Idiom

CLOSE your book. No free reading.

In these lines, borrowed from a store display, I distilled my philosophy on virginity after 12 years in a Catholic school exclusive for girls. 

My parents chose my school by family osmosis. Nearly all the women in Mama’s clan displayed the varying lengths and bodily coverage that the blue-and-white uniforms underwent over the decades. 

Or perhaps Papang expected the nuns to restrain me if I gave in to the urge to burn my training bra and run out of the closet?

In my teens, closets hid nothing dirtier than dustpans entangled with brooms.

Families and schools are the seats where a child learns for life that being Catholic is a perpetual guilt-trip. In kindergarten, I felt different from my classmates. My parents permanently separated.

“Broken families” are red flags for outbreaks of rebellion. I cannot recall a homeroom teacher who was not flummoxed when Mama gave her standard opening to explain why Papang was a no-show in getting my report card: her father and I do not see eye-to-eye.

Though I witnessed my parents locking eyes and horns, I thought Ma’s version was clearer than the one spun by the mother of a friend who said her father drowned in the soup.

Escaping into novels as soon as I discovered “Dick and Jane” (heteronormal twins influencing my conversion of hymen into a “book” kept closed to avoid breaking the “spine”), I saw my classmates and their families in the binaries of wealth (rich/poor), color (mestiza/brown), and marriages (intact/broken). 

In high school, “tomboy” was first whispered in comfort room (CR) colloquies, along with smoking, petting (first base, heavy), Cebuano, and “kodigo (cheat sheets)”. Under segregation (the faculty had their own), the student CR, spic and span, was the black market for the prohibited, disorderly, or just different.

I liked to gabble in Cebuano to the tune of flushing before returning to class where I nitpicked the English in my head, but I had little else to exchange in the CRs. 

I suspected I was heterosexual but was pathetically out of experience to prove or disprove.  Thus, college was the great revelation not just because the “books” were “falling off” the shelves but also flying “open,” helter-skelter.  “Browsing” welcome.

My coed uneducation, first in a Catholic university and then in a state college, began in the CRs, reading the cubicle walls where the graffiti of chatty penises and pushy vaginas illustrated the order of “gender disorder,” to quote Judith Butler.  

In an age when the watchdogs of orthodoxy hold that homosexuality is “objectively disordered,” our society’s spaces for excreta and articulation are, in my uneducation, vexedly misplaced.

Source of image: 123rf.com

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131) 

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s October 25, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

When babies are not welcome

AS early as January, merchants began rolling out the Cupids and chocolates, the froth-and-tease that precedes the gift-giving hard sell that’s become Valentine’s Day in this country.

In El Salvador, the choices are stark: stagnant water and a government appeal not to have children for the next two years.

Last Jan. 27, the International New York Times (INYT) reported how Zika, a mosquito-borne virus, has “rattled” El Salvador and other countries in the region into scrambling for measures to control the spread of the disease that leaves infected infants with microcephaly, a rare condition marked by an abnormally small head and brain damage.

Zika is spread by the Aedes mosquito, the same carrier of dengue, yellow fever and chikungunya, reported the INYT. The insects thrive in the standing water pooling amidst the trash piling in congested cities.

What hampers the communities and authorities from cleaning up and dispatching the mosquitoes is another Salvadorean epidemic: gang violence. The INYT refers to El Salvador as the “Western Hemisphere’s most violent country.”

In a country where mosquitoes and gangs compete for dominance, one would think having babies would be the last thing on people’s minds, even with Feb. 14 approaching.

Yet, the government’s call for a two-year moratorium on babies, with the implied strategy of contraception, is an issue that is “complicated” to raise in this “conservative, religious” country, reported the INYT.

While the El Salvador archbishop fell sick and could not say Sunday mass immediately after the public appeal for a birth moratorium and the nation’s bishops had yet to meet to discuss how to react to the government’s “new theme,” Salvadorean women interviewed by the INYT said postponing the babies was not a problem for the top three reasons: gang violence, unemployment, and Zika.

We are better off than El Salvador: violence that’s much worse in the media reports than in reality, so-so employment, and no Zika.

It is understandable why, with Feb. 14 approaching, we are not preoccupied with clearing standing water, fumigating the neighborhood, and reciting a loop of Hail Mary’s from fear and desperation for a child that’s still in the womb.

It explains why health workers distributing condoms outside motels on Feb. 14 invite derision. It’s not that they don’t want unwanted babies; the government only works to please condom manufacturers, never mind if they promote sinfulness and break up marriages.

Two worlds: one that does not welcome babies, another that does.

However, if one took away the particulars of place and time, what can the women of El Salvador ask their Filipina sisters: prior to conception, what kind of world do you dream of bringing a child into?

A world where a young mother without a husband, an education or even a supportive family can bring to full term a child, no more certain of its place than its mother.

A world where one can believe one’s child has a fair chance at a better life than its parents.

A world that loves a child and its becoming.

Though we may be in far greater danger from the arrows of Cupid than from the proboscis of the Zika-carrier mosquito, we should ask ourselves like the women of El Salvador: into what world do we bring a child?


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)



*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s January 31, 2016 issue of the “Matamata,” a Sunday editorial-page column