I’m getting a better grip at motherhood. Have I matured emotionally? It seems like it. Today, I found myself undaunted by something that used to bother me immensely – RH barging into my morning yoga session.
I woke up at 4:59 am and waited for my digital alarm clock to hit 5:00 exactly. In the other room, my son, who is almost eight (RH) was doing the same thing. I am still amazed by how similar the two of us are. In my early-morning-I-just-woke-up trance, I saw how funny the scene was. The two of us, mother and son, up early (obviously, morning people), time conscious, energetic, extroverted. No wonder we annoy the hell out of each other. We are too much alike.
And what of my parents? Growing up, was I so similar to one or both of them that I irritated them to no end? If I would chose, I think I was more similar to my father. As you are now familiar with my tale, you know that my father has been dead since 2011. And that he raised me up with a winning combo of undiagnosed mood disorder and traditional Chinoy rhetoric.
Holidays make me reminisce about him. This is due to the fact that my father’s birthday falls on December 6, and since it is already January 1, 2017, I’m writing this post haste. Post-post haste. I have a December 6 story, a bitter and juicy one. I have not told this tale before.
My father was adopted by his own (supposedly) biological father (Angkong) and his legal wife (my Ammah) from his Kabit (Concubine? Fling? Live-in partner? ) in Surigao province, Philippines. Growing up, nobody hid this fact from him. It was actually drummed in his head over and over that:
- If he was not adopted, he would be a useless scum Filipino (chao huan) scrounging around for a living in some impoverished corner of the country
- He was adopted because he was male, and males are needed to perpetuate the Chua family clan
- It is his duty as a son to serve his parents for as long as they live
The underlying tone behind these messages being:
He should always be grateful for the rest of his life that his Chinese adoptive parents took pity on him enough to take him in, as he was a half-breed mutt, very much undesired.
My father always knew he had Filipino blood. But he insisted that he was fully Chinoy in terms of heritage. Or as my father would put it, he is “pure Chinese with a dark complexion”. I mentioned in my blogs before that grew up with the nickname “O-e”, meaning “Dark One” in English. Growing up, he would tell me that children Should Respect Their Parents and Obey Without Question. He used this reasoning as a way to assert his authoritarian rule. Because he was brought up with “a purpose”, he thought it was a good idea to give me a purpose too.
I think my father never really questioned his outlook when it came to parenting his kids. For him, it was the natural thing, the right thing to inculcate in us a strong sense of filial piety. Culturally, my father is in the right. You can call his actions typical of Chinoy fathers. Almost every Chinoy I know born around the 80’s to the 90’s has told me how their dad would rather have them obey him than to connect with him as a human being, with very human faults and frailties. As if Dad is a deity, as if Dad is God. (We Chinoys have a tradition of ancestor worship. In my Christian household, there was no altar for the gods and the elders, but in most of my Buddhist-Catholic Chinoy friends the altar was commonplace.) The Chinoy father puts filial piety front and center of the father-child relationship. In short, shut your mouth and just do what I say.
Like many of his generation, my father also tended to show his love not with words or tender gestures, but with material goods. Cold, hard cash. When it comes to relating to your dad, the first thing you do is nod your head. Do not talk back or question his motives. Do not be bo le so (disrespectful). If you say you don’t agree because of blah blah blah (insert valid reason), you are bo twa bo swe (you are “out of line”). I related to my father like this until the day he died. As if we were role playing, stuck in the Confucian times. Something was lost – me and him as human beings, individuals with differing, complex, messed up feelings connecting with each other. Something was lost. And I can’t have it back. He’s dead already.
December 6, 2016 has passed this year, and five years has gone by since O-e died. To remember him this year, my mom and my siblings and I trooped to the cemetery and brought flowers, candles, and our messy selves. Because the cemetery was near Tagaytay, we drove there after the ceremony and had a good time. We took turns getting lost on the way to the restaurant. We all got to decide what restaurant. We decided what to order on the menu. When O-e was alive, it was a different scenario.
More often than not, my father threw a huge tantrum every December 6. Citing no one loves him, our gifts are cheap, we should all eat in a Chinese restaurant, we are all failures as his children because we were not stinking rich, at the height of our careers and so on and so forth, my dad also ranted: weshould allbetogetherandbeahaapyfamily. Let me revise that. Weshouldallbetogetherandbeaperfectfamily, DonotaguewithmeIamyourFatheryoushouldloveme, youshouldfulfillmyexpectationsif youdonotyouareaworthlesspieceofshit.
Fucking December 6. I dreaded it every year of my life.
Contrast it to the December 6 of this year.
This time, we just hung around, relaxed with each others’ company. We did not have to behave perfectly. At some point, food was spilled, children fought with each other, someone tripped, I made a huge faux pas. But it was fine. We didn’t judge each other as flawed. It was not the end of the world. No one was deemed bo le so (disrespectful). No one was called a siapai (an embarrassment to the family). Because implicitly all of us understood that we are all works-in-progress as individuals. As a family, we have come to accept that we are just good-enough. A good-enough, average, Chinoy family. Not as rich and successful as my father would have wanted us to be, but we are normal. That is what counts now. The acceptance, not the appearance, which he so valued all.
My father fathered the way he was fathered. And he fathered me in the best way he thought ─ the Chinoy way, the Chua way. He fathered by passing down our particular family legacy and stories.
There was one thing he inadvertently passed down to me that I hold dear, his nickname. My full first name is “Jinjin Melany”. In Latin, “Melany” means “Dark One”, and this is a tribute to his name “O-e”. I say “inadvertently passed down” because I know my father was not familiar with Latin names. When I told him what “Melany” means when I was eighteen, he almost choked laughing.
Though my father was strict and traditional, he had a wonderful sense of humor. All throughout my life, I connected with him through laughs. (Or at least I tried, I tried very hard.)
So. My father and I, me and my son, there are ties that bind. My son and I are so much alike it hurts. I wonder, did my father saw himself in me when I was as young as my son? RH has a wicked sense of humor. I would like to believe he got it (inadvertently) from me and backtracking a generation back, from his grandfather. (He goes on a Donald Duck mode when I am serious to a point of criminal intent.) Like what I did to connect with my dad, RH lightens up my mood by cracking jokes, pulling pranks. When he does that, I can’t help it. I have to drop the act.
I gave RH his name partly because it means “Red” in Hindi. Frankly, this gesture is a nod to how my father passed down his nickname to me. (When I first met my spouse Erwin, he had a little habit of calling himself “Red”. It came in very handy in Starbucks.)
Tomorrow is RH’s birthday. He will be eight years old, and I can’t help but indulge in wishful thinking. Maybe my father would act differently with my son. He wouldn’t be as strict of traditional. Maybe if O-e played with RH they would both go pranksta on me.
The featured image on this blog was AI-generated by me using free tools, namely ChatGPT, Canva, and Leonardo AI. I use these images to support my written content creatively and cost-effectively.
