CAUGHT OFF GUARD: A Personal Narrative

When everything goes right, prepare.

In life, when everything comes easy, you must prepare for a hard one. When I was about to sleep on the 22nd day of October 2008, I heard a loud and angry voice of my mama due to my ditse’s fault. I was just nine years old back then that’s why I just ignored the loud voice of my mama and continued playing on the phone of my papa. I was so carefree to the point that I just thought to myself that, “Tomorrow, mama’s anger will just disappear and I will hear her soft and loving voice again.” But on the next morning, an event caught me off guard, very off guard.

I was busy wearing my well-ironed uniform, shorts, and newly bought pair of shoes when I heard my papa screaming out of frustration. He found mama laying outside the house, staring at the sky, paralyzed. I was so surprised back then, very, very surprised. It was my first time seeing my papa crying out loud and that made me so scared because I knew something really bad happened to mama. Everybody in the house can’t believe on what happened to mama, we were just staring quietly to our parents as they’re getting farther and farther while tears keep coming down our pair of surprised eyes. I didn’t realized that the loud voice of my mother last night might be the last time that I got to hear her voice.

My mama got a heart stroke and half of her body was paralyzed. They stayed in the hospital for almost a month, and in those days that our parents were not in the house, me and my ditse were living independently in the house. My papa only goes home to give us a new batch of groceries to be used while they are still in the hospital. It was hard, it was something new to us since we were used to be taken care of our parents.

When they got home after mama’s discharge, everything changed. The hospital bills made our family savings disappear. Mama’s paralyzed state made her file a retirement from her teaching profession and as a result, the income of our family was decreased drastically. Our papa got busier of work to cope up with our expenses and to take care of mama that’s why our time with papa was also affected. We tried everything that can be tried for mama’s recovery, but up to now, she’s still paralyzed. So the only thing that we were left to do was to accept mama’s state, and to accept its changes to our family and to our life. In this story of our family, I realized that life is really like a wheel, we are sometimes in the upper side and sometimes in the lower side. The best solution to encounter this reality of life is preparation. I must prepare for something that I don’t know, because as what I have experienced, all sorts of things can happen in an unexpected way and those can affect you in a large way.