A MOTHER’S DAY FIND

My house is chock-full of paper, a case of documentary constipation with a stage-4 filing system. Everything is somewhere but retrieval is by serendipity. It was strange though, that precisely on Mother’s Day, providence yielded something unknown to me, an unfinished letter, handwritten by my late wife Alice just after giving birth to our firstborn Mianne. It was dated Sept. 10, 1967 and was meant for a friend:

“Hi! Guess what! We have a baby girl! Of course, if I were to describe her, I’d say she’s adorable. Today, she is 11 days old. Can you imagine me giving birth to a seven-pound, 14ounce baby which they say is above average for a Filipino baby. She’s quite fair, with ‘chinita’ eyes, a little nose, and oodles of hair. People say she’s beautiful and, certainly, I’m not one to argue. (As they say, only a mother!)”

“My first night home … [is unforgettable] … me not even knowing how to put on her diaper and, much less, hold her right. I had never carried any baby less than six months old before. Anyway, I survived… and it was a wonderful experience in spite of my being flat on bed the next morning.”

“Even with a yaya, I’m really the one taking care of her. I guess it’s a natural feeling to be sort of selfish—I like to do everything myself and all she does is watch the baby sleeping.”

“…It’s just the most wonderful thing on earth! All those feelings and sensations all through the nine months, topped by the first glimpse of the baby, not to mention the first time to hold her. It’s worth all that mothers have to go through.”

The baby, Mianne, has grown and now lives in Spain, a Harvard MBA doing international consulting and a mother of two teenagers. Her own firstborn, Diego, just graduated as high school valedictorian.

I scanned Alice’s

let- ter and emailed it to Mianne. Her reply:

“… I woke up this morning to your email, dad. It felt like a hidden treasure found and I couldn’t open it right there and then. It had to be a special place and a special moment. So I waited and, even after reading it, I was in awe of what I glimpsed, like going back in time...” “Wow. I just can’t describe the feeling of reading a letter mom wrote with her own hands sharing her feelings of excitement and apprehension about having me! There are no words worthy enough as a reaction. It brought her to life for me as I read it and what she wrote was so overwhelmingly familiar—recalling how I didn’t know how to hold Diego, too scared to turn him over when changing his nappy, cutting his nails worried me that I’d cut his fingers off!”

“The letter was found on the day we celebrate Mother’s Day [in Spain]. What a perfect way to remember mom and a perfect gift for me!”

A Happy Day to all mothers!

Note: Mother’s Day is celebrated in Spain on the first Sunday of May and in the Philippines, on the second Sunday of May.

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