MOTHER-IN-LAW

So what's new lately? My mother-in-law's coming to visit us next week! She's going to be escorted by fafa Jay's elder sister, Emy and her husband Rene, and their 4 daughters, Let-Let, Angel, Kim and Paula... hehe.



This May is going to mark my mother-in-law's 80th birthday. Great, huh? Something with the generations before us, they seem to live longer lives. I mean, people die of all sorts of things today, and with the advent of all things technological that are supposed to make life easier, more comfortable, more efficient, more enjoyable, there are more health issues unheard of before our time, people get sick earlier on in life, people despair and lose hope, people kill themselves.

My mother-in-law's got it tough in her life. Hers is not my story to tell but let me just say that I admire her a lot. Whenever I look at fafa Jay, whom she brought up almost all by herself, along with 5 others in the brood, I can just imagine what she must have gone through... all the penny-pinching that went into it, all the dreams she must have had to let go, all the things she has had to endure, all the worries she had to live with. And now she's 80 years old, all her children are grown up and have their own families and living their own lives, pretty much. But my mom-in-law stays steadfast, still there for her children, not to mention her grandchildren.

She's still strong inspite of having hypertension and arthritis. You wouldn't hear her complain about her ailments all that much even as you see her moving about slowly and painfully because of her diseases. She loves to eat, and the only naughty streak in her is probably her stubborn insistence to eat what she likes and not comply with her diet restrictions. I guess the hard times made her tough and it's serving her well now in her age. She's defying nature hands down.

We lived for a whole 8 years with her before we were able to have enough to buy our own house. I guess that made her sad because fafa Jay is her youngest child and her leaning post whenever something worries her. But then, my mom-in-law has never been intrusive in her children's lives. So we went with her blessings and she seemed happy enough for us. When we moved in to our house, it was tough going for a while. Fafa Jay and I were both working then and we had to do everything by ourselves. It was tough in a way that we weren't used to it and we didn't know how to go about it. After all the excitement of moving and the thought that we were in our very own home died down, we kinda thought... 'Now what?' If FPJ ever wins the elections, God forbid, that's also probably the first question he's going to ask himself... hehe.

At that point, all the things that my mother-in-law ever did for us just came back to me. See, for all those times, she never treated me as anything else except her own. If you think about it, it was all those little things... little things that made our lives so much easier. I guess they helped a lot to allow fafa Jay and me glide over the transition we had to go through at this turning point in our lives. It's been said that marriage is a tough thing to get used to, and it will be made tougher if you live with your in-laws. I'm not so sure I agree with that though. For instance, wouldn't life be easier...

if, when you wake up in the morning and you go through all the routine you painstakingly do to get to work, you find a cup of coffee waiting for you and a kettle of bathing water all boiling and ready at just the right time?

if, when you have to go to work and you have to take a cab cause hubby's out getting familiar with the country's geography, you find a cab all flagged down and ready to transport you to wherever?

if, when you come home from work, all tired and beat, you find warm food waiting for you on the table?

if, on the weekends, you want to do nothing else but laze around and sleep and do anything and everything that doesn't come close to work, not by a 10-foot pole, you find that you can do just that cause all the little chores have been taken care of?

if, on your birthdays, you have 2 mothers who will never forget to greet you and send you their blessings?

if, when you have even just a shadow of a wrinkle on your forehead, it would be perceived to mean that there's something troubling you, and you have somebody asking what the problem is, and you can always count on that somebody to take charge and take care of the problem for you?

Yeah, my mother-in-law did all those things for us, for me... for eight whole years.

Now we're doing something nice for her.

I wish we could do something nice for her.

I've been too lucky.