prompted by nothing more than to keep me away from UP, then the hotbed of student activism. I welcomed the idea of going to Maryknoll, because at last I would experience going to an all-girls school. But it was not meant to be: Maryknoll had a requirement that freshmen should have finished a Filipino history subject and all I had was an irrelevant American history. My mother, against her initial judgment, promptly took me to UP and arranged that I be accepted as an “entrance” scholar based on my good grades. In 1967, it was much easier to enter UP if you had a solid academic record, not to mention, in my case, an educator-mother who also happened to be a “veteran” of World War II for her role in helping Filipino soldiers during those turbulent times. I enjoyed a substantial cut in my UP tuition because I was a “scholar ng bayan. ” I could easily have been influenced by and adopted the more liberal ways of my foreign classmates, but thanks to my mother’s close guidance and example, she kept me grounded on the values of modesty, decency and uprightness.
In college, my parents hardly spent on my education; but not for this reason did Mama start to relinquish her “tight guard- ing” on me. I was already 17 and she was 52, at the peak of her career, a district supervisor who was poised to become assistant superintendent of Rizal. She had other urgent matters to attend to, like her church projects and her many community
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