President Rodrigo Roa Duterte. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO/JOAN BONDOC
He has risen to the highest executive post in the land, but President Rodrigo Duterte still has one sorrow: that his mother Soledad Roa Duterte never saw this achievement.
At an event in Malacañang to celebrate women, Mr. Duterte paid tribute to his mother, recalling her support for him and the sacrifices she made while he was growing up.
He had always been close to his mother who had faith in him, he said.
“My sorrow really is that I hope she had seen me become President,” he said before a crowd of women supporters on Friday evening.
But the President, who often shares stories of his past as a troublemaking student who took seven years to finish high school, joked that his mother would have been incredulous at the turn of events.
“But of course, I know she would not have believed it. I myself wouldn’t have believed I’d win,” he said.
He said mothers who have children like him should give them some leeway.
“They might become President,” he added.
He recalled how his mother supported her children after she became a widow.
She had a nervous breakdown after the death of her husband Vicente, he said. At that time, he and his siblings were still students. The family also got mired in debt.
When Soledad recovered from her illness, she had to look for the money to send her children to school. He remembered offering to stop his law studies in San Beda and to continue his schooling in Davao, but his mother told him to stay put.
His mother’s inheritance from her parents was used up, but he and his siblings finished school and he became a lawyer.
“That’s why I went home, I never practiced here in Manila. I said I would just help out in our manggahan (mango farm) because I pitied my mother,” he said.
While extolling his mother, he also recalled that she would sometimes hit him.
“When my mother gets angry, she would hit me with whatever she could grab. She was a bit of a child abuser. If that happened now, she would have faced cases,” he recalled with a smile, as his audience laughed.
He also remembered being made to stay before the altar, with his arms spread wide, for three times a week after she converted to Christianity.
But his mother’s support for him never wavered, said Mr. Duterte.
“I am not trying to marginalize my father but I’ve always been close to my mother because she was the only one who stood by me,” he said.
When he dies, he said, he would like his cremated remains to be placed beside the urn that holds his mother’s ashes.
In his speech at the Digong’s Day for Women event in Malacanang, Mr. Duterte also defended himself from criticism that he was a “chauvinist pig.”
“I just like to joke around,” he said.
“I am not really a bad boy, do not believe that. You know me, when was I ever disrespectful to women?” he later added.
He also pointed out that he has daughters.
He shared how he kids around with his female aides, saying he playfully slaps them and jokingly calls a nurse ugly.
When he was Davao City mayor, he came to the defense of women who were abused by their husbands, he further said.
Mr. Duterte had been hit for his statements and actions deemed degrading to women.
He had once catcalled a reporter during a press conference, and had joked about how he should have been first in line to rape an Australian missionary.
Aside from these, he has also received flak for his frequent use of expletives, which spare hardly anyone.
On Friday, he gave no intention of changing this.
He recalled that Sen. Panfilo Lacson had wished that for his birthday, he would become a statesman.
He had tried, he said, recalling how he bought a book about being a statesman, but he could not see himself in it.
“Statesman, statesman. It’s Lacson I see, not me. You just become the next President. I would not become a statesman. Frankly, I’ve never graduated to being really a President,” he said.
His attitude remains that of a mayor, who speaks as if he was in a cockfighting arena and who curses when angry, he added.