For many years I thought my mom was overly preoccupied with birthdays. I don’t know of anyone who has never ever missed celebrating her birthday. It’s not the grandness or anything like that, but the religiousness, the fixation, you might even say. Her parties were just lunches at home for family and friends, simple lunches she prepared herself except for the lechon and the birthday cake.
If I was amused or puzzled, my dad wasn’t. He must have understood well what I myself would only begin to understand much later, as I became older and wiser. Even then, still, I’d only be guessing.
Until after she married Dad, Mom never had a birthday celebration for herself. The third child in a brood of seven in a family surviving on the salary of a government employee, she, and possibly the rest of her siblings, just had to endure all sorts of privation, of which a birthday party would appear an excess.
Scrupulous time
It was not until many years later, in 1953, that a son-in-law, my own father, was elected to Congress—reelected in fact for four more terms, until Congress itself was dissolved by martial law, in 1972. That changed my grandfather’s family’s stature, if not exactly its plight.
It was a more scrupulous time: He continued working in the Library of Congress until his retirement and living with his family in the same government housing project until his death. Whatever it was he got for his service he got in a fair deal, no more, no less.
And whatever generosity he received from my father—an in-law from the greener side of the tracks, to begin with—was perfectly explainable.
It was, as I’ve said, a more scrupulous time.
As for my mother, whatever whoopee she made on her birthday was certainly most deserved, including at the less modest celebration I myself arranged for her 80th, at Orchid Garden Suites, a Manila hotel owned by a cousin’s family. It was probably Mom and Dad’s last big shindig together, and they both looked quite smashing. She died at 85 and he followed, three years later, at 91.
Memorable
Mom extended her birthday fixation to my dad and my brother, but it was my own celebrations that were widely memorable, indeed, remembered to this day by school friends and neighbors. Mom also began hosting in her home the first-birthday parties of her grandchildren, at which point my dad felt he just had to say something.
“What are we celebrating— that they were born? We could in fact be encouraging a sense of undue entitlement here,” he warned. “Accomplishments, milestones, fine, but those are not reached until one has lived at least 18 years.”
He was right, of course, but mom was hopeless. Then again, in a sense, she deserved even that.
Me—I have come to a compromise. For years now I have been co-hosting with family, friends and ex-classmates whose birthdays fall around the same day as mine: Feb. 7. This year, however, only two are joining me in hosting.
Small lunch
This time it begins with a small birthday lunch for our fellow members in Winner Foundation, whose concerns include, among other environmental ones, the care of the little forest park it had itself built, in Arroceros, Manila, and philanthropies for hospices in particular.
Necessarily, the celebratory senior lunch will be a healthy one, at cousin Malu Veloso’s parents’ home, on Protacio Street, Pasay City. The house, now a special-occasion restaurant, was built by her own architect father, Pablo Antonio, the National Artist, and declared a historical site.
The party will be carried over to the San Lorenzo Ruiz Home for the Elderly, also in Pasay. Our guests there will be 17 lolo and 27 lola in the care of nuns of a French order called Little Sisters of the Poor. We will bring them snacks, gifts and conversation, and keep them company for the rest of the afternoon. In fact, we intend this as a yearly, or even frequenter, commitment.
I’m not so sure why I very much like the idea. I guess if one keeps on celebrating one’s birthday and gets to live long enough, one is bound to find happier and happier ways to celebrate it.
