Mothers' Day Retrograde Post

(This was written on a piece of scratch paper last Sunday, Mothers' Day. I can't resist posting it on this site, simply for the stark honesty in it. Yeah right, flatter myself...)

It's Mothers' Day. Surely it wasn't the reason why I was given my first real day off in 3 months. A real day off after 3 months is such a treat I couldn't figure out what to do with it. Unable to spend it the best possible way I'd want to (which, by definition, is limited to the following: a quiet trip to a lonely and far flung countryside beach where I could be anyone, a long conversation with a favorite beer and travel buddy who's so evanescent he's almost unreal,
or a beach-side lunch with my parents and our dogs capped with a videoke session with my dad), I settled for the next best thing - I wasted almost P200 for coffee in my favorite Starbucks outlet in an almost secluded nook in CCP, enjoying the Manila Bay scenery with my Cardiology textbook in hand.

I couldn't concentrate on my academic pursuits though. All around me are middle-aged women bringing bouquets of flowers, obviously Mothers' Day token from their loved ones, young Korean women chattering gaily over coffee or tea with toddlers tagging along and messing with their chocolate cakes and Frapuccinos, huge families gathered over Sunday luncheon celebrating their women - from the lola in wheelchair to the little girl in the stroller.

I suddenly realize something. Today is Mothers' Day. And here's one special day I probably will never be given the chance to celebrate for myself.

I'm saying this because I was taught to be pragmatic, to base my hopes and subsequent courses of action on well-calculated probabilities, risk stratification, and prognostic quantification based on the best available evidence. And the evidence all show that there will never be Mothers' Day for me.

What do you do when you're an almost thirty, single woman, who never had the chance to participate in a mutual loving relationship with anyone in your entire godforsaken life; when all hope of beauty is gone (except if you scrape a few million and afford a Belo or a Calayan overhauling) and you never lost the thick slabs of leg, arm and belly fat you intended to lose all these years, when the lines on your forehead are much deeper and the circles around your eyes much darker and you're all bereft of the freshness and vigor of youth. When you happen to burn in the agony of unrequited love for so many years for someone you'll inevitably and completely lose very soon enough, and you don't even have the slightest gumption to stay away from danger and protect yourself from the imminent pain. When your only dream is to live a quiet and simple life in a farm by the ocean with a good man and a brood of children who adore you, but all your life's opportunities were never geared towards the achievement of that dream, but instead are directed towards something else more grand and less anonymous, something you didn't even long for, but unwittingly take because it was thrust upon you and you have no choice left but to be grateful.

What do you do when you're all of the above, huh?

Simple, actually. While all the mothers in the world are basking in their domestic bliss, you lay out your plan for world domination, a world without husbands and children. You save up for your future nursing home expenses and announce to the world that you're ready to die alone.
And you become a cardiologist pretending to be busily reading Braunwald on Mothers' Day. You just learn to stop caring, to stop dreaming, to stop looking. And you pretend. Just pretend.

You sit back, sip your expensive coffee and pretend you enjoy it. Just pretend...

Happy Mothers' Day to everyone concerned!

I know you're doing the world a great favor. Motherhood is a noble and honorable job. But yeah, I don't want anything to do with it.