Bebot

When my mother telephones me, the word “Bebot” appears on the screen of my Blackberry. It is what her seven brothers call her, and it is what I like my phone to call her. However, I have never actually called her Bebot, simply because I don’t feel comfortable referring to my mother as a hot chick, even if it is in another language.

Even if I did call my mother Bebot to her face, she wouldn’t disagree with me. “When I was young and first came here from the Philippines,” she always begins the all-too familiar story, “one of the men that I worked with told me that God must have spent a lot of time constructing my nose.” Whenever she tells me this story, she cocks her head and her eyes become doe-like, her distinctive nose pointing toward me as her thin lips formulate something in between a smirk and a smile. She often takes these trips down memory lane while she is cooking dinner, her arthritic fingers chopping vegetables slowly and rhythmically. “I could have chosen from so many men,” she always says, “but instead I got married to your daddy.” She laughs at this and then shakes her head. “But you know, Sonia, I did that because I listened to my father. When you are young and you are in love, you only see it from that angle, love. But when your family is looking too, then they make sure to see all the angles that you don’t think of.” Being left-handed, she often gestures somewhere in the air when she says “all the angles.” She then dumps the vegetables into the big pot heating on the stove, which is usually preparing some sort of soup. Soup is my mother’s favorite food.

My mother loves to cook. So does my dad. Every night, the two of them cook up a storm, even if they have leftovers from the night before. “For variety,” my mother always says to me whenever I tell her not to cook. “Even if I am old, I don’t want to be eating the same thing over and over again.” My parents relate to each other their events of the day while they cook, and in between their discussion, my mother telephones my grandmother so the two of them can have their gossip session for the day. My mother has a loud voice, and because she has to compete with the fans over the stove during cooking time, it becomes even louder during these phone conversations. The only words I can actually ever decipher are “Oh oh,” which she says with a Filipino accent multiple times during the conversation, I suppose to encourage the proceeding of my grandmother’s narration. After she gets off the phone with my grandmother, my mother will invariably gossip to my father, in English, the entire conversation she has just had. My father will listen intently, setting out the plates and silverware because it is too painful for my mother to reach for these things herself, while asking questions at the right places.

Although my mother complains that my father had it so easy coming to America from India because she had a green card, and even though she and my father always get into at least one kind of argument every day, she can’t deny that the two of them are best friends. They cook together. They eat together. They gossip together. They had five children together. Still, my mother is a critic. She likes to live in the past, detailing how she did this and that for my father when they were newlyweds living on top of a laundromat on University Avenue in Berkeley. “Why are you complaining?” I always ask her whenever she goes off into a rant. “That was then. Look who’s doing all the work now.” The last time we had this conversation, my mother and I were walking alongside the Berkeley Marina. She was using two different canes to help propel her mobility and looked like a cross-country skier in the middle of a snowstorm, especially because she was bundled up in her light green fleece jacket from the Northface outlet and was wearing a muffler and a beanie. Indeed, she was wearing all of the notable articles of clothing except for mittens, but that’s only because her fingers were too swollen to put them on. When I alluded to my father’s workaholic tendencies, my mother laughed at me and then shook her head. Speaking into her muffler, she said, “You are always defending your daddy.” Her voice would have sounded muffled, but because it is so loud anyway, I was able to hear her clearly. She then continued, at her snail’s pace, to walk alongside the Berkeley Marina, because she knows it is good for her to practice walking and she likes to smell the ocean air.

My mother is the most independent and dependent person I know, always reminding my siblings and me of how she came to this country by herself and did this and that for my father. But then she contradicts her self-assertion when she reminds us that our grandfather planned everything for her. And now, with her arthritis and lupus, her disabilities are influencing her pride. So at the same time she complains about everything she had to go through, she admits all that my father is doing for her. She often accompanies him on his business trips, the two of them hitting two birds with one stone by combining work and vacation. My father likes to brag that every time my mother wears a sari to one of these conference dinners, all eyes are on her. And my mother, Bebot, does nothing to deny this. Instead, she just cocks her head, turns her specially constructed nose toward me, and says, “I am still beautiful,” her dark brown eyes doe-like, shaking her shoulders to remind us of her femininity. The she laughs and shakes her head.

~ by suniyee on October 8, 2008.