What we know about mother and father

This post is a copy of my now defunct Friendster blog. Friendster blog just isn't good, so I migrated all my posts from there to here.

Father is five years younger than mother. She was his teacher in his senior year in high school. How they became lovers and how they got married despite mother’s family, we do not know. What we know is that father was somewhere in a boarding house in Delgado — drawing lines, drafting plans, building houses on his desk for his final exams — when I was born, one year and six months after my brother. Father’s mother, Mother tells, pretended not to know. Mother had to take her own pregnant self to the hospital.

Father stopped schooling after my sister was born. Why? we do not know. What we know is that he went to Saudi, sent us some money and voice-tapes telling us of the desert heat and singing to us about loneliness, and asked us — we three children — what gifts we want for Christmas.

Several years again would pass, and several events again would happen: grandfather dies and father doesn’t get the part of the land grandfather promised him; father comes home one night with his eyes swollen; grandmother ceases to talk with mother; father leaves to work for Taiwan; father’s brothers ask mother for payments — the reason for which we didn’t know either —, and we realize the vastness of the universe of our unknown. So we started asking mother. But she would answer us “Ay, Nonoy! Your father . . . ” and she would tell us how hard life has been for us, how hard life still is for us, and how father works so hard for us, Ay! your hard-working father! and how hard she works for us, too, and that we ought to understand, that we will have to understand, and that someday — someday — we will understand, and that we ought not to ask so many questions because it is a burden to be thinking about answers to questions when we ought to be earning money for the bills and your schooling and our food.

So we shut our little mouths up and get contented. So this is all we know about mother and father.