Mama

This is the second year that I am away from my mother when she celebrates her birthday. The last time I was in Manila was in December 2006. I went home on December 15. Kimrun followed on the 28th. Together we went back to Phnom Penh one week into the new year. I planned to go home in August to spend my birthday in Manila last year but work commitments prevented me from doing so.

From then it became somewhat easier to keep postponing the trip back home and before I knew it, it’s been 15 months since I’d been home. This is the longest time that I’d been away from my family. And I am not in the least bit home sick. I mean, like it or not, Cambodia has been home to me since 2004.

I was supposed to go home last March 25. I had booked my plane ticket, but cancelled it when an important project, which I had earlier given up on, suddenly materialized. Also, I have an impending trip to Johannesburg, if I get my visa on time. Hope I don’t end up like Amy Winehouse before the Grammys. The process of securing a South African visa deserves its own post so I’ll write about that later. So now that my work schedule is full until the end of June, I have forsaken all plans of going home.

When I said that I am not in the least bit homesick, I mean it. I miss a lot of people in the Philippines: family, friends, and everything in between. But do I miss my life in the Philippines? I’m gonna have to say no.

I miss being with my mother on her birthday, this is for sure. In fact, I thought about her a lot when I was sick earlier this month. But I didn’t want to go home to her because I was sick. I didn’t want to be a burden. Though I’m perfectly sure she won’t mind having me around, sick or not.

And now, like last year, I have no gift for my mother on her birthday. Just that 20-minute conversation we had yesterday and the few text messages we exchanged today. And a not-so-good poem for her in my other blog. But I noticed that as both of use grew older, she seems to be making less and less demands from me as I find myself increasingly wanting her to do so. The ironies of getting old.

On her birthday last year I wrote that my mother and I survived many things, including perhaps, each other. Reading that statement again now, made me rethink it. If my mother and I survived each other, we wouldn’t have been able to do it if we didn’t have each other in the first place.