I think I met my mother too late

I think I met my mother too late.

Not in the literal sense. I’ve known her my whole life. I know the sound of her footsteps, the way she calls my name, the exact tone she uses when she’s tired but still trying to be patient.

But I met her too late as a person.

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And isn’t it the tragedy of being someone’s child? We meet our parents halfway through their story. We arrive after they have already been shaped by things we will never fully know, like first heartbreaks, abandoned dreams, and younger versions of themselves that existed before us. We only ever know them as mother, as father, as the people who raised us, but rarely as people who once belonged only to themselves.

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It started when I stayed at our home in the province for a vacation. Living alone in Manila, where everything always feels loud and hurried, I found myself longing for home in a way I hadn’t before. The days there moved differently—slower, softer, and quiet enough to make room for things I usually miss.

Or maybe it was the distance, too. Maybe because I had simply spent so much time away that coming home felt like returning with new eyes. Whatever it was, I began to see my mother differently—not just as someone moving through the edges of my life, but as someone with a life of her own. Someone I had somehow never truly looked at.

Because for the longest time, she was just Mom. Nothing before that. Nothing outside of that. Just the role she played in my life, as if she had always existed in relation to me.

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I never stopped to consider that she had a life that didn’t include me. That years ago, she must have woken up with her own plans. Her own version of happiness that had nothing to do with raising a child, building a home, or making sure someone else was okay.

I will never know what that version of her looked like. Was she quieter back then? Did she laugh more easily? Did she ever want to leave everything behind and go somewhere no one knew her?

Sometimes, when I look at her, I notice how her eyes drift for a second, as if she is remembering something she no longer speaks about, or moving through a place I am not meant to follow.

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And so there is a thought that has been sitting with me lately, one I do not like, but cannot seem to let go of. What if my mother had a life she wanted more than this one? Not because she doesn’t love us. I know she does. I’ve seen it in all the small, unremarkable ways that don’t get written down or thanked properly. But love does not erase everything else. People do not stop wanting things just because they become parents.

So where did those wants go? Did they fade slowly, like something worn down by time? Or did she fold them carefully inside herself, keeping them there because there was no longer space in her life to open them again?

There are days when I come home and find her staring at the rice fields behind our house a little too long, as if another version of her still exists somewhere—waiting. Somewhere in the background of the life she ended up living. She looks back with misty eyes and offers a small smile, and later that night I wonder if some part of her still aches for the life she never got to live—the one she traded for us—and whether that version of her is at peace or still wondering.

Sometimes, I imagine another life. One where she became everything she once wanted to be. A life where she never married my father, never had me—where she chased every dream she ever had.

In that life, we would never meet. But in that life, she would finally be free.

If there really is another life—and I don’t even know if I believe in it—I hope she got one that did not ask her to give up so much of herself. I hope she got to choose without thinking about anyone else first. I hope she got to fail, try again, change her mind, and start over without feeling like everything depended on her getting it right the first time. I hope she got to be selfish, even just a little.

In that life, maybe she never meets my father. Maybe she never really becomes my mother. And I know how terrible that sounds. I know how wrong it feels to even let the thought exist. But if that is the life where she gets to be fully herself—where nothing had to be set aside or sacrificed—then I think that is a life she deserved, too.

I smiled at her when she looked at me like I was still her child, thinking something silly. She raised her eyebrows, like she always does when she is trying not to show too much. Even with eyes a little glossy from whatever she was feeling, she still looked at me with that familiar softness. Like I was something she chose, over and over again.

I could’ve said it. I could’ve told her, Ma, I would give up everything just so you could live that life. But I didn’t.

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Instead, I just asked, “Ma, anong ulam?”

—————-Rea Joy Reyes, 24, is a retail insights analyst at a consultancy firm in Mandaluyong.