What I Remember Of My Mother


Rosa Cajucom y Bernabe vda de Francia

Inang was a homebody who stayed at home most of the time. Every week she went to market to buy food for us. She knew how to read. And she wrote very legibly in Tagalog.

She also knew how to sew and we had a small Singer sewing machine. She could cook rice cakes like palitaw, espasol, ginataan, biko, and inangit.

She used to gather us, her children, at night to pray and give the sign of the cross before we went to sleep. Our surroundings were always clean because early morning and late afternoon, she would take a walis tingting and sweep whatever litter there was around.

She would make her own stove out of whatever clayey material she could accumulate. At times though, she would buy a new clay stove but such clay stoves usually cracked at the sides and she would try to fix it by tying a length of wire around it.

She would prepare oil from coconut milk. We loved to eat the latik. The oil was used for the hair or as an ointment for burns and cuts. We always had a small bottle of coconut oil around the house.

Inang was fond of wearing tapis, a wraparound skirt. I never saw her in a vestida or any modern dress. She never wore shoes but always had velvety slippers called kotso.

Inang used to lend small sums of money to the camineros and would collect with little interest every quincena or payday. She also bought pieces of clothing for rice exchange with relatives who lived in the farm.

Inang had some heads of carabao with her brand R-C under the care of her brother, Tatang Kadyong, and later under the care of Sankong Menggoy.

Inang was a widow when she married Tatang. They met in San Felipe where her brothers lived and where, for a while, lived her older sister Maria, who had married a rich haciendero. But the hacienda of the Gutierrezes was sold or parcelled out and her sister moved to Sta. Mesa in Manila where her husband later died.

Inang had three sons by her first marriage: Kuyang Carding (Ricardo dela Cruz), a barber; a second child who died; and Sankong Menggoy (Domingo dela Cruz) who farmed and lived in Polilio, Cabanatuan City. He died a year after Inang.

After Tatang died, Inang supported us mostly by being a market vendor – an ordinary one who bought fresh vegetables from farmers bringing their produce to the market and sold the vegetables afterwards. She didn’t have much money as capital. She couldn’t afford to be a grocery or meat vendor. At times, Inang would try her hand at sewing clothes by the piece. She would also cook espasol for us to sell in school.

For a long long time (it seemed very long) Inang would cook champorado (rice porridge with sugar and cocoa) for our breakfast. Inang would also add a lot of corn grits to our rice. We had viands of dried fish, broken pieces of tinapa, mongo with ampalaya, or sometimes just plain salt and tomato.

Inang, with an empty burlap sack, would take us to nearby newly-harvested ricefields to glean leftover panicles of palay. Once we had gathered enough panicles for our little bodies to carry home, we would help her beat the panicles, gather the grains, and store them until we had a half-sack full to bring to the kiskisan which was some 20 to 30 meters from our place.

At times, Inang would take us to her cousin, Tatang Keko, in a barrio beyond Samon. There we would help in picking corn. And whenever we went home, we had a quarter sack of shelled corn, cassava, and other vegetables. I enjoyed roasting corn in its ears and loved newly-cooked rice with raw fresh egg.

Inang, certainly, had difficulties in making both ends meet but she never heard any complaints from us. Maybe there were times we never had any viand, but we managed with just rice and corn. There were also times when Inang would take us to the relatives of Tatang in Anias, Bantug, Talavera. There we would help in harvesting, gathering, storing, and threshing the palay or pasturing the carabaos. And each time our relatives would deliver palay to the ricemills in Cabanatuan early in the morning, we would take a ride in the cart and have our own sacks of palay brought home.

I remember Inang not being able to buy new clothes for herself and for us even during Christmas or any important day. We never had any birthday party for any one of us. I remember Inang just cooking rice cakes every Christmas and nothing more. She saw to it that there was always some amount of malagkit rice during Christmas, New Year, Easter Sunday, and All Saints’ Day.

Inang asked me to learn how to cut bottles which I did with a piece of iron with a loop at one end which was heated red-hot before it was placed around the bottle. She made out of the cut bottles of beer, etc, glasses for drinking water.

Inang never had any metal pots and pans. We had earthern pots we called palayok and balanga. We had an earthern jar called tapayan for storing our drinking water.

Inang saw to it too that we continued our schooling. We had kacha for clothing which she herself sewed. Inang also raised a pig or two and some chickens. She also grew vegetables in the backyard.

Inang was very kind to us except when Fabian and I were naughty. She would scold us and even whip us with her kotso.

There were also many times when our viand was only panotsa or bukayo.