The kid who cried… a lot?
(This is part of my submission series for our Creative Non-Fiction class.)
Truth be told, I barely remember my childhood.
It’s like a vacuum in my storage of memories that I can’t put my hands on. Everything was too slow, and yet everything went too fast. All happened at once, but all also happened in strangely different places or time. It’s a bizarre montage of stories that I need to patch together.
Strange, too, is the irony during the time I’m writing this essay (to rush for a deadline): almost a day away from the day I would celebrate my 18th birthday.
So, here we go.
I’ll be honest with you: I actually have a pretty boring childhood. I was not part of the bourgeoisie who wallowed in so much wealth that their experiences, too, have been intrinsically linked with their fortune. I did not come from the poorest of the poor also, where my experiences would have surely been suffused with the everyday struggle against death, hunger, and poverty.
I lived in the middle, where comfort is the main course.
We had enough to live by, but not too much to allow me to splurge with needless stuff. We can afford most of what we need and want to achieve, but not too much as to indulge ourselves with the spoils of the Earth as if there’s no tomorrow.
And I’m the only child of my parents.
Actually, I had a younger sister. But she was not fortunate enough to avoid inheriting my father’s congenital heart disease. Barely three months after I was born, my mother had been carrying her in her womb; but when she was already born, it only took her five months to live. By March of 2004, she had peacefully died.
Despite the privilege that, early on, I know I had been wearing because of our family’s social status, it was still a bleak childhood for me. The one thing I had always wanted to have never came when I wanted it the most: a perfectly happy abode. Our home wasn’t really a home; it was a house, where living things coexist with their stuff for the mere sake of existence. Or where we thrash ourselves with the harshest, meanest, sickest words and gestures that we could muster.
But, I’m getting ahead of myself.
People who know me can attest to how ‘talkative’ I was. And still am. I often chat with people with the rapid fire of a fusillade of bullets from a machine gun. It’s like I don’t run out of stories or canards to share with people, especially people I have become comfortable to open things up with (that’s actually rare). Yet, far away from that façade through which most people got to know me, there’s one thing that lives.
Silence.
The kind of silence that, for most part of my childhood, coexisted with my vivacity.
My mother used to regale this story to myself and others, often in a jest: I was not talking until I was three years old. That’s odd, if you come to think about it. My parents almost brought me to a specialist to check on any problem or disability that I might be enduring, since I was not uttering any word other than papa or mama. I only cried or threw tantrums around whenever I feel hungry or irritated. Heck, I was not even reacting as joyously as they were expecting even when I’m watching Spongebob Squarepants or some other DVD in our stash.
I was too emotionless then, for lack of any better term.
Until, one day, we found this special nanny — special because she stayed with us for the next seven years. By and large, I think she was the longest nanny we ever had.
I had a special bond with her, to be honest. My mother told me, she was the yaya with whom I nursed the most special bond. Aside from the fact that she lasted for seven years in our care, she was the one with whom I had the most intimate relationship; most of my childhood’s highlights had her as a witness. And every time she would take some time off our household, I would cry on her knees.
Even as years had passed since she left us for good, I still maintained connections with her. Sporadically, my mother and I would visit her in their family’s residence in the flooded swamp lands of Bulacan, where I would regale her stories of various kinds — from political tidbits, to mundane stuff going around our humble home. If time or circumstances do not permit such visits, the telephone would fill in the vacuum. Being the sole kid of my parents, having someone to share these memories, realizations, and gossips with in a very secretive manner is of highest significance. And so, I took every single memory we had with her to my heart.
The silence that once again permeated through our home, the same silence that my nanny of seven years had broken with her innate talkativeness, reared its ugly head over me in the worst possible instances throughout my childhood: when my parents were at loggerheads with each other, when bullies in my school used every trick in the Bullying For Dummies to browbeat myself, or when I had to tell my teacher in Grade One that I needed to make an emergency trip to the bathroom.
When silence does not suffice, I turn to crying.
My mother would agree when I make the claim that, back when I was too young to understand half of the words I have used for this essay, I was a ‘cry baby.’ Whenever she would disallow me to go out and play hide-and-seek with our neighbors, when some of the burly kids across our neighborhood would not let me join their game because of some sadistic pleasure they were earning from power-tripping, or in those rare times that I would catch them fighting in the middle of the night, I would cry in an instant — so much so that I now ascribe to my childhood my current inability to cry even during the toughest of times.
Of course, the only time I cried a lot was when my father died.
Besides my mother, the memory of squandering afternoon hours to playing across the street, and my everyday bout with Hot Wheels, my late father would form a huge part of my childhood memories. He was my first mentor, the terror figure who would not let me fidget with my PlayStation Portable unless I could recite the whole multiplication table from memory, and the first guy who thought I would become an activist.
When former president Corazon Cojuangco-Aquino lied in state, and during her tumultuous burial, our eyes were glued on the television’s special coverage. Since I was born after two People Power revolts, as expected, my six-year-old mind could not make some sense out of the sudden outpouring of grief for Cory.
I asked my father, “sino si Cory?”
Since then, my father started to regale me tales about the restive years of his and my mother’s own childhood: the time of Marcos’ dictatorship. Of course, my young mind then cannot inculcate and remember all stories, anecdotes (save for hilarious or hypnotizing ones), and facts he was sharing then. But I cannot forget one confession that he made to me while we were traversing the South Luzon Expressway, in a service car he received from Taguig City’s local government (where he worked in his last years), roughly two years since Cory’s demise:
He was a former youth activist during the dying years of the Marcos regime — as one of the members of League of Filipino Students.
At that precise moment, everything made sense.
And until now, I couldn’t forget that single detail.
That kicked off a life-long interest in myself to know deeper about what-the-heck martial law was, who Cory and Marcos and Ninoy-the-airport were, and what was the magic that wafted through Cory’s burial that captured my young imagination forever. Alongside my constant immersion in political conversations (I was watching Renato Corona’s impeachment while most of my peers were busy finishing off missions in Grand Theft Auto - Vice City), his story of activism had left an indelible mark — or scar, I dare say — in my young consciousness.
Since then, the flow of my childhood had started to take a different turn.
As many people close to myself have known, I never had a normal childhood. And even if I wanted to tell you more ridiculous or embarrassing tales about my childhood, both my trauma responses and my memory fail me now. Anyway, life for myself then often looped around familial separation, politics, or boring moments of ennui when I would endlessly stare at my die-cast metal toys and wonder, “when could we have a peaceful life?” It was as if the pain of seeing my family torn asunder, or the melancholy of an excluded kid, had become a part of my childhood’s pathetic DNA.
My father’s death had become the culmination of that cycle.
I am not at liberty to discuss sensitive or personal information that are pertinent to the recollection of those times, but to cut to the chase, I closed my elementary days with the memory of being separated from him until his dying night. I still can’t extirpate from my waking consciousness that one year when I could have snatched even a single day to meet and spend time with him before he passed on to the Great Beyond.
It was a lackluster Thursday night. The hustle of Ayala Avenue was cradling my sleepy mind, having been tired out by joining my mother in her work at the House of Representatives, when a sudden phone call flipped off the night’s mood. The call came from a close friend of our family, and with that ring on the phone, the grim news arrived.
My father had passed away.
Had he survived that night, and was able to live a little longer than forty-four years, he could have seen myself become the activist that he envisioned me once to become. He could have had a glimpse of the words and paragraphs I have strewn on the publications I had written for. Heck, he could have even accompanied me to every single protest action, educational discussion, or mobilization that I have participated in.
None of that, of course, could happen the moment my greatest youthful fear became reality.
My father was not even able to see his unico hijo graduate from elementary.
After my mother told me the grim news, I did not shed a tear right away. Not even when we reached the hospital, and not even when my mother had started to wail inside the morgue. No, I was nursing then a stoic form of silence. I even chose, with my unique brand of defiance, not to see his cadaver lying on the morgue.
The first — and last time — I saw my first mentor after a year’s worth of separation was inside the medium-sized coffin that bore his lifeless, bloated remains.
At the first sight of him lying on that coffin, I shed more tears than I have ever had.
Since that moment of mixed silence and grief, life never became the same for myself.
Hence, a new chapter opened in my lugubrious life — with the shedding of endless streams of tears, the wailing that I never expected to churn out, as the crestfallen kid who cried a lot.
