Perhaps. Sometimes. But mothers love forever

Children are not spewed out into this world with a care instructions attachment or user manual. Expectant parents spend the time waiting for the child to be born selecting baby names, buying nursery furniture, baby clothes, and feeding paraphernalia, interrupted by the OB-Gyn prenatal checkups that mark milestones to the impending birth … but that’s the fun part.  

The nerve-wracking bit starts as soon as you hear the baby’s first wail.

“Is the baby ok?” You ask yourself even as your anesthesia-befuddled brain tries to convince you that the ultrasound showed all fingers and toes intact during your last OB GYN visit. You will still worry the doctor might have missed something.

Looking back, I should have seen it as a portent of what was to come as I entered motherhood over 20 years ago: Worry, and for a conscientious mother, it never ends.

The sound of a baby’s cry has been so ingrained in a mother’s DNA that we begin to feel the nerves on our breasts twitch and even leak milk in expectation of feeding our child. We involuntarily look around when we start to hear a child in distress.  In a sea of mothers, we end up turning our heads in sync toward that disembodied child’s shout, “Mommy!”

The instinct to protect even becomes so strong that given a life-strengthening situation, we unthinkingly put ourselves in danger just to protect our child or a child first. But then it happens… When you realize that raising a child will be your responsibility and protecting your child will not only mean protecting the child from the world but even from you, it dawns on you that you can damage your children—physically, emotionally, and mentally by your mothering inexperience, learned parental behavior, and misguided notion of what you think is right for the child, as opposed to what the child needs to learn to be happy in the real world.

I have two boys, William, 21, and Ian Orestes, 15. I learned a lot raising William and sometimes at night, I recall bad parenting moments that fill me with so much regret. I have apologized for some of them when William became a young man. And promised myself not to repeat them on Ian Orestes. In fact, I often ask William’s advice in a lot of matters regarding his younger brother. I am very lucky that way but still, the world is never perfect and one can never really protect your child from what’s happening around them. So what do you do?

As I mentioned before, there is no care instructions attachment or user manual that comes with the baby, so to a large extent you wing it because you can’t use all the items from your parent’s parenting manual. There are bits in there that fall under the “break the cycle” category since your parents, and yourself lived in a different time. Some portions of my parents’ parenting manual certainly didn’t work for me!

Each child is different. We have different parenting procedures and objectives but the one thing that remains constant is love. If there is one thing, I want my children to know with certainty, even in their darkest moments, it is that they are loved. Admitting that I would be making mistakes—and some bad ones—in this journey we call motherhood was a good start. It freed me from the burden of being and trying to be perfect, even as being free from that burden did not stop me from trying to take care of my children the best way I could.  

Raising children is a bit tricky. It needs some planning and calculation but to love them is natural.

I have been blessed with a more than comfortable life, as my children too have been. I’ve been asked how we managed avoiding “feeling entitled.” To a certain extent, there is a sense of entitlement because we have expectations and a track record of positive behavioral reward when we ask our parents for something. We all ask our parents for money to buy clothes, new gadget, to spend with friends. Depending on the financial stability of the household, children expect to be given.  The operative word in cases when we reward our children, however, is “moderation.”  We give in moderation. Based on what I’ve seen, the entitlement is nurtured when there is a history of excessive rewards and this is driven by many factors, such as a parent’s need to impress the child’s friends (or parents) or overcompensation for the perception of being an inadequate parent or the need to fulfill a childhood dream or wish to have his child have what he could not have when the parent was a child or the family just has a lot of money.

It can get tricky because how do you explain to your child why you can’t give money when they know you have it? So again “moderation.” Create a tab of how much your child asks for so you can monitor how often your child asks for things and how often you give them to him or her. Our children are given a weekly allowance so they only ask for big purchases that need to be explained and defended a la thesis defense level!

A recent published letter of a son disowning his mother hit me hard. It made my blood run cold. It was the stuff of a mother’s nightmare. If my son said that to me, I would blame myself. I will hear the pain, disappointment, hurt, and frustration in my son’s words and blame myself for being the source of that anguish. There surely are a number of underlying factors that led to the son’s actions and certainly the actions of the mom in the political arena should not be confused with a betrayal of a mother’s love for the son. Children forget that their parents are human too and live in the real world and have to make real life decisions to survive. But conscientious mothers will always blame themselves because the buck stops with us, the mothers, when it comes to our children. That’s just how we transform as soon as we bring our babies out into the world.

I’m from a political family. We are no strangers to disagreements and differing opinions within our clan. My goodness, my two great uncles—Supreme Court Justice Norberto L. Romualdez, who was also one of the Seven Wise Men who were tasked to create the template for the 1935 Constitution of the Philippine Republic, and Miguel Romualdez, the sixth Mayor of Manila, appointed by then Lt. Gov. Leonard Wood of the US Civil government in the Philippines—were on opposing sides of the political spectrum. But they still sat down for meals together and respected each other’s views.

A recent published letter of a son disowning his mother hit me hard. It made my blood run cold. It was the stuff of a mother’s nightmare.

Norberto wanted independence from America while Miguel wanted the Philippines to be a part of the US. Our family matriarch recalled during our family reunion last April, the brothers were so close and their respective families. And she wished this would continue for many generations to come. There will always be strong opinions, and sometimes differing opinions within our family have gone public, but as a cousin sagely said, “We can only pray that we stay true to our shared values and principles.”

Our forefathers would be crestfallen to know anything got in the way of family cohesion.  And this cohesion is often the responsibility and the burden of the Mother of the House. So on this day, Mother’s Day, let us celebrate all mothers for all that they have to do and bear.

To all mothers, it’s OK. We can do this! Fighting!

The author, Eliza Romualdez-Valtos, is the mother of two boys, William, 21, and Ian Orestes, 15. She finds joy in life through her children, writing, reading books, listening to and learning from people from all walks of life, listening to all kinds of music , and immersing herself in various arts and crafts. She is also a traveler, particularly enamored of the mountains and the highlands. Her goal is to have a meaningful life and to be remembered to have had a life well lived.