Rebecca Gonzales Zalamea is my mother.

Call her Becky for short.

She had me when she was barely 18.

So she was this tiny 18-year-old mom in the early 80's.

After finishing college, she started to work.

Every day she would commute from Quezon City to Manila, where she worked as a designer.

Every day she would work hard and go home to greet me and prepare dinner.

She worked to buy my milk, clothes, pay our bills, send me to good schools, pay for my swimming and ballet and speech classes, pay for our weekend holidays with our aunts and cousins, and give me some money to buy food in the school cafeteria.

She taught me to pray and we walked to church together every Sunday.

She was not one to show weakness.

Rest and solitude were for losers.

She kept working even when she was pregnant with little Zoe.

She worked through the most turbulent times of her life, and worked her way up until she was not longer a mere employee but an indispensable figure in her firm.

She established her own line of clothing.

She put up her own business.

Everything we ate, used and enjoyed were from the fruits of her labor.

I always thought she worked really hard.

She would take a vacation once in a few years.

She loved the States and Hongkong.

Straight from the plane, she would make sure we were good girls, and go back to work.

I cried to her a lot of times and she didn't like it.

I didn't like it either.

I wanted to be strong for her and I wanted her to see that I took after her when it came to possessing strength and soldiering on in the face of adversity.

And then the daily grind stopped this year.

She took a minute to rest and catch her breath.

She is regaining her strength and can't wait to get back on track.

That's my Mama.

I've been witnessing her tireless and selfless efforts to keep our family intact for 28 years.

Many people tell me that they admire my mother's resilience, and that they wish they could be like her.

Well, it hasn't been easy to get to where she is.

It took a lot of twists and turns.

But at present, we have never been happier.

You are an amazing mother, Mama.

You deserve the world.

I love you.