I was the apple of my father’s eye, my mama said. He would drive the car around the block with me on his lap when I was almost two and until I grew too tall for him to see the road. He would even make me a paper crane origami whose tail could be pulled and its head nod.
Our nightly routine was for me to crawl into daddy’s bed and lie on his double pillows, almost upright, while he read the comics to me. We went to kiddie movies and he did a running translation of the English dialogue in my ear. He supplied me used test papers to draw on. Every night he would help me with my arithmetic homework (and, as I grew up, algebra, geometry, physics and trigonometry), pinching me impatiently when I looked around disinterestedly or yawned too much.
My mother was more interested in fattening me up with fresh milk and raw eggs and Sunkist oranges until I developed a real loathing for them. But she loved dressing me up too and there she thought she did a pretty good job.
Once when I had a long bout of flu (Dr. Tupaz even came for a home visit with his stethoscope), daddy read the whole of Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables” to me. It became the literary totem of my early years. My mother was around too, a reassuring nurse, but fussing, fussing—with the cough syrup, the unguents, the inhalator, the gruel, the sponge bath, and the obligatory enema.
The latter was nothing new: it was a cure-all for every ailment mama fancied I had. She’d hang the glass container of soapy water with its rubber hose on a bedpost, position the enamel bedpan under my butt, and begin the ordeal. It is now a revered practice called colonics. Friends called her up to ask how to cure this or that, she’d prescribe enemas and medications faster than Dr. Tupaz. My mother was such a quack.
Juan Tamad
The trundle bed which I slept in till I was six was the third bed in my parent’s room. It matched a cute child’s dresser (pink) with stool. Segunda, my yaya, sat on the floor beside my low bed and told me Juan Tamad stories until I fell asleep. She talked about her brother Igme and the farm they tilled which had many orange (sinturis) trees.
I think Segunda was homesick. Sometimes she sang me to sleep but whenever the song was “May Isang Ibong Sawi,” the wet bird who could not fly because of a broken wing, I would cover her mouth because it made me cry.
There was no such thing as child psychology in those days. My parents didn’t make me feel secure when they quarreled or stepped out at night for a good time. I bed-wetted till I was five, at night wearing a bird’s eye diaper secured with safety pins. I listened to the loud tick-tock of the regulator clock with Roman numerals, listening to it strike every hour and half hour until they got home. I was insomniac even then.
When I was born, my mama said, she thought I wasn’t a good-looking baby. It took a while to convince her that I looked OK. That is strange because most mothers think their own baby, no matter how plain, is the most beautiful of all. My mother’s self-esteem couldn’t convince her that she deserved a good-looking child.
In grade school I was the only girl whose yaya stayed on the waiting benches all day. She was ordered to make me drink milk during recess—Klim milk put into a blue magnesia bottle. (How symbolic, because Milk of Magnesia is a laxative!) A robot extension of my mother, Segunda would alcohol my hands before I touched a single cookie. At the slightest breeze she would throw a fashionable white cape around my shoulders. I didn’t realize how freaky all of it was until mama’s friends would tell me how lucky I was, I was so spoiled, I got my way all the time, etc., because I never felt I got my way even once.
Fend for myself
Early on I realized that I couldn’t rely on my mother for guidance. The first birthday party that I ever went to was my best friend, Ching’s, in their big concrete house on Taft Avenue. All my Grade II classmates had brought gifts. When Ching began opening them one by one, I realized that my mother had forgotten to buy me a gift or didn’t know she had to. It sounds inconsequential but somehow I never forgot it. I knew that henceforth I just had to fend for myself.
As I grew up, I knew my mother wanted me to look beautiful and to be accepted by people who mattered (to her) but her advice was always somewhat flawed. Maybe she was too eager, too anxious to please, or maybe she was just terribly naïve. The embarrassment her faulty advice caused me ballooned disproportionately in my eyes.
But how could I blame her for faulty parenting when she barely had a mama herself? Mama’s mother died of TB when she was about five years old. She told me that in the middle of the night she would wake up shivering because there was no one to put blanket over her. Maybe that’s why she piled tons and tons of blankets over me and wrapped me up like a mummy. We carry into our motherhood our own childhood insecurities and hungers.
My only sister Tess was born in 1943, during the war, when I was already 13 years old. Actually my father believed in family planning and decided on having only one offspring. He wanted a comfortable life well within his UP College of Medicine salary. But during the Japanese Occupation the supply of contraceptives must have dried up. Tess was an unexpected but happy surprise.
One of my father’s quirks was that he couldn’t sleep at night even with the smallest light on or noise of any kind. Since a baby is synonymous with bawling and bright lights, my father and I moved out of the master bedroom into the guest room. Those were the happiest days of my life.
I had my own bed lamp and a real adult bed. I could read anything I wanted without mama being nosey. Daddy would blow into his recorder very softly until I fell asleep. On moonlight nights Chopin etudes wafted in from Nakpil’s piano across the street. It was a tranquil, soothing time. And I had daddy all to myself. Sometimes I wonder whether my mother’s life-long differences with me had something to do with being jealous. For obviously a child is a formidable rival.
Immaculate
My mother had now a new baby and she poured all her attention and fuss on Tess. She even hired a uniformed midwife to take care of my sister and she was always a nice-smelling and immaculate baby. I never felt of the world of mama and Tess. I wasn’t encouraged to play with or carry my baby sister because I usually came from school sweaty and covered with all kinds of invisible germs. Having to first wash up and be disinfected all over with alcohol as soon as I peeped into their bedroom was just too much for the privilege of kissing a cranky baby.
So my sister and I grew up not really knowing each other. She was mama’s kid, I was dad’s. When we were both married we had a chance to go to Hong Kong together. For the first time we got to talk one on one and were ecstatic to discover that we really liked each other.
Much later on I asked Tess if she had the same issues with my mother that I had. She said there were a lot of things that she didn’t agree with either but they never disturbed her much. Maybe it was because I was the older one, Tess said, the practice baby. Or maybe, in the big gap between us, mama may have learned something. Tess said mama just awed her, with her dazzling talents for cooking, for designing jewelry, for dreaming up finery and for business.
Tess grew up much more athletic than I and, like my father, played a mean tennis. That became their bond. She got as much attention from dad as I did and so had a more balanced growing up.
Neither Tess and I felt any favoritism although of course there was. To mama’s credit she was more than fair when it came to doling out money to Tess and me. If she gave Tess P10 in the morning even if I didn’t know it, she would give me the same amount in the afternoon.
During the Japanese Occupation there was hardly any gasoline and so the street had little traffic. People used bicycles. Dad had a sturdy red bike and when I turned 14 he bought me a slim green racer. He taught me how to maneuver smoothly between the tranvia, the charcoal-fed cars, the carretelas and the other bicycles. Tess and I had beautiful times with our dad, each in her own time.