I refuse to call it as such as.
It is, to me, a meaningful mess though.
It’s a mess alright but it’s that kind of mess that gives me meaning and purpose.
It is that thought that keeps me going.
