DAVAO CITY — For quite sometime now, I have been watching the cartoon series Doraemon. Doraemon is a gadget cat robot from the future, about a hundred years away from our time. He has a four-dimensional pocket where he can keep anything from pins to cabinets to doors. Best of all, he can pull out from that pocket any sort of hi-tech gadgets: lie detectors, doors that can lead you to so many places, even time machine! He has a friend named Nobita who would always come and ask for his help. Doraemon never hesitates to lend his friend some of his gadgets.
I grew so fond of Doraemon that I always wished for a gadget cat. Maybe life would be easier if I have a cat like him. Some wishful thinking, that.
The other night, my mother and I discussed the money I needed so I enroll. She told me everything about how she got the money and how she felt so tired after spending the whole day working for such a big amount. I was so struck by what she said I ended up asking myself what took me so long to realize that Mama is the Doraemon I have been wishing for.
While Doraemon nags at Nobita whenever Nobita does something stupid, Mama never hesitates to do the same to me. Like those cartoon characters, she and I often argue, and yet I always cry on my Mamas shoulders whenever the world turns so cruel to me just like the way Nobita cries to Doraemon.
Although my mother cannot provide me with hi-tech gadgets, she can do almost anything to seek out the good things in life for me and her other Nobitas. Now I realize that every Nobita should not take his Doraemon for granted because a Nobita is totally lucky with a Doraemon always around.
(Ms. Soco is a student of Mass Communications and International Studies at the Ateneo de Davao, where she also served as president of Samahan, the student government. She was the 2003 Mutya ng Dabaw.)
