It's All Coming Back To Me Now

My neighbor is energetically belting out Celine Dion’s “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” in a very loud karaoke machine on a school night.  My son is creating dialogues for his toys. I am thinking of what topic to write about for my writing job.  I survived the first two days in a totally new line of work.  I endured an hour of interview done by friends of mine pretending to be all formal for the recording sake. I was able to differentiate between raise and rise.  Thanks to a friend who gave me a tip.  Even if it meant I had to study about transitive and intransitive verbs.  I got the answers to 41 out of 50 extremely difficult questions in vocabulary, sentence structure and prepositions. How do you know what disquietude means unless it is used in a sentence really.  Thank you to freerice.com.  It allows you to donate grains of rice to Cambodia for every correct answer on any given subject, including vocabulary where I learned the meaning of the above word.  Miracle indeed, I must admit, I am pretty bad when it comes to punctuations and prepositions. My communication skills, rely mainly on “what sounds right must be right”.  Makes me wonder now what I must have been busy with when my grade school teacher was teaching us about grammar. Must be the voice of Robby Roza of Menudo, not knowing at that time what his gender preference was. Oh but wait, I remember being sent to division level literary competitions in English.  Yes! It’s all coming back to me now.

Now I can smell the aroma of fish cooking in vinegar with lots of ginger. Very tempting, but I need to restrain myself.  That would entail more than a cupful of rice, and that would be an overload of carbs.  I have already finished 2 bars of my favorite Cadbury Fruit and Nut while desperately looking for forums on career and employment.  Blame it on someone who came home from the Middle East and decided to bring us a thousand and one sinfully tempting brown potions wrapped in purple things. I am constantly trying to lose weight.  I have a million and one reason why I should.  The most pressing is the fact that in two weeks time, I, yes, I,  a 71 kilogram-38-year-old mother of 1 is going to join 8 beauty queens, (including Venus Raj and Diane Necio) in a fashion show.  Before you completely let your jaws drop, I should add that I am 5 feet 7 inches in height.  Unfortunately my weight is not fairly distributed. Everyday I look at myself in the mirror and I see my double chin.  A dear friend suggested the “Dukan Diet”.  She has already started with it, and already she looks way better than the Duchess who lost weight through this diet. And I am still procrastinating.  Why I am agreeing to sashay on a runway looking like the famous whale shark really beats me. “The things I do for love” as my son would say over and over every time I ask him to do an errand for me, and that comes with a big sigh I may add.  Yes. Love for my mentor is what’s driving me to do a crazy thing. The mentor who, exposed me then a 17 year-old-girl to the world of modeling and beauty pageants.  Yes. It’s all coming back to me now.

Now my son is asking me if the fish that he is eating is dead. (My son loves to eat fish).  To which I answered, “Yes”.  And he asks again, “but why mama?”  Really, how do you explain that when you know anything you say will elicit more questions from him?  He is a very clever and inquisitive kid.  The issue of who he takes after being a constant debate between my husband and me.  Just the other day, when I dropped him off to school, he told me that he wants a certain classmate to be his girlfriend.  “Yeah right”, I said.  “How about (naming another)?” the daughter of a showbiz personality that lives in our village and goes to the same class as my son.  To which he grumpily answers, “No mama, not her please, I like (naming the other one) because she is very pretty”, putting heavy emphasis on the word “pretty”. (Trust me; the showbiz daughter is pretty with a capital P) What does my son know about that anyway?  In this regard, I can safely say that he does not take his taste in women from his father. Ha. Ha.  And I can also definitely say that I am a running candidate for the worst mother in law title in the face of the earth.  And to think that I am the daughter of the best mother in the world.  I have but one son and it took me years of waiting and millions of prayers and tears before he came into our lives and yes, it’s all coming back to me now.