It’s easy to say I’m a feminist. It’s easier, sometimes, than being a daughter who pays attention.
In class, I learned the vocabulary to understand women’s suffering the same way people in prayer do—in earnest, reverently, with the appetite of someone trying to name their way out. Yet, it is also my greatest sin: while I was busy learning how to advocate for "Women" in the bigger picture, I still failed to translate the grief of the woman nearest to me. We grow old enough to recognize our mother’s humanity, and suddenly, cannot separate hurt from empathy the way we once used to. We cannot demand “be better” without also hearing the cruelty—placed under the same sun and the same weight of circumstance, would you have been better?
The failure is simple: I mistook her availability for permission to stay curious about everything else; she can be inches away for years and still be a stranger. In Kyung-Sook Shin’s Please Look After Mom, there is a question that disturbs the easy silence we keep around her: “Did you ever think of Mom as a person who was once a girl?” So I wonder, what did my mother want to be? Did she also listen to radio stations as I did growing up, and what kind of music did she actually like? I wonder about the girl she was before I existed to witness her. Was she chatty, unbearable in the way girls are allowed to be before they learn to shrink; was she the brightest in class, or just quiet enough to survive it? What kind of boys did she like, and would I hate them on instinct if I knew?
Mom could’ve been a teenager angry at the world, with dreams she had to trade for survival, with hobbies she no longer does because they didn’t lead anywhere “practical”—a whole girlhood the way daughters assume only they have. My want to understand the world was generous, it became a habit aimed at everything else, but my own mom. To me, Mom had always been Mom.
When our mother is reduced to “Mom,” the child inherits a simplified story: she has always been like this, she has always existed in this form, she has always been meant to carry. My mom had me at twenty-six; I’m turning twenty this year, so her life has an entire first chapter, a longer existence of hers I never witnessed directly. Twenty-six isn’t scandalously young, but sometimes, it feels like she would’ve wanted motherhood under kinder conditions, with the right person beside her.
I know she is grateful for me, for my life and for the person I came to be, that much is clear. Still, for every daughter, we see the phantom limbs of the lives they cut off to survive us. It is a shared, blood-knowledge: the sight of a mother mourning the woman she had to kill in order to make room for us, and we see ghosts of those unlived lives flickering behind her eye. In that moment of looking, we no longer see a parent; we see the wreckage of a woman, and we recognize our own reflection in the debris.
Mothers were daughters first, that fact is simple and almost banal. So, it’s humiliating how much becomes obvious the moment you stop pretending you already know. For starters, I figured that Mom works harder than I ever gave her credit for. We share the same preferences in handbags, but she has always made sure that, even when we stand on the same scale, she finds a way to step off so it would tip favorable to me. She has asked me to do her makeup, but I never got around to do it; until my “later”s turns into never.
I also wonder if all mothers perform these absurd, domestic rituals—she’ll cook an absurd amount the moment she notices I like something even a little, carrots or potatoes, because of a passing preference I’ve long since forgotten. Then, she will get rid of the same ingredients from her plate, saying she’s already too full to take more as if fullness is a switch she can turn on.
I figured that Mom just wants me to have the best parts, even if she’s doing it in such an annoying way—we are then trapped in a mistranslation: she is speaking a dialect of kindness so ancient that I, in my arrogance, mistake it for a language I don't understand.
Mom wouldn’t be Mom without you and I. We are, in fact, the very thing that defines her, but she also isn’t only Mom; and once you have that figured out, you realize that she is a woman who carries her own share of consequences, a person who existed before us and persists despite us. Still, this is a continuous learning journey I am willing to hold, that to love her is to accept this ambiguity, and it can start with the more difficult thing: learning how to read her.
When feminism is said out loud, it can sound almost rehearsed and practiced. Here, it’s closer to prayer: a way of remembering that women are not roles. To understand a mother is to make room for contradiction without rushing to resolve it, to hold space for both gratitude and resentment, and for admiration and critique. It is to return her to personhood, to remember that mothers were daughters before they were reduced into “Mom,” a woman who is not merely a prefix to my life.
So, I wish for us to seize the actuality of our moms every day, because ultimately, every day is all there is.
Written by Zen Villanueva, Insight PH
Zen Villanueva, Insight PH is a dedicated campus journalist and contributor. Their insightful writing sparks meaningful conversations and keeps the community informed.
