A Letter to My Daughter

"A chain of life begun
Upon the shore of some primordial sea
Has stretched through time
To reach to me."
- 'The Story Goes On' from the musical "Baby"
   
    About five years ago, one of my best friends lost her mother to stroke.  To say that it was a difficult period in my friend's life is an understatement, especially when her mother's passing came rather swiftly and unexpectedly.  I was a freshman in law school back then and I found it completely unbelievable, especially when her mother had been a regular textmate of sorts who was always sending me messages of encouragement and asking how I was doing.  I was unable to attend her mother's funeral due to class but in the middle of my professor's lecture, I wrote the the date (Feb. 14, 2007) and a short goodbye message to my friend's mother on the margin of one of my textbooks.

    That night, when I got home to my apartment, I sat on my bed, trying to sort out what I felt and what I wanted to tell my friend who had just lost a very important person in her life.  She would never get to talk to her mother again.  Neither would she ever see her in this lifetime.  My friend would never be given away by her mother on her wedding day or place her newborn baby in her mother's arms.  That thought stung.  I wondered what my friend's mother would have told her, had she known she was to die pretty soon.  That made me think about what my own mother might have said to me and in the process of thinking and reflecting, I then began to effect some sort of transference by asking myself "What would I tell my own child if I knew I were to pass away soon?"  I had never been pregnant or had a child so that, in itself, was a huge challenge.  But I wanted to somehow leave my friend with a mother's words of love and encouragement, with what I thought her mother would have said to her and, in the process, using thoughts from my own mother and from some natural maternal inclination within me.  After about an hour or writing, the result was a letter simply addressed to "my dear child." 

    The problem I faced was giving the letter to my friend.  I wanted to give it to her as soon as I could but I felt the pain was a bit too raw and I might just be reopening her floodgates which, for now, needed to be shut down.  So I waited and decided to give it to her on her birthday (which didn't happen), then Christmas (still didn't happen), on her mother's first death anniversary (still didn't give it) and so on.  Eventually, after one too many postponements, I decided to keep the letter in my files and give it to her on a major milestone in her life which I am sure was to happen - her wedding day.

    A month ago, on December 2, 2012, I finally gave my friend the letter, just a few hours before she walked down the aisle and pledged to become someone's wife.  The letter I had kept for the last five years goes this way:

My dear child,

When I was a little girl, my mother used to say something to me many times over that it has forever remained in my memory.  She would always tell me, "There is no love like a mother's love."  Those words rightfully described every moment with her not just because of the frequency that those words were uttered but because I felt that love day by day from as far as I could remember.  That is why I write this letter to you now, to tell you what my own mother told me just in case the realization within you is still up for grabs.

I have loved you the moment I first felt you growing inside me and I loved you even more the moment I first held you in my arms.  To me, you were perfect, from your eyes down to your tiny toes, from the way you made those gurgling noises to the way you squirmed when you were held in an uncomfortable position.  You grasped my finger with your tiny hands and I immediately felt the connection between you and me, mother and child, the bearer and the offspring, the very connection I shared with my own mother, only this time, reversed.  "It was the same connection yet different in a way," I thought to myself, as I felt your tiny heart beat along with mine while I held you close to my chest.  It was almost like two identical ships passing each other in an open harbor, one sailing east and the other going west.  I had grown up full of love because my own mother loved me with so much intensity and devotion.  And in turn, here I was, passing on that love to you.  It was too beautiful for words to explain.

I love you, my child.  It was this love for you that made me devote my time and effort to simply being your mother as you grew up year after year.  You would gaze at me with those beautiful eyes full of wonder and none of the things I gave up could compare to the sight of you before me.  You, my child, were a bundle of myriads of possibilities - good and bad, heartaches and triumphs, laughter and tears.  No one is perfect but I promised myself I would do my best to bring out what is good in you, to make you the best person you can be and to give you the life you deserve. 

I love you, my child.  Watching you grow up was nothing short of a thrill.  Slowly you began to emerge as your own unique person, sometimes imbibing certain characteristics from your father or from me, but still with an edge which made you stand out as a person distinct from us.  I have so many dreams for you and so many things I want you to do.  But I had to realize that I had to respect the person you were slowly becoming, that I could never impose on you my wants and my desires.  You had your own path to choose and your own road to walk but still I felt the need to be here to hold the light for you.  If I had my way, I would shield you from all harm and carry your burdens for you.  But loving is not about keeping the ones you love in your tight grasp.  It is about giving them wings strong enough to carry them off as they fly into the sunrise. 

I love you, my child.  In my days of youth, someone once told me that a mother is both a daughter's best friend and worst enemy.  I never felt that way about my own mother but I have to admit we had occasional clashes, much like what the two of us now have.  But what I am most proud of is the fact that my mother and I could sit down afterwards, talk it over and later on forgive and forget, again much like what the two of us do.  I believe in what some people say, that the ones you love often hurt you the most.  True, words have been exchanged which tear us deep within our hearts.  But I believe that statement is wanting of a follow-up.  The ones you love often hurt you the most but it is also the ones you love who can make you forgive and forget the deepest hurt.  I look at you and all I see are the happiest moments of my life - waking up in mornings with you by my side, packing your lunchbox, doing grocery shopping, beaming as I watched you in your school play, seeing you out the door as you head off on your first day to college, having a family picture taken during your graduation, making your brownbag lunch for your first day in your first job. 

I love you, my child.  I want to be here for you day in and day out until time stops running.  I want to be everything for you, I want to stand by your side always.  But I am afraid that cannot happen, that this is not a possibility in the world we live in.  If you can, I pray you would find somebody who will take care of you for me.  I hope he is somebody you deserve and somebody who deserves you, somebody who will love you with all his heart, somebody who will respect the person you are.  Establish your own family and pass on your future children all the love from my heart so you will remember me as I will always keep you in my thoughts and in my heart.

I love you, my child.  There can be no love like a mother's love but there is no love greater than God's love.  In anything and everything, put Him first.  Let Jesus be your constant companion day in and day out.  Turn to Him when the seas start to rise and the rivers start to rage.  Yet, most importantly, nurture Your relationship with Him when the nights are quiet, when the sunshine is warm and when your joy is unsurpassed because, contrary to what most people think, God is best known in moments of solitude and peace, in times when You see nothing but His goodness, His mercy and His overflowing love.  There is so much more to God than being Light of the World and Savior of Mankind.  He is a friend who sticks closer than brother and He knows You, up to the deepest, innermost recesses of Your being.  Bring that knowledge of Christ into Your own family because a house built on rock may see storms come and go but constantly know the peace that only God brings.

I love you, my child.  I always have and I always will.  I cannot always be there for you, no matter how much I want to.  I may not get to see every life-changing occasion, every monumental event but know this - I am and will be fiercely proud of every milestone and every achievement that will see you grow into a more beautiful person than ever.  Let every fall be an occasion to show your strength and your ability to rise up to any challenge.  I know you can do it, I have no doubt.  I certainly cannot wait to see what the future holds for you.  At some point, I may not live long enough to be with you in all of them but believe me, I will be there.  Just as you know that the stars will come every night though you cannot see them in the morning, I will be there. 

With all my heart,
Your mother

Twin Tussle

Sometimes I think there’s a little tug-of-war going on inside of me.  On other days, it gets worse and escalates into a full-blown, all-out rampage as the wide-eyed wanderlust-cum-daydream believer gets her knees all wound up around the hands of the small-city girl who thrives on simple joys.  

The wanderlust/daydreamer is ambitious, hopefully not to a fault.  She wants to see, hear, taste and touch everything not just because she wants to say “Been there, done that.”  It’s because she wants to answer questions on her own.  She wants to take up the sword that she knows is a tad bit too heavy and slay the dragon that she can see is a mite bigger than a skyscraper.  She wants to get a burn on her shoulder so that she can feel the rawness of the pain and the almost barbaric way it eats into your flesh.  She wants to feel what it’s like to get up and walk again.  She wants to feel her head spin like a kaleidoscope until she hits the threshold.  She wants to be blinded momentarily by the sun as she stares at it straight.  She wants to feel the wind on her face and to walk on sand that she has never stepped on before.  She wants to lose so that she could win again.  She wants to see whether the books were right when it spoke about lightning and fairytales.  She wants to see for herself how cocoa becomes chocolate and how the sugar could eventually lead to diabetes - in technicolor.

On the other side of the spectrum, steadily grasping at the ankles of the wanderlust, is the one of quiet mornings.  She gives in to the persistent knocking of the other one but continues to hold on, not barely, not defiantly, not desperately.  She is patient and tempered and knows where her vision ends and what her hands can reach.  She is easily satiated and looks forward to tomorrow without thinking about the days that may follow.  She is settled, calm and collected.  She may not completely know what she wants but she realizes there is joy in mystery and value in surprises.  She lets her more turbulent twin go off to the world in her whinnying pony but keeps her grasp firm just to make her presence felt.  

As of today, it’s the latter who has taken a backseat as the wanderlust walks the streets while Davy Jones sings in the background.  

But she who grasps knows that, at the end of the day, the only place anyone would want to head for is home.

Attached to "Attachments"

     Cue Ed Sheeran’s “Lego House.”

     It was one of those books stacked neatly in the corner which wasn’t in the bookstore’s bestseller’s shelf but merited a space in the Features corner.  It had an interesting blurb and featured one technology-conversant character thus sparking my initial interest.  After all, I wasn’t one who frequently bought a lot of romance novels.  Well, save for those stamped with the name Nicholas Sparks.  Now even with those I’ve had a couple of mishits but I figured my basket had one too many thrillers thus the decision to purchase.  And when I felt I needed a break from all the gore and depression which comes with George R.R. Martin killing off a lot of characters, I jumped to Rainbow Rowell’s “Attachments.”  By the end of 300-plus pages, I realized it was indeed one good jump with the guilty pleasure frills on the edges.

     Rowell’s debut novel is set in 1999, right at the cusp of the new millennium.  Lincoln works in the IT department of a local newspaper company in Nebraska.  His job is to screen emails which get flagged in the company’s system for violating a policy against using office email to send personal messages.  Perhaps to make him more dispassionate, Lincoln works during the graveyard shift in a cold office isolated from the rest of the newsroom.  He does send some notices to certain employees but is hooked to a series of email exchanges between Jennifer, a copy editor, and Beth, an entertainment writer, that he never gets down to enforcing the rules when their emails are concerned.  Even if he has never seen or met them, Lincoln eventually grows to know both women through their emails since they bare a lot of personal details in their messages and he begins to form an attachment to the pair, especially to one of them.

     Lincoln and the book’s reader are rightfully engaged by the series of completely hilarious emails exchanged between Jennifer and Beth.  Both write with huge chunks of wit, a healthy dose of tart and an overload of humor that snickers are always a guarantee.  Reading through the pages is akin to a fun kind of voyeurism wherein one can see the deep friendship between two women who share a lot of seemingly shallow stories which may seem both senseless and sensible.  They discuss a myriad of things - family, grammar, stalking, movies, men, whether a fetus has an umbilical cord at six weeks, breakfast vis-a-vis infertile tigers, alter-egos and, of course, Colin Firth.

     As Jennifer and Beth utilize their electronic attachments to lament about personal attachments to their families, parents and to their men, Lincoln also struggles with his own set - a dissatisfaction with how his life and career are turning out despite having multiple degrees, the fact that he still lived with his mother, how his social life was mostly confined to weekly Dungeons and Dragons games with college friends and the struggle with getting over a girl he cannot quite forget.  Jennifer and Beth’s constant banter about what they have to hold on to and what they have to let go provide the perfect backdrop for Lincoln’s evaluation of what he should keep and what he should change.  Christine, a friend of Lincoln, provides the perfect antidote to Lincoln’s dismissal that the new year is just like an odometer turning.  “It’s a chance to wake up new,” she says and that sets the stage for Lincoln as he decides to do something different with his life even as he struggles that the answer probably is not to “move out” but to “ease out.”

     The book doesn’t provoke thoughts as deep as the earth’s core or parade brooding, psychologically stilted characters but it does give the occasional comforting nudge about things any person may have gone through or could be currently facing.  It is the familiarity with the characters and their daily quandaries - all delightfully wrapped in Rowell’s very entertaining prose - which makes “Attachments” very difficult to put down.  Reading especially through Jennifer and Beth’s repartee made me recall similar, equally hilarious verbal tussles with my closest friends.  It doesn’t help that the characters are charmingly endearing or endearingly charming, however way you want to see it.  Lincoln is an easy favorite.  He is so Star Wars/Lord of the Rings geeky I find him completely adorable.  Jennifer is all cynicism and pessimism but she undergoes a huge character transformation without the routine sappiness.  Chris, Beth’s boyfriend, is so sullen, withdrawn and rebellious and yet still quite engaging.  Beth is so easy to love because she is just like high school at any age - seemingly decisive, oftentimes misunderstood and eternally hopeful.  In the book, she talks in terms of films she has seen and favorite MTVs that in the middle of reading, any 80s or 90s kid would most likely blurt out “Oh yeah, I know that!”  What I liked best about her (and laughed most heartily at) was her verbalization of something I had long been puzzled with: why a lot of dresses do not come with sleeves anymore for those who want to cover their arms when, according to her, “the whole point of clothing is to hide your shame” which she supports with a verse from Genesis.

     It has become quite difficult to write about a book I thoroughly enjoyed while censoring myself lest I give away too much.  But I could not help but agree with what one of my favorite writers, Jodi Picoult, said about the book: “If Attachments were an email, I’d be forwarding it to my entire list of contacts.”  Which is exactly why I’ve successfully convinced my best friend to drop by our house tomorrow to pick it up after work so she can give it a try herself.

Filling My Heart with "The Sound of Music"

     Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens are pretty familiar.  So are bright copper kettles, warm woolen mittens and brown paper packages tied up with strings.  The familiarity however began to wane with snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes and completely disappeared while singing about crisp apple strudels and schnitzel with noodles.  But that did not stop me from wailing along to Fraulein Maria’s “Favorite Things” when I was five.  On and on I went until I was sixteen going on seventeen and even way past my twenties when I met an eventual friend who went by the online monicker Edelweiss.  Up to now, I haven’t completely figured out what exactly the sound of music should be but for sure, it should at least involve do-re-mi and the other notes down the scale.

    Thus when the opportunity to see the extended run of “The Sound of Music” in Resorts World Manila presented itself, I was at the very least completely excited.  And not only that, the week after my family and I saw it the first time, there was an extra ticket for another showing so I went to watch it again.  In both instances, I kept my fingers severely crossed that I would at least get to see Audie Gemora as Captain Von Trapp but I had no such luck.  The failure, however, to see my childhood crush blow a whistle around the stage was not enough to rob me of a mighty good time and to start working on my yodeling.

  
     This purely Filipino adaptation of the well-loved musical deserves a lot of commendation.  The set was impressive and the transitions were smooth and never distracting.  I especially loved the use of the video screen to provide the background for every scene change.  It lent a more authentic and realistic feel to every scene, especially in the scenes which involve the home of the Von Trapp family. 

    The singing was generally exceptional.  I especially enjoyed watching Pam Imperial on stage as one of the nuns in the abbey.  When I was a freshman in college, Pam was already acting in our school productions and often stood out in any role she played.  Tanya Manalang and Michaela Bradshaw filled the stage with their clear voices as Leizl.  Mother Abbess (played by Jenny Villegas) drew great applause for hitting those impossibly stratospheric notes in “Climb Every Mountain.”  As for the Von Trapp children, Brigitta (Janina Punzalan) was perfectly cast with all her precociousness as well as Luisa (Rebecca Coates) who played up her rambunctiousness naturally.  Alexa Villaroel portrayed Gretl and came across as a very plucky five-year old. 

    Special mention should be made of the supporting cast who were really on a league of their own.  Leo Martinez (as Max Dettweiller) was humorous, engaging and absolutely perfect for the role.  As for Pinky Amador (Baroness Schraeder), it was very difficult to tear your eyes from her once she entered the stage with her disarming presence, poise and that one heck of a voice.  The runaway winner though would have to be Frau Schmidt who was excellently portrayed by Debra Lee (who is really one of the most underutilized actresses in the country).  She was just so downright hilarious without even trying too hard.  

    In both instances that I had seen the show, the role of Captain Von Trapp was played by TV and movie actor Ariel Rivera.  I really had no problems when he sang the high notes because he sounded quite all right despite his pop background.  I just had difficulty understanding him when he was speaking or singing in the lower registers because he needed to enunciate his words more.  In his scenes with Pinky Amador, Leo Martinez and the two Marias (Joanna Ampil and Cris Villonco) where he had to sing with any of them, his voice was often drowned out.  Ariel really needs to work hard not just in projecting his voice but also himself.  I think he needs to make his shoulders broader, keep his feet slightly apart and lift his chin higher when he stands on stage so as to give a more impressive, bulkier impression.  After all, he is playing a decorated navy captain!  I have to give him credit though for his searingly emotional rendition of “Edelweiss.” 

    When I saw the show on two separate occasions, I was especially fortunate to witness the two actresses playing Maria - West End star and former Miss Saigon Joanna Ampil and Philippine theater’s homegrown sweetheart Cris Villonco.  I would not daresay that one sang better than the other because that is would be a downright lie.  I would venture to state that both sang differently and distinctly.  It was apparent that Joanna was a seasoned performer and her beautiful soprano voice was serene, smooth and effortless - much like silk on air.  She channelled a more mature Maria, perhaps due to the fact that she was older than Cris.  Cris, on the other hand, was a revelation.  She looked so young onstage despite the blonde wig but sounded very mature and so much like Julie Andrews.  Her singing was completely faultless and I thought she got the yodeling in “The Lonely Goatherd” down to pat.  Her Maria was more spirited and endearingly defiant, especially in instances when she had to stomp across the stage and hold her chin up in the air. 

    It has been about three weeks since I saw the show but I still cannot quite stop myself from singing about cream-colored ponies, doorbells, sleigh bells and wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings.  I guess there is something about a completely wonderful and poignant childhood memory brought to life once again through another avenue.  If I could draw up a list of my own favorite things, “The Sound of Music” would certainly be on top of everything I would have written down - just a few notches above “girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes.”

"The Sound of Music" runs until May 27, 2012 in the Newport Performing Arts Theater, Resorts World Manila.