Bunsoy

This is the first time i will be blogging with a deadline- 12:00 midnight tonight. And it's already half past nine in the evening. Today is my Bunsoy's 30th birthday and because i was caught up in so many inconsequential matters the past days, i failed to grab enough time on the computer to do what i needed to do- write about my youngest, dearest son. The whole day today, i was in the kitchen with my bff and my cousin turning up some scrumptious dishes for family and his buddies. As i write this, his titos and titas and his cousins have gone back to their respective homes, but the buddies and the birthday boy are still up in the bahay-kubo, having a blast, as if being thirty is the most significant stage in a man's life.

Ronald, my Bunsoy, was named after Ronald Reagan who won the US presidential elections on November 4, 1980. Eleven days later, Nad was born. Since his elder brother, Gerald, was named after Gerald Ford, we reckoned that, maybe, it will be more consistent if we go by that name. I am quite proud of the choices we've made for our children's names primarily because we made the choices ourselves. When I was still single, I made a vow never to let another person give the names of my would-be children. I'm glad I did not have to go through the distress of having to turn down someone who, for some reason, would be so assertive enough as to choose a name for someone not his/her child.

Among my three children, it is always Nad who makes a big deal of his birthday yearly. It is as if he was so exultant and ecstatic that he was born. And that alone makes me happy, too. When I hear other young people question why they were born, I feel sad for them because their reservations clearly have something to do with the kind of life they live. Nad is nothing like that. He loves life and he lives it to the fullest. He may not be the gifted son nor the young entrepreneur who earned his first million before he reached 30, but my Bunsoy gives me so much joy, like all other Bunsoys in the world do to the own mothers. Like his eldest sister and elder brother before him, Nad has been and is always a constant source of joy and inspiration for me to go on living, despite the stresses attendant to aging.

Nad and I have our own share of spats and misunderstandings, but one thing I will always appreciate about him is his ability to take things lightly, as if unpleasant things didn't happen at all. When it is I who have done him wrong, it does not take too much time for him to forgive and forget. Perhaps the only thing I could never make him appreciate is my being a worrier. He wants me to relax when he goes anywhere, but what can I do? I am a mother who thinks I am the only one who can protect him.

I know I owe my children so much. To this day I still cringe when I recall that on Nad's second birthday in 1982, I left him and his sister and brother in the care of a househelp and attended to a problem with a bounced check that was paid us by a customer in Pasig. All along I thought I could make it by noon time, but my aunt-in-law and I arrived back home late in the evening- with everything in disarray on the homefront. I hated myself then for being away on my son's birthday and I feel that I have never forgiven myself to this day because the memory is still fresh in my mind and the tears still flow when I recall the events of that day.

Nad was my passport to a renewed professional life when, in 1986, his first year as a kindergarten in St. Mary's, I also started my stint as a classroom teacher in the same school. I was to resign in 1998 when he graduated in high school, but was given a bonus of one more year. Many years later, Nad finished college. Many girlfriends later, Nad is still here with me, celebrating his 30th, still single and still giving me the joy only a mother could feel.

Happy birthday, Bunsoy. I love you beyond the stars!