Mom's short stories, long life: The cave dwellers

Already a mountaineer

In the 1920s, Grandma Catalina was born a twin, and the one who survived. She was adopted into a family member’s already poor family. With a world war raging on, another mouth to feed, and another soul to protect, Grandma’s family married her off to Grandpa Victorino, a man twice her age. They didn’t know each other or love each other, and the pair was chosen because Grandpa had been to America. By Filipino standards in the 1940s, this was the equivalent of life’s shield of armor. Find yourself a man who has been to, and worked in, the most successful place in the world, and you’re set for life. Yet, Grandma never loved Grandpa in the way we understand marriage in our modern, Western world, and it would stay that way for the rest of her years.

And so, as an 18-year-old, Grandma gave birth to Mom on July 20, 1944, in a barrio named Dallangyan, located in the Luzon island of the Philippines. The world had been shaken by the second world war, the Japanese taking hold of what they could as their feats to conquer were slimming. The story goes, if you are a woman, the Japanese will rape you. If you have a baby, the Japanese take their swords, throw your infant into the air and slice right through them. In response, Mom, Grandma and Grandpa escaped to the nearby Barawas mountains, and into the caves for protection. They packed their newborn and headed for the mountains, roughly 10 kilometers away, a road literally less traveled. They trudged through the landscape of thick forest and no paths to lead them there.

Mom was the first child of Grandma, giving her one hell of a crash course on first-time motherhood. A cave in the mountains is where these three people, who barely knew each other, got a crash course in survival, superstition, and sanguineness. Climbing to and hiding in a cave was treacherous but finding a solution to cave ants chewing away at Mom’s newborn flesh, was the next uphill battle.

It may be unusual to describe Mom’s name here but it is an important detail in this odd sequence of events. Mom’s birth and baptismal name was Cristeta Flores Balcita. With no hospital, no running water, no basic necessities for survival; in desperation to keep her alive, Grandma fell back on one particular superstition, one of likely dozens that she truly believed and practiced throughout her incredibly religious and superstitious-filled lifetime. Apparently, switching one's baptismal name to another name grants a second chance at life. Mom’s grandmother’s name, Carmen, is someone who lived a long time. Pleading the universe for a similar fate, Grandma changed Mom’s name to Carmen. The ants stopped ravaging her flesh and, to this day, Cristeta is mostly known as and called by her changed name, Carmen.

In Spanish, the name Carmen comes from the word, garden, a fitting name for the woman with a green thumb, and a plot of land that offers second chances at life.