Nanay Josie

Filipino Mama

When I was two or three my mother’s mother stayed with us in Calamba, Laguna in the house my father built. My mother called her ‘Nanay’, which to three-year-old me sounded far grander than ‘mama’. “Mama,” I said, “can I call you Nanay too?” It was a name that became her identity, a calling: to mother all she meets in her warm, generous way.

God’s been scheming this all along.

On the Anastasis, Jing’s classmate Peter Duby knocked on our cabin door and asked: “Nanay, is Jing there?” Yesterday, I found a a note on the back of an old Anastasis picture: Salamat, Nanay. Thank you, Nanay. It certainly wasn’t my handwriting.

The other day she sang this old Tagalog song on the karaoke at a gathering of family friends. As a kid, I remember her on the guitar playing that song and singing with her sweet voice. “Lord, Í’m loving you simply, my only desire is that you use my life, everything I have I give to you …”

It struck me hard that God saw the desire of her heart and that this song was a prayer. In 1989, they moved the family to Africa for a better life. For whatever reasons they had, it was all ‘just happened’. Many families just happened to be under their care in Liberia and Sierra Leone: Africans, Koreans, Filipinos. So many young men happened to be trained by my father in the maintenance of the hotel’s machineries. Young filipinas happened to flourished through my mother’s friendship. During the Liberia civil war, we just happened to have food everyday while in the rest of the country food was scarce. Their string beans just happened to be harvested 2-3 times a day. We just happened to walk unharmed to the US military base, miles away from our house, despite the soldiers blocking the way. The day my father decided to do so, parties just happened to hold a cease-fire. And they just happened to be in Sierra Leone when the Anastasis arrived in 1993. It just so happened that Mercy Ships had been praying for a few years for an engineer specialised in refrigeration. It just so happened that that’s my father’s speciality. It just so happened that old friend arrived looking for a ready furnished house and car, so my parents could offer theirs and move aboard the ship!

And I could go on for pages about things that just happened. It seems that God took that song she sang in her youth and consumed it: he made it her life.

Through-out our stay in Holland, her mothering was always called on. Couples with babies and toddlers entrusted their children under her care. Adult babies with marriage problems or any other problem would come to her and my father for comfort and wisdom. Her love mixed with discipline is exactly what they all needed. My friends had it made: they’d come for me AND get my mother’s delicious cooking and beautiful cakes.

Besides the cook’s gift and the baker’s skill, she has healer’s hands, the sick she cares for heal. And she has green fingers, just about any plant – especially the ones you think are plain dead already – grows if she’s the one gardening. The plants she put surrounding the house – like this bongabila hanging over our gate – break the heat and occasionally provides veggies for meals.

To be a mother to people hasn’t been easy. Life in Holland was so stressful, that some days was either to panic, or cry out to God to provide, or both. She acquired hyperventilation there (and all the nasty effects of meno-pause). The move to the Philippines proved harder than they expected. The heat, the number of people in a tiny house, the distances, the rush to get renovation and preparations for Jing’s wedding, done. Getting used to the absence of one son. On top of that, Papa’s cardiac arrest in October last year, his three-month long hospitalization, piles of bills that even now stretch her trust in God Provider, and Papa’s current state: memory loss, vulnerability to another arrest.

In and out of the hospital she took care of Papa. She’s extremely meticulous with his medication, low salt-low fat meals, his showers and rubbing coconut oil on skin against allergy, his daily diaper changes. The only problem is that she keeps feeding him when she says he needs to loose weight as specified by the doctor.

Papa tries her patience repeatedly when he insists on something that’s wrong because he forgot the right. One time he poked me, pointed to Nanay who was preparing his meal and said: “What’s thhe name of your mother again?”

She fussed so much about different things and people that I sometimes lost my patience. Peace in her mind and heart are standard things I pray for. Now, she’s still rattled once in a while, but a strong sense of trust resides.

Her friends here are in awe of their past experiences. “Your riches are not the earthly kind,” one friend said, “but the heavenly kind.” She sometimes wonders if she’ll ever go back to  ‘missions’ but quickly reminds herself that her mission right now is to take care of her husband.

“Your worth Nanay is not in where you’ve been, or what you’ve done or what you can do,” I tell her, “Your worth is in how God made you and who He is in your life.” Right then, my uncle, aunt, the baby and my  cousins sit outside enjoying the breeze. I recall my other uncles and aunts who all value her counsel. I remember effort she took taking care of me when I got sick. “And right now you are what he made you to be: a mother to us all.”

This slideshow requires JavaScript.