Thursday January 6, 2005 - My Mother, My Hero

Thursday January 6, 2005 - My Mother, My Hero

My mother TQM was the oldest daughter in the Q household and was given the duties of house keeper as her mother was pregnant. The family consisted of one boy and two girls, my mother’s older brother and a younger sister. When my mother was seven years old, my grandmother died and my grandfather remarried my grandmother’s sister. This union produced another seven siblings. Remarkably most are still alive and living in The Philippines, My mother and one of her half brothers—there were six—were the only two to have left The Philippines and lived a large part of their lives abroad. My mother arrived in here 1947.

She was 34 years young. Now close to 92 she has lived 58 years off the island. Her brother CMQ left The Philippines to travel the world as a merchant seaman before living several years in the Middle East working in the old fields. Fifteen years ago he came to visit my mother in El Paso and never left. He married one of my Mom’s rental tenants, a single Filipina mother with a son working as a nurse. CMQ settled into life in El Paso as head of a household and flourished.

After my grandfather, a policeman in Agoo La Union—where my mother was raised—remarried, my mother asked her father if she could go and live with her uncle, a successful undertaker in Manila. Her father and uncle agreed. The uncle had an only daughter my mother's age and the two were close friends. The world of Manila was far more exciting than the smaller town of Agoo. She spent most of her adolescence and girlhood in her uncle's home. At the age of eighteen, she married her first husband RC and had a daughter she named SC. RC had gotten a job at a printing company owned by a Chinese businessman. RC was able to get the owner to take my mother on working in the business. She did well as a typesetter and the two were able to afford a nanny to care for SC.

RC died a few years later of lung cancer after a long illness just before the Japanese invaded the Philippines after the Second World War broke out my mother became the bread winner for a family that included SC and SC’s grandmother and aunt. With the Japanese invasion, she evacuated all of them to San Fabian in the northern part of Luzon Island. It was here she met my father who helped provide supplies to her family and neighbors. In return my mother began living with him.

My mother became pregnant with me. My father's tour of duty in the Philippines came to an end seven months later just before I was born and he was shipped back to the states. My mother now pregnant moved in with the RC’s family and I was born. Afterwards, my mother went back to work and about 18 months later, she got a call from the Red Cross saying that my father was coming back to the islands. It seemed my father was already married back in Mississippi and had to get divorced before he could return and marry my mom.

He had managed to get a furlough from his duty station in Saipan to fly to The Philippines to marry my mother and arrange for our passage back to the U.S. via Military Sea Transport Service. Once we had our travel orders—civilian dependents of military personnel are also issued orders—my mother sent a letter to my dad in Saipan detailing when we would be arriving in San Francisco. All the solders on Saipan were being sent back to the states, my father included, but instead of taking the slow way by ship, he managed to get a flight back in time to meet our ship arriving in San Francisco.

I think back on my mother’s ordeal during the war, her hardship in providing for her extended family with the stigma of being a pregnant war bride and her journey to a far away place to start a new life among complete strangers and I’m in awe of her courage and inner strength. Being married to an Army enlisted man in the 1950s with all its associated hardships only added to her burden. And her task was made even greater by the addition of my three sisters.

From her upbringing in a middle class Filipino household, my mother has seen more than her share of suffering and adversity. But through it all she has remained a pillar of strength. Now in her early 90s she continues to carry on. She survived a mysterious blood illness that kept her in and out of Army hospitals for the good part of a year. Into her 80s, she survived a heart attack that we all thought might be fatal. Like a fighter with the heart of a lion, she pulled through. She is a testament to the human spirit’s ability to endure hardship and prevail against overwhelming adversity.

After all that she journeyed by train with my dad from El Paso to Watertown, New York to right a wrong done to a family friend buried in the cemetery there. She returned a week later invigorated and eager for another adventure.

My Mom, My Hero.