what did my mom ever do to you!?!

Call me anything you want. Seriously, I could care less. Back in high-school, bashing each other out of our wits was our favorite pastime. We treated it as a game, almost a sport. It was a free-for-all; you can come in anytime you want, land some decent jabs and then occasionally go below the belt, then leave if you can no longer take the beating (but we would hunt you down anyway!). There was but one rule: no blood, no foul. When it was on, it was really on. It was “front-stabbing” at its finest!

So choose your poison and let’s bash each other senseless. I dare you! But please…leave my mom out of it.

If there’s one phrase that causes my blood to jump out of my veins, it’s “putang ina mo”. I’m no expert in Tagalog but I think that roughly translates to “son of a bitch”. I know, I stated that I can take just about any insult. But what I hate about it is that it has less to do with me and is more of a derogatory statement towards my mother. Do you even know who my mother is? If there’s one thing she’s not, it’s a bitch! And she definitely is not a whore!

It’s funny how we Filipinos claim to be so family oriented and yet willfully call each other’s mothers “whores”. I know I’m running the risk of sounding feminist, but that has to be the worst thing you can call a woman. The worst part about this insult is that there is nothing you can do about it; it implies that it is predisposed from birth. You are condemning a person not only from the moment he took his first breathe but even before that.

I also think that this insult was birthed from people’s distaste for responsibility. No one wants to be accountable. No one wants to own up to their responsibilities. So they end up living miserable lives. And what do they do? They blame it on the generations before them. Someone once said, “we are the masters of our own destiny.” Whatever wrongs our parents, heck, even our great-grandparents did in the past should not dictate how we live our present and future. Maybe your mother did make mistakes in the past. So what? You are not living the life your mother once lived. Don’t blame your problems now on something someone else did before.

The phrases have become so overused that we have become desensitized towards it. Just like the daily dose of bashing my high-school friends and I dished out to each other, it becomes so repetitive that it becomes second nature and that you don’t care so much about it anymore. We become like tape recorders, just yapping whatever we were programmed to say without putting any thought into it.

Exodus 20:12 tells us to “honor your father and mother, so that you may live long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” The last I checked, our country sucks and we curse our mothers. I’m just saying…

~ by jedomps on March 2, 2008.