It’s A Happy New Year!

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I love new year’s. There is always something so powerful about new beginnings and clean slates. It makes me want to try harder to become a better person.

Of course, a new year would also mean that we are leaving another year behind. I’m another year older in a few  months and that’s another year of my life that I could not get back. Did I make it worthwhile?

I spent the holidays back in my hometown, in my parents’ house. The holidays are always a good time to be with family and reconnect with old friends. I also get to spend 2 precious weeks with my daughter, without any nanny, and that is always a good thing.

Daughter. If for nothing else, the past year had been worthwhile because of her. She had her first birthday last November and everyday I am reminded that I’m not the only one who is getting old. She is getting old as well and she will never be this young again ever. And I’m gonna miss it. At the same time, I love it that she is growing up. The can run on her own now. She knows how to explore. She calls me Mommy. And now she starts to appreciate the stuffed animals I have been buying for her. It’s bittersweet. Motherhood really is full of paradox.

New Year’s really gets me so sentimental. At the same time it gets me all excited about new possibilities. There are so many things I want to do. Most of them are resolutions from last year that I never fulfilled and want another shot at this year. All good things for sure. The trick is the action.

In any case, Happy New Year to all of us and may this year be better than all the other years that came before.

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Back to Regular Programming

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So I found out yesterday that my mother was being discharged from the hospital. So far so good. Owing to the fact that her stomach had been recently reduced to half its size, she’s still on a soft diet. But she is recovering from the operation pretty well. It may seem impossible in the beginning but people do survive all sorts of shitty stuff by sheer will power. My mother is a living testament. A day after her operation, my mother was almost back to her usual self:

“Take that away. I don’t want to use that.”

“I don’t care what the doctor says. I’m not using that breathing contraption with this asinine tube thingy on my nose.”

“Do not give the baby some goddamned chocolates when she has cough!”

My  mother. A drill sergeant in sickness and in health. I think, all the more in sickness.

But she is up on her feet again I hear. And though, she has to take it easy for a couple of months, my mom being back at the house is a good thing. The house could really use her domestic powers again. I’m not saying she has to do housework. We hired house help before I left to do that. But I think it would do her good to be the lady of house again. I had to do it while she was in the hospital but I could not do the role the justice it rightly deserves. It is a big house by my standards (because I live in a shoebox). And they have 3 dogs. Dogs make everything filthy. But at least I cleaned and restocked the refrigerator. Plus I made sure that laundry was regularly done. And I cooked some, to the relief of my father and youngest brother. The day I arrived, I opened the ref and it was dirty, it smelled and was full of empty food containers. My mom had been in the hospital for almost 2 weeks at the time.

Me: What have you been eating?

12-year-old brother: Eggs and… eggs.

He said he was gonna say hotdogs but he almost forgot they have been out of hotdogs for 3 days. My first order of business was to go to the supermarket. I swear I saw the word relief spelled all over my dad’s face.

But that was until early last week. As of last Thursday, I was back in the war zone disguised as our office. And the next two days were spent going over my 800+ emails. I am not even kidding. I wish I was. Two weeks is a long time to be gone for my position. Especially if you left in a hurry and did not have time to turnover stuff to someone else. But the fort held while I was away and I could not express how thankful I am to my bosses and my co-workers who had allowed me to spend that time with my family and covering for my gigantic share of the workload. I still have a job. God bless you all.

The only other good thing that came out of the horrific two weeks, aside from my mom’s operation being successful, was that I got to spend 13 whole days with my kid. No nanny. Only the occasional grandpa/aunt/uncle trying to score some babysitting time with her. Wherever I go, she goes. We had no choice. I could not get rid of her. She could not get rid of me. I loved it. In all that commotion, I never even thought of taking a picture. But that is okay. It’s really not as if I’m gonna forget that  this episode in my life ever happened. It’s just that when I spent that much time with my baby, I realized that she’s really grown. She’s almost not a baby anymore. And I prayed that she does not think that I have not been there enough. And it makes me think that I would like another child again. Someday.

Not good.

A Series Of Unfortunate News

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I’ve received more bad news this month than I ever did my entire life.

3 weeks ago…

Mom: Hello. I’m in the hospital.

Me: What? Why? Is it your diabetes?

Mom: No, I’m having a stomach-ache. Nothing fancy. I had myself admitted so that I will have a reason to get some time off. I’m on grave yard shift this week.

(My mother is playing hookey. She is hard-working but grave yard shift is killing her.)

4 days later…

Mom: I’m still at the hospital.

Me: Whoa! Isn’t that over-extending?

Mom: Actually, my stomach-ache has increased in magnitude and none of the medication seems to be working. They are trying to find out what is wrong with me.

Me: Perhaps it’s gastroenteritis.

Mom: Well, they’ve given me something for that but it’s not working. I’ll call you when they find out. I hope they do soon because I’m bored. I wanna go back to work.

(My mother is not always this fickle.)

After 2 days…

Dad: I’ve scheduled her to go through all these tests. Her stomach-ache has gone worse.

Me: Our CEO will be in town this week and I will be in a lot of meetings. But call me as soon as you know something.

After another 2 days…

Dad: The ultrasound picked up a mass just under her stomach. She has to go through an endoscopy and biopsy.

Me: What? What mass? How big is it?

Dad: I don’t know. It’s a mass. How big could it be? I will call you when they know what it is.

(My father is worried like hell but he is not really a detail-oriented person. And really. You have to wait one week after hospital confinement before they find out what is wrong with you? Third-world medical system. Unbelievable.)

2 days later (July 11, Wednesday)

Me: Well? Did they get the result of the biopsy?

Dad: Not yet. We probably won’t know until Saturday.

Me: Ok, that is it. I’m coming home. I’ll be there on Friday. I’ll need to get tickets for me and the baby and make some arrangement from work so I’ll be busy tomorrow but pick us up at the port on Friday.

Saturday morning (seeing my mom for the first time after 2 months)…

Me: Mom, your stick-thin! Look at you! Look at your arms. You’re just skin and bones.

Mom: I can’t keep food down. I keep throwing it up so I stopped eating.

Me: Dad! How can you let this happen!

Dad: Don’t look at me. You know how she is.

(My mother has a mind of her own. You really can’t tell her to do something she doesn’t like.)

Monday  morning (facing a new doctor who was referred by the previous one…)

Doctor: We got the result of the biopsy this morning.  The mass we found just below your stomach is a tumor. Actually, it is cancer. You have stomach cancer.

(Awkward silence.)

Doctor: Unfortunately, that is all we know for now. That is all the biopsy can tell us. We do not know the extent of it yet. That is why I’m going to advise you to undergo another series of tests. Would you want to do that?

Me, Mom, and Dad: Yes! (louder than necessary)

Doctor: Good. I will need you to sign a consent form.

(As if the tests will kill my mother. Before, I felt like we were all waiting for a death sentence. Now, the death sentence has come and we are waiting for the day of the execution. Morbid, I know.)

Wednesday morning…

Doctor: It was worse than we thought.

(Deafening silence. At this point, I felt like I was being executed and it was death by bludgeoning with a heavy object. I do not know how my mother felt.  I could not remember very well the conversation that transpired but  it went along these lines.)

Doctor: The cancer had already eaten up half of your stomach. It is obstructing the food’s way out of the stomach that is why you are always vomiting when you eat. The good news is it hasn’t spread to your other internal organs yet and based on the CT Scan, it is not connected to any major blood vessels so we should be able to remove it. Of course, that is not a guarantee. We need to be able to see it ourselves before we can know for sure. But there is hope.

(A silver lining which I failed to comprehend at the time. All I really saw was the word cancer and what I thought was a tumor. I’ve never seen a tumor before but I was pretty certain that ugly thing I was imagining was a tumor. I only saw the dark side of the situation. I never even knew I had that in me.)

Doctor: So we have two options. Number one is for you to undergo an operation that will remove the affected area. That is what I will recommend. That is your best chance of survival. Number two, if we find out that we cannot remove it because it is after all attached to a major blood vessel, we will need to do a bypass. In this procedure, we will disconnect your intestine to where it is currently attached to your stomach and reconnect it to the upper part of your stomach which is not yet affected by the cancer. This way you can eat without throwing up. But since we are not able to remove the cancer, it will grow bigger and spread and your chances of survival…

(The good doctor trailed off at that part, that much I can remember. I cannot believe a medical practitioner will do that. Were we supposed to fill in the blanks?)

Doctor: So those are our options. I recommend we do the first one. But it’s entirely up to you whether we do anything or not. Do you need a moment to decide?

(There is only really one option, you moron. My mother does not have a death wish. She’s 56 and can kick your ass in physical combat if she did not have cancer. I was not really angry with the doctor. He had been very kind to us. I was just angry, period.)

Mom: I do not need a moment to decide. Let’s do the removal procedure.

Doctor: Ok, we will do the operation on Friday. I will give you 2 days to regain your strength for the operation. You have not been eating very well so you are weak. You will not be eating through your mouth anymore. We will have food introduced to your system through an IV. You will be transfused with blood one day before the operation. Another doctor will check you on Thursday and declare you fit for operation. If she does not give you clearance, we will have to postpone the operation. Do you understand?

Mom: Yes.

Doctor: Ok, then. I will go ahead and make arrangements.

Friday morning…

(She was wheeled to the operating room at 10 am. My brother, my dad’s sister and I accompanied her until just outside the OR. We let my dad stay at her hospital room to rest. He is faint-hearted. We do not want him to have a heart attack out of stress and anxiety over my mother’s condition. We waited the whole day. At 4:30pm, at last…)

Nurse: The doctor wants to see you.

Me: They are done operating?

Nurse: Yes. All other questions, the doctor can answer.

(We waited another 30 minutes outside of the OR before the doctor showed up.)

Doctor: Where is your dad?

Me: He is upstairs. We’ll be the ones to tell him.

Doctor: Ok, here is the part we removed from your mother.

(Whereupon, he showed us bloody stuff in a pan.)

Doctor: This is half of your mother’s stomach that we had to cut off. This is the tumor here…

(He pointed to a thing that was protruding on the thing. The Tumor. It is ugly but not as ugly as I thought. I’ve always had a bad imagination.
But I did not wait all this time to see a god-damned tumor.)

Me: How is the operation?

Doctor: We were able to remove it as you can see…

Me: So it’s successful?

Doctor: Yes, it was successful.

(Big sigh of relief from all of us.)

Doctor: She is not out of danger just yet. The next two days will be crucial. She will be wheeled into the recovery room for another 4 hours. After that she will be taken back to her room where she will continue to be monitored. We need to avoid her getting an infection in the lungs or in the wound…

(I did not hear the rest of it. The operation was successful. It is the best news I have heard for a long time. The only good news I have heard in 3 weeks, in fact. Fortunately, it is the news the mattered.)

The Big C Nightmare

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My mom is battling cancer.

Having said that does not make the fact easier. It is not something I imagined would happen to me or my family. It’s something that happens to other people. My mom’s case has even challenge everything that I know and read about the probable cause of said disease. My mother is the poster girl of healthy living. She does not drink, has never smoked a cigarette her whole life, does not like candies or sweets, does not like Coke and other sodas, does not even like burgers or meat. She likes fish and vegetables, lots of vegetables. As a matter of fact, if it had happened to me or to my dad, it would have been easier to accept. Of course, I would not want that but if there was ever a healthy meter, my dad and I would have been at the extreme unhealthy end, while my mom would have been at the extreme opposite.

I think I am still in the denial stage. I had to muster up all of my strength not to challenge the doctors into redoing all of her tests as I am pretty sure it will yield a different result. People tell me to be strong. I do not know how to be strong when the strongest person I know is merely skin and bones, lying in a hospital bed connected to an IV with food and water, fighting for her life. How can I be strong? Can I buy strength? Is it transferable? I don’t even have it in me to fake strength.

I don’t like dissecting negative feelings. I’d much rather have them dissect my uterus, at least it was life that came out.

And forget what you know about cancer. You cannot avoid it. Cancer chooses you to suffer him and your whole family with you. That’s all there is to it. There is no escape. Just one big nightmare. Even if you manage to wake up, you can’t survive unscathed.

Dealing With Single Mom Guilt

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More than anything, more than the financial challenges even, what I’m finding really hard to deal with as a single mom is the guilt. I feel guilty that I have to leave each morning to work. I feel guilty that I’m gone for most of the day. I feel guilty that somewhere between when she was born and now 8 months later, I have missed or failed to capture an important milestone in her life. Every time I come home in the evenings, when I look at her and she looks back at me with a huge smile on her face, I feel a pain in my heart because she is one day older but I only saw her in the beginning and towards the end of that day. I didn’t see her while she was discovering the world outside. I was not there to help her discover it.

It is painful. And I don’t really know how to make it easier. I want her to need me. But since I’m not around half of the time, I also want her to be independent. It’s a dilemma, this thing. But I have to do what I have to do.

I try to do things that would make the situation more bearable for me. Like on weekends, I spend all of my time with her. I take her everywhere with me if I can. We’re like a package deal. You get me, you get her. If you extend an invitation to me, you are inviting her as well. If I accept, she accepts. I talk to her all the time when we’re together, like she’s another grown up. I tell her I love her a lot. I hug and kiss her a lot. If I were rich, I’d probably buy her a lot of stuff, gifts, and treats. It’s a good thing I am not rich. She would have turned into one hell of a brat.

Sometimes I worry about leaving her with the nanny on a daily basis. A few months ago, I saw this video on Facebook showing what I thought was a nanny abusing and hurting her charge (later I found out she was actually the mother, that awful woman). That freaked me out. I imagined my baby going through the same ordeal. I wanted to go home right then and there. I even entertained the notion of putting up a hidden camera somewhere in the room so that I can spy on them or to make sure that the nanny was not hurting the baby. Of course, I would not have been able to afford that. It’s just one of those things I think of when I’m being paranoid.

But I also worry about the opposite happening. That the nanny is actually really good and my baby will love her more than she loves me. I know . It’s a horrible, horrible thing to think about but I do think of it. I cannot help it.

So there. I have revealed how much the guilt and paranoia is eating me up inside. How do other mommies deal with their own guilt?

It’s Payback Time: Debts Be Gone!

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I’m writing this post on a lunch break, while sitting on a salon, getting a pedicure. So while I’m furiously scribbling, somebody is removing my cuticle. Gross.

It’s not that I am rewarding myself after my 7am client meeting. I am getting the pedi because I have to. My toes are hurting from ingrown nails. It’s excruciating, so getting the nail job is a necessity.

Ok, enough with that.

One of the biggest challenges of being a single mom is the financial aspect. It’s very expensive raising a baby alone. And I am now slowly finding out just how much. Formula, milk, clothes, vitamins, diapers, and, the most pricey baby expense of all, the vaccines. To make the long story short, I incurred debts. It’s from various sources but if you sum it up, it’s considerable for my income bracket. A huge portion of this was from my C-section operation. It was an emergency/unplanned operation and I did not have the necessary funds to cover the cost. So I had to borrow. If you are curious, no, I do not have health insurance or medicare or any of that shit that would have made my life easier. More about that in future posts (maybe).

But now that I am getting income from 2 different sources, it’s finally time to get serious about paying them off. While I still can. Haha. More importantly, I came across Man vs Debt today and I felt empowered to take control of my finances as well.

So here is what I did:

1. List all of my payables.

Every single one of them. Up to the last cent. List all the credit card balances, loans from the bank or other financial institutions and loans from friends. Everything. Be honest. Get it out there and see the extent of your debt and the gaping hole that it is.

2. Find out how much of your monthly income you can spare to pay them off.

What I did is I added all the income I regularly generate from all sources and deducted all of my regular expenses: rent, utilities, transportation costs, groceries, salary for the nanny and all baby expenses I had previously mentioned. 70% of what is left will be used to pay off debts. The other 30% will be used for petty/miscellaneous expenses. Here is an example:

Total income from all sources———————————Php 45,000

Less: All regular expenses————————————(Php 22,000)

Income after expenses—————————————–Php 23,0000

Multiply that number to 70%= Php 16,000–> This is the monthly budget I’m going to use to pay off my debts.

The most important part of this step is to evaluate your finances realistically. How much can you really spare? If you have a particularly huge debt, you may have to let go of a few luxuries. For me, that is no new clothes, bags, or shoes in the next 3 months. But I also do not want to have to compromise my usual budget for, say, groceries and end up scrimping on food or, worse, running out. And I may also allocate a budget for a cheap day-out with the baby once a month.

3. Schedule your payments.

Scheduling your payments is really important if you have multiple sources. It will avoid the guess work every month on who you should pay and how much.  Of course, you will need to take into consideration that some of the payables will due earlier than others and base your schedule off of that. For example, this is my July schedule:

Budget for Debt Payment——————————— Php 16,100

Full payment to X—————————————–(Php 7,000)

50% payment to Y —————————————-(Php 4,000)

Credit card due——————————————–(Php 4,000)

Small portion of payable to Z—————————–(Php1,100)

After coming up with this, I may also be able to come up with next month’s schedule as early as now. I may decide to fully pay Y in August and pay another portion of my debt to Z. Again, the key is to be realistic. Bear in mind that you will not be able to pay all of them in one month. So set the proper expectations before hand.

Now that I have this, I feel pretty freakin’ awesome. I have half of my debt problem solved. Now the other half, which is the harder half,  is sticking to that budget and schedule. Most people will need a referee, a trusted friend or a family member who is going to help them stick to that. But since I have a superhero-slash-goddess complex, I’m going to try and do it on my own. I’m going to give an update on how I ‘m doing on this front from time to time. Wish me luck.

P.S. I had just about enough time to allow the polish to dry a little. Time to go back to the jungle, err, office.

Our Nanny-Free Weekend

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The nanny had to go back to their province for the weekend for a family get-together or something. I embraced the chance to have some quality time with my baby for 2 whole days. For a moment, I was actually scared that she’d grow sick of me. But apparently, 7-month-olds do not get sick of their mommies that easy.

We watched a movie from my laptop. Or rather I watched a movie and she watched me watched it. (Her watching me lasted for 5 minutes, whereupon she launched into a loud unintelligible commentary of God-knows-what, so I switched to earphones.)

The movie is actually Sherlock Holmes, Game of Shadows. I immensely enjoyed it though I found most of the gay moments between Sherlock and Watson awkward. Here is one of those moments:

Damn, they are so good-looking.

I decided to do some cooking, while baby waited. Patiently, may I add.

I wanted to try some of the easy recipes here.

Unfortunately, I’m missing 2-3 elements of the recipes that I wanted to try. So I cooked my trusty old Pork Adobo instead. No, I would not dare post a picture of it. It looks hideous. But it’s not half as bad as it looks.

My baby went through a low appetite phase last month. I have no idea why or what triggered it. It was awful. She’s always had a healthy appetite. I mean, she eats everything and does not stop eating unless you stop feeding her. But the greater part of last month had just been a struggle trying to get her to eat her food. Fortunately, now, she’s back to her old self where she just eats and eats and stops when the food is all gone. She’s even trying to hold her spoon herself now. I know, I’m a lucky mom.

I have not a shred of craftsmanship in me. But I do love paper and I have tried scrapbooking before (I didn’t finish it but that’s beside the point). So I decided to start a scrapbook for Rei. I’m now done with her second month, so that makes me 5 months behind.

The next day, it rained most of the morning so we stayed indoors.

Eventually, it stopped raining and it was time to get some groceries so off we went.

Of course, mom can’t resist looking at beautiful things she can’t afford. So we went from store to store.

So we got tired and had to rest at a place in the mall that serves milk teas (It’s the craze here, I don’t know why).

She is still a happy baby. And look at our shopping shoes! We are the flats kind of girls.

But this is the part she loves best. The push carts!

She was so tired that upon getting home, she only had time to finish her dinner before going straight to bed. Poor dear.

I love weekends. I love doing things with my baby. I love spending time with her. It makes me want to wish that the nanny will take more weekends off.