Life is what I make it...
By Maria Robelle O. Lahoz
My life started one rainy Saturday evening of the 16th day of September, when father talks with so much pride and my mother’s glued grin registers her face owing to a new angel who quietly sleeps in her crib. My father divulges that I am just about a size of a decanter who snivels stubbornly, which brought enormous bliss to the heart of many. As a first born child, my only priced possession is the name given to me which is distinctively originated from my parent’s first names “Rolando and Maria Belinda”. Three weeks after I was born, Maria Robelle Oñeza Lahoz was registered in the City Civil Registrar. I then became a star in the whole clan when they welcomed me to Christian world.
Apparently, having a perfect family isn’t always what I always dreamed of…ours embraces the word “broken home”. My parents got separated when I was two, so, my Grandmother took care of me ever since. I don’t know actually what it feels like to have a mom. I grew up with the knowledge that a household doesn’t count a mother. What it feels like to be cared and loved by the person who carried you in her belly for nine whole months I couldn’t really tell. But, I don’t have any bitterness in my heart, I have put aside any resentment that I could possibly feel, and whatever reason why my mother left us I don’t need to question. I just thought that my parent’s tastes and ideals are built into two different spheres; grateful I am that I have someone like my Lola Aring whom I am fond of calling “Nanay”. Growing up with an old-school and an uptight grandmother is not easy, everything appears to be forbidden. But I believe that setting rules in and out of the house is for my own safety. I get used to it while growing up, but, sometimes I break some. My Grandmother would used to scream about it and to her hysterical habit she would spank me. But I still adore her despite of the painful whip she gave me. I know it is an indication that I am cared and loved.
My childhood years were one of the happiest times of my life. I grew up with distant relatives who belong to a family of medical doctors who owns a general hospital. Every weekend, my grandmother who is a pharmacist there would fetch me at school and let me spend the weekend in the hospital, there; I met different kinds of hospital personnel, like doctors, nurses and midwives. Inquisitiveness leads me to watch patients who are undergoing operations from simple wounds to the most delicate ones. I was exposed to hospital life at the age of four. At an early age I know how to answer the phone in a polite way. Sometimes I compete with my cousins in answering the phone whenever we hear it ringing at midday. It is in the hospital that I first learned manners of greeting people in higher positions, and there are times that my grandmother would bring me to social gatherings of physicians and surgeons in a fancy hotel where I was exposed to proper way of meeting people and how to act formal in such occasions. My stay in the hospital taught me valuable things. The doctors who have been my chat mates every weekend would used to teach me some techniques on how to clean my own wounds and how to take medicines without choking. Hospital have been my second home, I have seen emergency situations that can really be heartbreaking, I have seen people come and go in just a snap of a finger, I have seen people grieved, and that’s when I realized how short life is. How valuable it is to live with a purpose. I told myself that when I grow up I want to be a nurse. Because I wanted to help people who are vulnerable when they are ill, I want to assist the doctors at the operating room, I want to clean wounds. I want to bathe the newborn baby. I want to save life.
My mother died when I was six. Although, I haven’t given a chance to see her when she was alive, I still cried a lot upon knowing that she passed away. I saw my father cried harder. That’s the first time I have seen him cried. Maybe, it’s really different when someone who has been very special to you died even if you’re not together anymore. Upon looking at my father’s eyes I am seeing not pain but grief and agony. That time I wondered how it feels to have love and lost. Maybe I wouldn’t really know.
Several years after the death of my mother, my father courted one of the nurses that I have befriended at the hospital, after four years of going steady; they ended up together as a married couple. My father became the happiest man on the planet. That’s the time when I knew how couple enjoy having lunch together no matter how busy they are, who enjoys dancing and singing together, sometimes they would play board games with me at night during weekends, they would go to market every Saturday and cook together. The house was full of laughter since then. And I thought of it as something special and it made me realized how sweet it is to love and be loved.
When I went to college I experienced a few good times, I gained many friends; I met a lot of people of my age who belongs to different cultures and ethnicity. It taught me more about interaction with another human where you give off information about yourself, about your cultural, economic and academic experiences. Meeting someone with different perspectives and point of views really taught me a lot. Simple interactions, that could be absorbed and may have helped to expand each other’s views in life.
College life is somewhat interesting and challenging where you began to fulfill your dreams and ambitions, little by little you fulfill things that will lead you to a higher degree. Unfortunately, my ambition of becoming a nurse will just remained a dream because I just thought of becoming a teacher instead, it all came upon me that not just a nurse who has the ability to save life but a teacher as well, growing up having a sense of maturity and sensibility due to experiences that I encounter, making my life becomes tough and crucial. Decisions made are more practical, one should be wise enough to face the challenges and should be physically and emotionally be ready for every trial that can be hard to bear. My life’s journey doesn’t end in the fulfillment of my ambitions, but rather I will keep on learning lessons in life which is I believe my only freedom. Being successful doesn’t gauge you as a good person; it only means that you are just determined to take the responsibility of fulfilling something worthwhile. “Reality bites” is my philosophy in life, whatever you encounter there would always be disappointments, but you can still patch things up and you can work on it over and over and if it doesn’t, then, you should have alternatives to work on. I don’t get stocked with something that doesn’t really fits. There are many opportunities ahead in store that remains unfold; I just have to explore it. Life is what I make it. It will depend on how I live it or how I want to live it and I know that it will only be meaningful if even in death I would still be remembered as a person who in one way or another really made a difference.
