There are all sorts of Mother’s Day stories, possibly as many as there are all sorts of mothers. But I never expected to hear one that would tug at my heart so grippingly as this one, unhuman as it is.
It’s cleaning day at the Arroceros Forest Park. Gigi Carlos, arriving ahead of her partner, Ninit Paterno, both members of the Winner Foundation, its caretakers, is met by an excited security guard. Cupped in his hands is a newborn bird that had apparently fallen from its nest.
Gigi thinks she should bring it home. Ninit, just arrived herself, agrees, and they put it in a small box. But Gigi doubts it could survive without its mom.
With visions of Mama Maya searching desperately for her lost chick, they decide to rest it on the ledge under the flagpole where birds congregate to pick up crumbs left by picnickers; Mama should spot it there herself, if not tipped off by her fellows, though Ninit herself fears possible predators. But Gigi, whose power of prayer is legend among us, eases her mind.
By then the rest of the cleaning team have arrived to constitute a full complement of prayer force. Lo and behold! In mid-prayer, Mama Maya swoops down, snares her baby, and flies away, to wild and, in certain cases, teary eyed applause.
Absentee mom
I’m misty eyed myself just listening to the story. I couldn’t help thinking of a 6-year-old close to my heart, who sings like a bird and whose absentee mom is proving herself yet another kind. There are few like Edith Burgos who will not stop until she gets justice for a disappeared son, her own missing these several years; or, indeed, one such as revealed as the true mother, when she yields to the false claimant when Solomon the Wise affects to halve the contested baby with his sword.
I’d be naïve now, as admittedly I once was, to believe that a woman’s love for the child she gave birth to comes unfailingly naturally. No, it does not; the love between them—mother for child and child for mother—is a gift deserved in the long, intractable karmic process, says a meditation master, whose words tend now to be proved to me.
There are mothers who give away children, or are treated differently from their siblings, to escape some foretold oracular doom. Malas—bad luck—is the operative word. And there are also women who, possibly through no fault of theirs, lack maternal instincts.
One would therefore expect Philippine courts to be more aware of such realities, and not be too quick to award blindly the custody of illegitimate children to their mothers. But again, it may just be another case of convenient blindness, such as is rather prevalent in our culture.
At any rate, this is the story, set in the United States, of this love child, born of a bachelor and his former college sweetheart. At the time of their second-time-around affair, already she is wife to another man and mother to a daughter.
On her eighth month of illegitimate pregnancy, she escapes husband and 4-year-old daughter to join her lover and give birth. But only two months after giving birth, she leaves lover and nursling and returns to her husband, is forgiven, and gives birth to another daughter, as if to seal the reconciliation.
Child support
The American-born bachelor father, meanwhile, leaves his stateside life—car, house, job—and returns with his baby to the Philippines, with a US court ruling granting him custody, itself waived, signed, by the mother and her husband, and stipulating a monthly child support that she would default on. Father and daughter live with an older sister, herself mother to three older children, and he begins prospecting, picking up the threads of an old life.
Some civility has existed, for the sake of the child, between the old lovers’ Philippine families—until three years later. The unheard-from mother arrives for the funeral of her suddenly heart-stricken father. A Philippine court summons is issued on trumped-up charges of kidnapping against the father of the child and his sister.
On quick order, the judge, promptly dismissing the American ruling as irrelevant, makes a ruling of his own: custody belongs to the mother and guardianship to her own mother, a practicing lawyer well connected, as happens, to the judge, who has refused to recuse himself despite being a classmate of her husband’s and a friend as much to her as to him.
After about two weeks the mother abandons her child again. With the standing comfort of a new ruling, the grandmother allows the child to be with the father on weekdays, for him to send to school, to watch over, to care for, indeed, to sustain both emotionally and financially.
The poor child is thus shuffled between two houses. She turns 7 this year, and since her mother was dubiously awarded custody nearly four years ago, she has not contacted her. But again, suddenly, the grandmother is saying, threatening, that her daughter, the mother, is coming back, this time to take the daughter away from her father for good.
Well, not with the likes of Gigi, me, and a whole brigade of volunteer mothers, grandmothers and aunts from whom this child gets an oversupply of maternal love—not with all of us storming the heavens with prayers on Mother’s Day to spare this beautiful child from all manner of predators.