“Being a mother is a non-stop calling.”

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day, a day to celebrate mothers – whether they are called Nana, Nanang, Inang, Inay, Nanay, mom, mum, mommy or whatever in the 17 regions of this country of 108 million people.It is a celebration that began in the Philippines in the 1920s, thanks to the Ilocos Norte Federation of Women’s Clubs who appealed to then American Governor General Charles Yeater to declare the first Monday of December as Mother’s Day “to honor these fabulous women who brought forth God’s children into this world.

”The date had been changed, from the Commonwealth to near the millennium rollover in 1998 when then President Joseph Estrada amended a previous presidential proclamation and changed the date to the second Sunday of May.This year, given the strict lockdown protocolscaused by the pandemic coronavirus, within which Mother’s Day is celebrated, many wonder how children and other members of the family would let the mother feel her day tomorrow.In years past, gifts galore – from sparkling stones to gift certificates to lunch or dinner dates, not to mention trips outside the metropolis for those in the capital – were a common sight.Today is a different, and probably a challenge, to those who have been used to taking the mother of the home to posh restaurants or jewelry shops in spic-and-span malls.

We need not pick the brains of children or other members of the household.For those outside of the ancestral homes in COVID-19 time, they can video call their mothers and express the affection of a grateful offspring.Those at home need not go out for the heretofore easy-to-buy gifts from some shopping malls or some such.

These can be replaced – and this is not the limitation — by perhaps a pencil sketch of the mother’s profile, a sincerely whispered affection of gratitude hardly heard by her 364 days of the year – even while being a mother is a non-stop calling.It was the 19th century Swiss Cardinal Gaspard Mermillod who said, aptly, that “a mother is she who can take the place of all others but whose place no one else can take.”Indeed.