When you have been married for 50 years, as I was in 2002, some interviewer will assume you are an expert in child rearing. And on the dot one came.
What were your children/grandchildren’s ambitions when they were little? he asked. And do you think they’re on the way to achieving them?
That really stumped me. My grandson Juaneo wanted to be a dinosaur, a Tyrannosaurus Rex, to be exact, so he could tear me to pieces. (He was jealous of his younger brother Miguel, who was my flavor of the month.)
Chin-Chin wanted to be a vampire. Quinito was gentle and cuddly and content enough to be eaten. Miguel just wanted to be an “idodot,” an Igorot dancing in Mines View Park. When I asked preteen Majalya if I could get her a faux fur handbag that I would have killed to own, she said, “No, lola, I want to be president of the Philippines.”
I hadn’t been lucky about the ambitions of my own children, either. For my husband’s corporate parties, I used to have “proper” clothes done by Auggie Cordero with my daughter Wendy by my side. Auggie’s assistant was a slim, lovely gay called Sammy who was the epitome of ladyhood. Why don’t you be like Sammy? I would tell Wendy when she sat about with legs askew. When she had become a young mother I asked her why she still had not reformed. Wendy retorted, “What do you expect, ma, the role model you gave me was Sammy and he’s a male!”
No gender biases
Wendy grew up with no gender biases and her three baby boys wore piña or lace baby dresses, sometimes pink. Later on one of the little fellows with borderless clothes was assigned by an enlightened Grade 4 teacher to take an old pair of shorts to school. The Ateneo boys were to paint and embroider them any way they wished. Carlo stitched fruits and flowers on his. The teacher and his grandma were elated. I even ordered Carlo to paint and embroider one of my own pants with the promise of paying him with an extra expensive toy. I was so proud of my pants. I wore them everywhere.
Please don’t say they were made by Carlo, his brothers Franco and Io said. Kawawa naman si Carlo, sasabihin nila bakla! Well, Carlo is perfectly straight and is now an outstanding medical student. I think all that embroidery will help him be a good surgeon.
When they were kids in turn, my granddaughters, Majalya and Chin-Chin, got for Christmas a play stove with a coil that lighted and a sink that could pump real water. They would cut real vegetables with the plastic cleaver and put them in the pan “to cook.” And guess who insisted on cooking with them? Their then 2-year-old cousin Quinito. And he was a more intense and assiduous cook than the girls, seriously ladling vegetables and stirring the pan and all.
His mother Bing-Bing was flustered, she brought out Quinito’s new helicopter to distract him. But he was not to be derailed, so completely engrossed was he in “stirring” and “frying.” Until, I guess, Bing-Bing realized that Quinito sometimes sees his father, my son Arcus, cooking breakfast and it was OK for all of us after that.
What else do you think you contributed to their family life? The interviewer wanted to know. So I told him that when my grandchildren were very small, we would lock ourselves out of sight in the study and do body movement which is simply an intuitive free-form dance. We would dance in complete silence. Sometimes with vigil candles scattered on the floor. It was lovely to see the little boys go into themselves, becoming the dance, becoming a prayer. My husband used to call it our voodoo dance.
Best mover
Miguel was always the best mover, the instinctive dancer, just as he is the most graceful even in kung fu. He was professional quality even at that age and so I thought he should be given direction in some school of dance. But Mol was adamant—please, please, please, please, ma, naman! Huwag!!
I find this is a strange thing. My now old sons should remember the days when a guy wouldn’t be caught dead cooking. Now any male who can put anything into an oven has a crack at being a celebrity. So why can’t my cooking sons help push the envelope further by freeing the machos to dance and sew? I think the chances of becoming gay are the same whether you allow your son to dance or strap a beltful of machine gun bullets around him.
Do you remember anything more normal that you did with your family that I can write about? asked the frustrated interviewer.
Let’s see. I didn’t cook breakfast for them. I didn’t sew. I was afraid of blood. Whenever one of my children had a bigger than usual gash, I’d call the yaya and cover my eyes while directing her to clean the wound with hydrogen peroxide, put Mercurochrome and cover it with bandage and tape. I didn’t take them to and from school either, the bus did that.
I think all I did was play with my children. I always volunteered as the “monster” and was a very popular one. I was an expert at snarling, clawing and all kinds of dying. I was also always bathing in our big sunken tub with two or three of the kids and a windup mermaid. Sometimes we walked in the flood and played in the mud, and they got sick. Mosquitoes bit them but they didn’t die.
I don’t think my husband was much better. He had indulged our children’s every whim. He didn’t believe sparing the rod would spoil the child. He said kids who were severely punished bore deep resentments, while those who got most of the things they wanted loved their daddies madly.
One of his bookshelves was a handsomely stocked children’s commissary with not a single healthy thing. But daddy was an armchair athletic director and we went to public beaches (which were clean in the ’60s) every Sunday because he wanted them to be good swimmers. When I wasn’t there, he didn’t help them with their homework. Sometimes he forgot to give them their allowance. Sometimes he boxed their ears. But they grew up on their own, straight and happy. And they loved us!
The interviewer was not impressed.