Love for women

WHEN I read the first social media posts about his death, I wanted to doubt the news.

When I read the breaking reports from media I trust, my next thought was of his sisters. When he moved in the Bahay Pangarap in the Malacañang Park complex, his four sisters shared the official duties that, if he had married, would have been carried out by the country’s First Lady.

Finally, when the undeniable sunk in—that the 15th president of the country was dead at 61—my thoughts turned to us, the people he deferred to, first in his inaugural address and frequently throughout his term as the most powerful person in the land: “Kayo ang boss ko”.

As I write this, I feel the familiar hollow of what we have lost, his death debriding me of the carapaces grown even before June 30, 2016, when he stepped down and another moved into Malacañang.

So this is where five years have gone: growing one layer over another as self-fortification against the acid rain of jokes, innuendoes, smearing, shaming, and inanities assaulting women. 

Five years of raining women.  Cut up in body parts: “suso (tits),” “bisong (vagina)”.   As curses replacing presidential punctuations: “putang ina (mother-whore),” “bitches,” “crazy women”. Or reductionist judgement: the presidency is not for women, women are not emotionally wired like men.

Officially anointed, gutter talk is gutter think, spawning a culture that turns violence into a metonym for governance: make the problem “disappear” in the War on Drugs; brand critics as terrorists; cut off media franchise; and threaten resistant women with assault, rape, gang-rape, and shoot-the-bisong.

His death on the 24th of June sent me five years back, long before a strongman’s loud and lewd language converted “love of women” into an infested mattress of thorns. 

The country’s first bachelor president was not above making jokes, often comparing his love life to Coke Zero. Not once did he paw women in public or spit back when they called him out.

This “soltero (bachelor)” reserved his most impassioned side for his parents, sisters, and motherland: “Ang layunin ko sa buhay ay simple lang: maging tapat sa aking mga magulang at sa bayan bilang isang marangal na anak, mabait na kuya, at mabuting mamamayan.”

This was no lip service. On Dec. 21, 2012, Benigno Simeon Cojuangco Aquino III signed into law the Reproductive Health (RH) Bill, which, after languishing for 13 years in Congress, grants Filipinos, specially girls and women, better access to information and means to prioritize their health and future.

Daghang salamat, President Noynoy. Love for women is again my ballot’s yardstick in 2022. 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com, 0917 3226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 27, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Fathers who cook

PAPANG did not cook. My father-in-law did. The husband does.

Papa Peking made “inun-unan (dish simmered in vinegar)” I can still taste: the fragrance of sauteed garlic and onion, the tartness of vinegar, the sly spice of ginger, softness of flesh after the scales peel away from the fish, and, overlaying all these, the sinfulness of pork lard, which he added as the finale, never measuring, just knowing by sight and smell how much to pour.

I grew up in a home that woke early to the breakfast smells of fried eggs, “buwad (dried fish),” and inun-unan, mingling with the aroma of Papang’s first cup of coffee, black as the night that still clung to the sky, leavened by a spoon of powdered milk, absentmindedly stirred while the sun suffused the dark and cold. 

The staccato of Papang’s two-fingered typing on the heavy Army-issue Underwood typewriter punctuated many mornings when I resisted stirring from my mat. Inun-unan, conspiring with omelet curling at the fringe and “sinangag (stale rice toasted with garlic),” always won.

My father bought the typewriter for a song from a relative. I was in senior high school then, feeling superior that I was learning how to touch-type in class. 

When I catch myself pounding away on the laptop keyboard, I hear that Underwood antique, silent now under its plastic cover, never to echo from my father typing exams for his medical students.

Papang and Papa Peking liked to share beer and stories. When Mama Margie talks about my late father-in-law, she often slips into the present tense and refers to him as “Mr. Tabada”. At first, I thought it quaint to refer to someone you were married to for more than four decades in such a schoolmarmish way.

The husband’s parents were public school teachers until they retired. Mama Margie still tears up remembering how she stroked a piece of cloth with longing in one of their outings in Colon. Papa coaxed her away by saying they had to stop for bread to bring home to the children.

“Breadwinner” is a many-layered word that hints of what fathers do for their families. The stories often describe what these men do, leaving unsaid the unlived and unfulfilled worlds they turn their gaze away from to stop by on the way home for bread.

When a friend commented how I refer to “the husband” in my writing, I joked that, thinking of my parents-in-law, I wanted to avoid mixing up the multiple “Mr. Tabada” in my life. 

In truth, I smell Papang and Papa Peking when our home is redolent with the scents, flavors, and memories stirred up when the husband cooks inun-unan with “iba (bilimbi or tree sorrel)” and the secret ingredient of a father’s abiding love for family.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com or 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 20, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Happy ever after

DID I get the vax?

To the question asked by the vet’s assistant, I answered that the three aspin (asong Pinoy) puppies were due for the fourth and last jab of the 6-in-1 vaccine, which also protects them from the canine parvovirus.

The assistant clarified that he was asking if the husband and I were already vaccinated for the coronavirus disease (Covid-19). 

Being a guardian of dogs and cats has a way of creeping and taking over one’s life. When the husband and I started to rehome Noki’s puppies, we followed the advice of my sister, another guardian who minds other people’s dogs, to rehome after 12 weeks. 

Prematurely separating a puppy from its mother traumatizes through forced weaning and deprivation of its canine family. In the first three months, a puppy is not just nursed by its mother but also socialized by her and its siblings. 

Twelve weeks also cover the basic deworming and vaccination program that protects the puppy during its first year. 

Since our lot is less than 100 square meters, with delineated dog, cat, and plant zones for everyone’s sanity, we see it as our responsibility to match each puppy and kitten with a “furever” family.

When prospective guardians see the puppies and ask “anong lahi (what breed),” the husband and I answer, “lahing Pinoy”. 

Within our spheres of influence, we push the stance that breed is not important. All dogs and cats, even those with feral ancestry, deserve kindness and respect. 

Life on the street is not fit for any animal. Life with some folks who think they want a pet can be as deadly. We screened guardians for red flags: this person will NOT eat our puppy; feed the puppy to its pet snake; groom it to be a bait dog for dog fights; or chain it to guard their home, expecting the animal to eat air while they get a tan.

We dismissed prospect no. 1 because she never visited us and the puppies. Expecting the puppy to be handed over the fence, this entitled creature probably equated it with a pinch of salt cadged from next door. Salt melts away; what would have happened to our puppy after she outgrew her novelty?

Prospect no. 2 met us and brought home a puppy. He passed her on to his 70-year-old grandmother to feed and look after. On the third day of failing on his vow to update us about our puppy, the husband searched for the man’s house and took back our puppy.

Our neighbor ticked the boxes: not only did she visit us and talk about her furry companions while it drizzled, she took the puppy into her arms and asked her if she wanted to go home with her. 

As of this writing, we have yet to visit Ikog and her new mom. Meanwhile, Ikog’s old mom is asking God for a genuine happy ending.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 13, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

 

Knitting

IN my memories of sitting in her kitchen, food was the spice and stories, the staple. 

She was daughter, sister, wife, and mother in an age that had the expectations of and prescriptions for women traced and ready for applying to every woman, no matter what was in her mind and heart, like the cut-out clothes I used to punch out for paper dolls.

She was the last of the siblings that included my maternal grandfather. While watching her debone for chicken à la King or turning inside out a pork hock only to stuff it again and sew it close like a sock for contui, I itched silently with impatience, wondering why we could not just eat without the tedious deconstruction.

Painstaking meals prepared daily was Tita’s overture to telling stories.  While cooking, she pulled out and consulted notebooks where she wrote down recipes, jotting on the flour-sprinkled, soy-spotted margins improvisations and tweaked measurements. 

The stories, though, were all in her head. Knitting stories invokes the power to animate. She breathed life and soul—“anima”—to relatives I barely remembered except as family ghosts.

The great grandmother whose amputated leg I heard echoing in every creak of the ancestral house was, in Tita’s retelling, a young girl who witnessed her mother give away the land upon the prodding of her sons, who then treated her as a maid to serve their every caprice. The memory drove my great grandmother to be sparing in showering material gifts on her own children.

A family’s personal stories are stitches seeded on the broad canvas of history. Women as actors and narrators of their fate are often embellishments, decorative while being invisible. 

Tita’s stories first made me draw nearer to the canvas to examine the elision of lives glimpsed as a small hand placed tentatively from the back on a starched masculine shoulder in a studio portrait. 

What are stories if not illuminations and magnifications? In Feb. 1986, I was about to start lunch with Tita and Tito when I absentmindedly refused an offer of Coke. I participated in the nationwide boycott of businesses owned by cronies of Ferdinand Marcos, following the disputed snap presidential election. 

Tito, who worked with the company bottling Coke, was silent but Tita was furious. From what seemed to be a far shore, I heard her speak for employees and families suffering from the boycott. Issues split us, her voice buffeted but holding, a tenuous line above the tumult.

Recently, in the online requiem mass, I looked past the white coffin and saw Juanita Solon Villarosa in her kitchen, meat thawed, condiments ready, memory casting for a story. I’m listening, Tita Niting. 

Source of image: dreamstime.com

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 6, 2021 issue of the Sunday main op-ed column, “Matamata”