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Meet Our Moms, Part 6: Marissa
When you're the only girl in the family, it's natural to want to become best friends with your mom. And as best friends would have it, my relationship with my mother has seen it all.
I've always wondered whether God specifically chose my mother just for me, in order to drive me crazy, to test the limits of my patience, to make me cry - to know how to say things in a way that irk me so much. I'd often wished I had someone else as a mom. Why is it that moms have a way of knowing exactly how to push our buttons? It's simple: they wouldn't be mothers if they didn't.
And for everything my mother does that makes me completely insane, at the same time I'm nothing without her, a woman who has taught me to have a sense of humor, who has shown me the meaning of forgiveness, how to love even when it hurts, to understand that a good conversation can override the hands of time and how a smile can disarm the coldest of souls. But most importantly that the best gift a mother can give her child is the gift of faith - a lesson she learned from her own mother.
Mom said of her mother to me, "She is the reason why I understand the gift of faith because it's something she had passed on to me. She is the blueprint of my motherhood and hopefully I can be some form of blueprint for you as a daughter because you are a mother now." As a wife and mother of four - the youngest being only six years old, she's far from retiring her mother jersey. In fact, the birth of my second daughter earlier this year now makes her a grandmother of two.
"I feel fortunate and fulfilled in that sense to experience those moments of the birthing process, now we're going to go through the growing process," she said. "Camille is now a toddler and Sofia is an infant and to see really how you as a mother will raise your children because that's something I did not really think about when I was giving birth, and that's because my mom wasn't around. I think it helps to have mothers around to be in that moment to share, when they say it's a labor of pain and a labor of love. But mostly of love."
Of course, nothing beats the years of raising me and my brothers, a trio that undoubtedly tried Mom's patience. "Flooding the bathroom, trying to find out how much toilet paper it takes to plug a toilet or to put down action figures into the toilet or let's see how many different places we can hide bubble gum," now laughingly recalled. "I don't know how many times I'd feel something under the chairs and it'd be bubblegum or how many different places you could write with crayon. Those were the things as children, like not coming in when I wanted you to because you'd rather play more, I look back and I welcome those moments because it was the transition into puberty and teenage years that I recognize how much more it took as a mother to raise the children who are really transitioning from children into young adults."
But after all is said and done, there really isn't a minute of all the diaper changes, the bottles, the basketball games, the boyfriends and girlfriends, the late nights spent worrying whether we'd come home alive, all the usual things that mothers take on for the sake of their children, that my mother doesn't regret. Because you realize that the moments are numbered and one day, your babies are all grown up. And all you'll have are the memories - memories that make days like Mother's Day so special for my mom, Mary Ann Ada Eusebio.
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