Josefa Guillermo | CONTRIBUTED
I hope you have a good brunch with your mom on Mother’s Day. And that you remember all the special things she did for you post-brunch.
Today, I’ll remember mine in prayer.
My mother, Josefa Guillermo, died nearly 30 years ago, but she’s still such a vivid memory in my mind. She was a devout Catholic, happy to sit in her room and pray an endless rosary.
I think she’d consider Pope Leo XIV as God’s gift to the world. I don’t think she’d mind that he wasn’t the Filipino front-runner. Oh that would have been nice. But Leo the American is needed as the Trump antidote. (See my previous column).
My mom was a green card holder until the conservatives started cutting social services to the old on fixed incomes. That radicalized her to become a citizen and activist. She was anti-Reagan to the core. If she were alive today, she’d think Trump was nuts.
Ah, but Pope Leo XIV would be seen as the anti-Trump and worthy of the papacy.
“He’s for the poor,” she would say if she were alive. “He’s not for the billionaires.”
I can hear the words in her Filipino accent, after which she’d ask if I prayed today.
Of course, Mom, later. I’m writing this now.
For entertainment, my mom would watch her favorite TV shows like “MacGyver.” While my mom preferred prayer, MacGyver relied on his wits to figure a way out of just about any problem.
And then Mom would watch me on the news, when KRON was the NBC affiliate in San Francisco.
She couldn’t believe a Filipino could be paid for just talking about the news. She had lived the relatively hard immigrant life, both here and in the Philippines.
She didn’t see what I did as being very “hard” at all.
“You wear a suit, makeup. And you talk, ” she’d say in that mom sarcastic way, a reminder that she wasn’t always so reverent. “Hard life.”
I did report on murders, fires and the like, some hard news. But nothing as hard as what my mom lived through. She was a young woman in Manila during the Japanese occupation, trying to avoid being forced into service as a “comfort woman.” Working in a dress shop, she hid under sewing machines, and kept a low profile. She only survived when a patron of the shop offered her the chance to come to the US as her “niece” after World War II.
In San Francisco, my mom met a group of other Filipina women who became a community near St. Dominic’s Church. In that group of Filipinos that defined the San Francisco Filipino American community, she met my father, whom I talk about a lot. (Mostly because I never talked to him).
Soon after, my parents were married. And my father was always working. It was mostly my mother who raised my sister and me.
Josefa and Willie Guillermo | CONTRIBUTED
I’d say, my mom’s most important task was potty-training. And she had a trick. She’d place me on the toilet and then had me call for her when I was done.
“Mommy I need you,” I would say, my universal refrain for help.
When we first began she would attend to me dutifully, cleaning me up like a human bidet.
But then something changed.
“Mommy I need you,” I would say. And then it stopped being so automatic. Sometimes she arrived quickly. Most times she did. But sometimes she was busy, or just didn’t hear. Or maybe pretended not to hear.
I’d freak out.
“MOMMY, I NEED YOU!!”
“Mommy? MOMMY?” “MOMMMYY!!!”
She’d come when she thought I fell in the toilet.
But frequently, she was busy in the kitchen or with something else, and she made me clean up all by myself.
It may have seemed accidental, but it took care of potty training. I had to do it on my own.
Imagine that, my mom had a method. And it worked.
I think about that lesson because as much as it practically took care of a major thing like youthful toileting, it also bonded me to my mom.
The refrain was correct. I needed my mom.
And to this day, I can hear in my head, me calling out for her, over and over, singing that phrase like a broken record.
It was a youthful song of love.
Mom taught me to clean up, which I think I learned well.
But throughout the years, she’d also talk about loving and respecting others. Even your enemies, as Jesus would do.
And she’d connect prayer and being spiritual in the practical context of having humility and staying humble.
Unfortunately, those lessons did not come to me as easily as toilet training.
As I think of her today, I realize those were the more important lessons that would have spared me some grief throughout the years.
Those messes were far greater in my adult life than they should have been.
She tried. But I didn’t listen well enough.
But I can hear her clearly now.
And hopefully, as I pray for her soul on this Mother’s Day, she can hear me too.
Mom’s wisdom, her love, so many years after, I still need it all.
Emil Guillermo is an award-winning journalist, news analyst and stage monologuist. He writes for the Inquirer.net’s US Channel. He has written a weekly “Amok” column on Asian American issues since 1995. Find him on YouTube, patreon and substack.
See him tell a story May 12, May 19 and June 2 at The Marsh in San Francisco at 7 p.m. Click here for tickets.
