Parental Guidance

Mood: Pensive, Nostalgic...Fatherly

Mood Music: Elsewhere (Bethany Joy Lenz), Promise of You (Edwin McCain), How (Lisa Loeb), Brighter Than Sunshine (Aqualung)


Browsing through the newspaper this morning, I realized that today was my least favorite day of the year. Yes, Father's Day is something absurd and alien to me. Short of drowning in bitterness of the past years and cursing the universe, I instead decided to be mature (read: fatherly) and accept the things that just can't be.

Still, reading articles paying tribute to great dads brought back a deluge of memories. Not just of a past that is best left forgotten (in a box of memory labelled as "LIFE LESSONS"), but of my own experience as a quasi-father.

I became a father at age 13; but not because my raging hormones got the best of me. My mom decided to have another child after ten years. The initial reaction was, of course, excitement. After putting up with each other's whimsies, my sister and I will finally have a new playmate. But soon after the screaming bundle of joy came, we realized that our life will never be the same again. Being ate and kuya entails responsibilities and sacrifices. To put it bluntly, it robbed us of what was left of our childhood days and thrust us head-on in a very adult world. At age 10 and 13.

I remember waking up at the middle of the night to frantic wailing and fighting off sleep while preparing the milk formula to appease the screaming little villain (we didn't have a yaya then). Then the paranoaia if the milk will not do wonders and the wailing continues (oh no, something might be wrong with him!). I remember spending the entire afternoon washing dirty lampins (yes, laced with poopoo). When he was able to trash his little body, I remember my attempts to confine him in his little space with tons of pillows but at the same time preventing suffocation. Then there are the futile attempts to keep everything out of his grubby hands and his unstoppable mouth that wants to eat anything colorful (mental flashes of me eating mothballs at age 2).

Of course, there were the cute funny moments. His attempts to imitate or narrate anything he sees on television. The quips that will easily make it to Kids Say The Darnest Thing. His improvised toys (until now we call a folder slider "handa" coz he used it as a sword). The bulol words that soon found its way into our household vocabulary (ei-dor for electic fan, mineWAL water, south UMA-market, toi-LATE). The wide-eyed (and I mean WIDE-eyed) awe at seeing or experiencing new things. The things he fears and how we will sometimes feed the fear so that he will cry and make sumbong (maybe this was our childish way of getting back at him).

The funniest experience I can remember is his huge fear of ABS-CBN's sarimanok (their station logo at that time). Channel 2 has a promo where you will write down the shows where the sarimanok will appear. We didn't know how that fear started but he will really be hysterical and will run outside (or to the arms of anyone of us) whenever he hears the sound or sees the sarimanok. The funny thing is that after a while, he WOULD know when (2 seconds before) the sarimanok will actually appear so that he was already running away from the TV. Call it kid's instinct or weird talent but he will always be correct! If the contest was "Guess When The Sarimanok Will Appear", we would have been millionaires. Looking back, our theory was that he saw something real scary on TV and the sarimanok appeared so he associated the sarimanok as a precedent to something scary.

Three years later, another bundle of joy arrived (the last one, at last!). Imagine having a new baby and a 3-year old brat. Double the work… twice the cost. Three times the fun (two individual antics plus their "combined" antic). This page will not be enough if I were to narrate all the things I can remember.

The scariest and cutest thing that we will always remember was when the two of them was separated from us in the supermarket, when they were 2 and 5 years old. We found them already outside the supermarket. 5-Year Old was acting like a little kuya while consoling the already crying 2-Year Old ("Wag ka na umiyak, makikita din nila tayo").

From little brats there are now big brats. The 5-Year Old consoling the 2-Year Old is now 1st-Year-High-School fighting with 3rd-Year-High-School every five seconds. The babies you confined so lovingly in a safe place are now out of the house for the most part of the day (to God knows where).

And here I am, older and maybe wiser. My fatherly instinct for my siblings has stuck. Part of me wants them to have a better life (I do not want them to experience what I experienced growing up). But I don't want them to have an easy life either coz it will just destroy them eventually. I want them to also experience hardships (as I have) so they learn the value of things. I want them to make mistakes also and get life lessons from these mistakes. I want them to be equipped with everything material and immaterial for the real-world battles that await them. But how do you do that when you see them only on weekends and by then you are too tired to even care?

So to all decent and responsible fathers out there, Happy Father's Day! I think if all of us will be good parents then this world will be a much better place. Being good parents might just be our best contribution to this world and our only shot at immortality.