In art, as in life, introductions are executed with careful, calculated precision. This is true for many things, except for some, like myself. I tumbled forth into this world with only nine months for my mother to prepare for my coming. Unlike other babies who are created in test tubes or offered eggs for in churches, I was born an illegitimate child before my mother, a pretty Economics undergrad, even began writing her thesis. Hours after I was born, she saw me, an exact photocopy of her, shrugged and fell asleep.

My brain was too young then to recall how my mother began to love me, but it happened. Even before I could speak, my mother had already taught me all 26 letters of the alphabet. By seven months, she would say a letter, “A”, and I would point on its equivalent in printed form. I was five when she gifted me my first paperback: it was a Paulinian book entitled “Do you love me?” which I finished in three days. She indulged me in more books as I grew up, sent me to piano lessons, voice lessons, swimming lessons, and dance lessons. My mom insisted that I spoke English—only—which led me to thinking and writing in English.

Now that I am a journalist, I cannot divorce myself from the idea that every word that my fingers type out about any subject is because of my mother. Every pain of my mother bleeds ink on my stories. When she separated from my father, she worked overtime almost everyday to earn enough to send me and my sister to school. When I almost drowned in a family vacation, she jumped to the pool and saved my life. She drove me to my high school soirees and picked me up, without a word, before 12. When I told her I wanted to take an English course for college, a rather impractical choice in a sea of nursing students, she welcomed the idea without the faintest doubt. When I told her the summer before college that I had a boyfriend, she welcomed him with open arms. When I went home late nightly during my rebellious phase, she stayed up until I was home, her thumb calloused from dialing numbers for hours. When I finally graduated from UP, without honors, she sat there at the back of the auditorium (unlike the parents of honor graduates who went up the stage with their children), but with the proudest smile I ever saw because it was her sweat and blood that brought me there. Every sentence that I write is from an understanding of the world which she made me see.

And every breath I take to this very day is because of perhaps the most difficult decision she had to make: to end her youth to let me live. Whenever I hear about young women who abort their babies because they “aren’t ready,” I always say, “If all unwed girls thought like that, I wouldn’t be here.” My mother, at 21, not only gave me life, she allowed me keep it. She took her fate and let me have mine.

Every story I write that sees print is not merely a confluence of letters and punctuation marks. Here is my secret: I write with my mother’s blood.