“She listens to me now,” Heart Evangelista shares, when asked about her relationship with her “mommy-ger,” Cecile Ongpauco.

"Siyempre, ilang taon na ako (Of course, I’m already grown up.). I just turned twenty-eight so we’re so much better, communication is better now,” she was quoted as saying in an article on PEP.ph. “Before… I had really no say about anything. But now, I’m very… she allows me to express myself. And you know, she understands it and I get na rin what I want now. Kaya mas masaya ako sa career ko (So I’m happier with my career now.).”

But though Heart says that she now has full control over her career, she still heeds her parents’ advice.“Parang you’re just more confident ‘cause they’re strongholds, they’re your parents,” she said. “So it makes a lot… it gives you more confidence. But to top it all of, I still know what to do and what’s right.”

When Heart was asked why she only recently had the courage to stand up for herself, she admits that she had to learn crucial life lessons the hard way first before she was allowed the independence she craved.

“I’m very child-like, immature about a lot of things. I’m restless. I really don’t know what I want [before],” she says. “But now, I went through life, I went through the hard way and I learned the hard way… 'Cause, of course, when you reach a certain age, you go through a lot in life and then you become a different person, you develop character. So when they see you develop that character, then they’re a bit more confident with the decisions that you’re about to make. So that’s why they allow you to say what you want and they follow that.”

(Photo courtesy of PEP.ph)