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”

The invisible ones

FATHERHOOD must be the only occupation rated at its best in absentia.

Years ago, I entered a warren of inner-city hovels for an assignment. I found enough strange things to think I was in another world: a city made of cardboard scraps and tarpaulin floating above a sea of ooze, a smell that dogged my steps like a mangy canine out for a bone, any bone, even the one my ankle was still attached to.

It was noon. Women with children were preparing lunch. And the men were just stirring.

Of all the oddities, this was by far the most curious: that all these men—young or middle-aged, fit and able—were not at work.

The bourgeois portrait of fatherhood is all about an empty space beside smiling spouse and children. Fathers provide; mothers nurture.

Women have to be everywhere, in the bedroom, in the kitchen, at work, in the PTA. Fathers go off to work; when they come home, they have a license to disappear into a newspaper, TV set or laptop. When children are told not to disturb Dad, it really means that they are not supposed to question the disappearing acts: to retreat to work, to escape from work.

In that city growing above ooze, I rediscovered fathers.

Wondering what kept them sleeping till noon, I let my bourgeois biases color my assumption. What else but the illegal and the covert must drive these men to follow lifestyles in total reversal to the normal and respectable: while others slept, they worked; while others worked, they slept.

But the sleep-deprived can also include a taxi driver on a 24-hour shift or one plying a jeepney route thrice a week. The night watchmen and the dope peddlers: aren’t both providers, with one difference? If one provides for the family, isn’t that already meeting the all-qualifying criterion for fatherhood?

In incest cases, there is a pattern of women becoming blind to a partner abusing a daughter or blaming the daughter for “seducing” the abuser. Such women would rather sacrifice a daughter or two than jeopardize the survival of the whole family, which will happen if the male partner and breadwinner is put in jail.

Absent fathers or growling guts?

Wandering among the hovels, I noticed how few of the children drew near the men. No male arm or knees dandled an infant.

The kids clustered instead around the women, who, because they were busy with chores, either ignored them or swatted them away and harangued them. When the women’s curses faded away, the children drew closer again to the women, who renewed swatting and cursing.

The only ones unbothered by the press of small bodies in that cramped place were the men. They leisurely stretched and scratched several parts of their body. They chewed on toothpicks. They openly stared back at me, a stranger.

Even when some men are at home, they remain invisible. They cannot find their socks. Their children cannot see them.

Yet when a child runs away, or is caught slitting a stranger’s throat, or winds up slitting his own throat, the family case study specialist will often theorize this reason for wildness: an “absent father.”

But isn’t fatherhood an occupation in absentia?

So the case study writer used one adjective too much: fatherhood is an exercise to eradicate the proliferation of “absent” in modern English usage.

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

* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s “Matamata” column in its June 21, 2009 issue

Can fathers become mothers?

AMONG my favorite mothers are the bearded ones.

My friend Roylu recently emailed about being a parent the second time around. Months ago, with silver already streaking his shaggy mane and eternal stubble, he passed by my table at the university to drop off some of his books for adoption, as well as the news that he and wife Anne were leaving for Quebec, Canada.

Then a few days ago, his post to the kulturnatibist group was a lengthy meditation on “hilots,” home births and the Canadian midwives that are regarded as “sage femme,” French for “wise woman.”

Decidedly less scholarly but more effusive, Roylu’s friends zeroed in on a tiny but telling detail of that post. “Congratulations Roy and Anne and unnamed newborn” wrote Mons, Roylu’s other half in performance art.

Days later, the second-time newbie father (first-born Rosa is now an adult) emailed that he, Anne and baby were still in deep conference with a midwife, a breastfeeding specialist and a lactation consultant. The topic: synchronizing the “wiring for the breastfeeding subsystem” that was messed up by Anne’s C-section.

So, seven years after my last nursing, I emailed my friend—artist of lost causes, old but still seething passions and the nearly lost art of surrogate parenting of books—tips for inducing milk despite the odds of surgical interventions (for Anne’s benefit) and wrong gender (Roylu’s).

Was it? Is there really a right gender for parenting? These questions floated near the surface of my thoughts as I gazed at the photo of bawling Baby Luz and Tatay. Except for that giveaway fuzz above his lips and on his chin, Roylu and Luz may as well have posed for a classic portrait of “Madonna and child.”

While it may be biologically impossible for any man to express milk from his own breasts for his child, the pathways of bonding are limitless and deep. “We are just also getting into the rhythm of getting milk ready at the oddest hours since we have to give formula milk as supplement to breast milk,” this Tatay emailed. “Hopefully, we will be on our way to having a 100-percent breast milk-fed, fertilizer- and pesticide-free, organic child.”

More than anything that he wrote in that email—not the length and details, though they are certainly prodigious as he emailed after another nursing episode must have blurred night into dawn—his use of “we” in those bleary-eyed but optimistic closing lines moved me.

Only one pair of breasts may prick and flow in answer to the hunger of this child but it will not only be her mother’s embrace that will soothe Luz back into slumber (and I was not thinking of a battalion of lactation experts).

Children do need both parents, as traditionalists are fond of saying. But neither male fathers nor female mothers have exclusive domain on the nurturing, healing and freeing love that any child needs to grow into becoming his own person.

I’ve lost track of the parents I admire: their number, gender and creative configurations. There is the single parent explaining to his child that their family picture has one adult less compared to the families portrayed in the photographs submitted by his child’s classmates: I’m your mother and father at the same time so there’s only one of me, not two of us.

There is the insomniac writer who spun poetry, trawled the blogs, and threatened to beat Nick Joaquin at being Nick Joaquin with the bottles until the arrival of his sons. Then my friend used his sleeplessness to change every soaked nappy and bring his sons to his wife’s side for nursing so she could drowse on and wake in time for her morning classes.

Psychologists and sociologists have long debated whether one sex is naturally better at parenting than the other. How does fathering fare against mothering? Should fathers just stick to being masculine role models and leave the nurturing to the women?

To many children, these debates hold no interest. It is not my cooking but their father’s that sends the boys into ecstasy. On this day honoring mothers, I thank the women who’ve nurtured generations—as well as the men whose bosoms have been no less bountiful.

May men continue to face fearlessly a night of nursing and nappy-changing. May they teach their sons to cry and their daughters to dare. May all children honor their mothers and father-mothers. May this circle of love renew itself forever.

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

* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s May 11, 2008 issue