How I Voted With (And For) My Mother

As early as seven o’clock this morning, I was roused from my REM sleep by my lovely mother, who repeatedly called my name like she was trying to give Siryn and Banshee of X-Men a run for their money until I got up. She said I had to get a move on if I wanted to finish voting and catch a bus back to Manila early. Okay, Nanay. A cold bath, a quick breakfast, and a carefully wrought kodigo later, I was all set to exercise my right to suffrage with my mum, while dear dad decided he’d go and vote upon our return and stayed behind to watch the news.

We arrived at our polling precinct in less than five minutes, what with the public elementary school it’s located in, my old alma mater, just a stone’s throw away from our house. Mum and I were registered to vote in the same precinct (turned out everyone else in our area with the same surname as ours was) and we would have finished in no time if not for the rest of the population of our barangay who came before us. The queue for the voting numbers, not to mention the heat, was of Stygian proportions. It was exhausting enough to make us go back home immediately after securing our voting numbers (mine was 420, a long ways from the number of the last voter who entered the precinct) after a couple of hours of waiting.

A plate of roast chicken for lunch, an hour-long nap, and another cold bath later, it’s back to school for me and my mother. Luckily, it wasn’t long before our numbers, just three integers apart, were called.

My mother was the first to go, but she asked me to come with her so that I might assist her in casting her votes. Not wanting to risk shading beyond the “bilog na hugis itlog” (That’s really how you should refer to the ovals on the ballot. Didn’t you get the memo?) because of her partially blind left eye, she handed me her ballot, her marker, and her list of preferred candidates. It’s the first automated elections in the history of the Republic of the Philippines, I thought, and I get to practice on my mother’s non-sample ballot. So, with a rather shaky grip on the blot-prone marker, I voted in behalf of my mother. And for the umpteenth time in my life, she made me feel important.

When the time came to mark my own choices, my own votes cast with the future of our motherland in mind (I can be coyingly patriotic sometimes.), my hand was less shaky and the whole process turned out to be a cinch. I was particularly relieved to see that our ballots were not rejected by the PCOS machine, whose industrial design seemed to have been inspired by a Dumpster. (I hope that’s not a metaphor for our votes being wasted in the end.)

So, I voted twice. Once for my mother and once for my motherland. While my mother is not running for any position and surely neither is anybody’s motherland, that’s really what I did. And while you may think I’m just echoing yesterday’s Mother’s Day/Election Eve words of Hallmark card wisdom, that is in fact what I did.

I voted twice. Once for my mother, who has poor eyesight, and once for my motherland, who is simply poor. And on both occasions, I was hopeful.