Woog, Eli and Child Labor

Nighttime. Woog meanders through meal. Evening chore is wiping post-dinner debris off table and sweeping kitchen floor. Woog dawdles. Attempts to prolong inevitable.


Eli is done with meal. Bored out of skull. Gets hold of Mom's old eyeglass case. Starts to pick at rubber lining. Pick. Pick. Pick. Million pieces of soft green snow rain down on floor. Busy hands. Happy baby.


At table, Woog shrieks. Mind's eye sees floor sweep-a-thon til midnight. And Pokemon starts in half-hour.


Woog (near to apoplexy): Eli! Stop! Stop!


Eli (grins at brother): Mmmmm.


Woog (approaching indigestion): Stop! Stop scattering everything!


Eli (basks in attention, picks harder): Mmmmm!


Woog (turns to Mom for help): Mom! Eli's messing the floor!Tell him to stop!


Mom is doing dishes. Tired of waiting for empty plate of slowpoke son. Shrugs. Waits for Woog to solve predicament by self.


Woog wolfs down meal. The sooner to stop brother's particle shower, the better. Speeds through wiping of table. Rushes next door with bowl of leftovers for auntie's dogs. Descends on confetti-happy toddler like avenging angel.


Woog (aflame in artery-popping ire): Eli! You think you're smart?!


Mom winces. Woog uses words with long history. Passed down from grandfather to mother. From mother to son. From son to baby brother. Mom resolves to abolish words from family lexicon.


Eli looks down at handiwork. Red-brown floor is abloom with sprays of soft green. Pretty. Eli chuckles. Beside him, Woog is Rumplestiltskin dancing with rage. Close to tearing hair off. Close to tearing little brother's hair off.


Eli marches to cleaning supplies closet. Takes out broom and dustpan. Commences to do Woog's job.


Woog (near to tears): Eli, stop! You're making it worse!


Woog is right. Felt pieces are tossed about in whirlwind of Eli's passage. Mom collapses in laughter. Nearly drops plate.


Mom (in conciliatory tone): It's okay, Woog. At least he's trying.


Woog harrumphs to living room. Bereft of job. Bereft of speech. Snaps on Cartoon Network and settles down with episode of Pokemon. Mom thinks certain people are secretly relieved to be let off chores.


Meanwhile, Eli commences wrecking havoc with broom and dustpan. Look of intense concentration on face.

Starting them early.
This is why we are a nation (in)famous for export manpower.

The Evolution of A Boy

He was quiet when he woke up this morning, barely saying two words to anyone. He was pensive at the breakfast table, as well, seemingly deep in thought.


Maybe having a birthday does that to you. You feel like something should be happening at such a momentous occasion. Maybe the sound of your bones growing, or the skin of your face taking a different shape, or maybe even the sudden blossoming of wondrous insights inside your skull at the stroke of your birth hour.


But he had just turned 6, after all. And the changes he might have been expecting were still a long way off into the future. Far far away. In forty or so years, his growing paunch will tell him. And so will his aching back, his cynical thoughts, and thousands of strands of no-hair.


But for now, he is just a little boy who has just turned 6. And 6 is the exact same age to ask his mother at the breakfast table, "when are you going to evolve into an old woman, Mom?"


In the olden days, if I asked such a question, my father would have delivered a brisk clip to the side of my head and commanded me to stop spouting such nonsense. But I recognized the little girl that I used to be in his odd query. Perhaps he was wondering how long it took to become an adult. And I fancied his maturing mind was trying to grasp the concept of age.


Suddenly, he said, "Pokemon can evolve."


I was flummoxed. Is the generation gap too wide a chasm for me to cross? It seems I have lost my son in translation.


I was quiet for a bit more while I tried to analyze his question from every angle. But Woog's mouth won battle of supremacy against silence and emerged victorious. Suddenly, words burst out of his mouth at a mile per minute, shattering the morning calm with the enumeration of various Pokemon monsters he has observed to have, at one time or another, evolved on national television.


I laughed with him, relieved that he'd found himself again. Stay yourself a while longer, I said to him in my head, you have years and years and years and years.


After breakfast, we granted his birthday wish to spend the day at my parents' house. Later, when we picked him up, we learned he had helped his aunts set up an impromptu garage sale in the front yard and earned himself some money for convincing an old lady to buy a beat-up toy car.


The lady had asked him what on earth he was planning to do with ten pesos, and Woog, who has never had an allowance in his life, told her he was going to buy bubblegum. "Pleeeeeeease," he begged. She relented and haggled him down to five.


And so he has five pesos for birthday money. I can almost see the wheels turning in his head. Our spawn might turn out to be the world's greatest salesman. Fancy that kind of evolution. I just hope he doesn't sell us out of house and home.

Happy birthday, Woogie!

Slices of Sunday II

Woog is fidgeting before me with a hopeful expression on his face, first on one leg, then on the other. It is mid-afternoon and we are leaving in a while to attend a children's party. Eli is prepped and ready, squealing with excitement at this rare chance to explore the world.

Woog is not. Woog wants to stay here at my parents' house and play with his cousin, Kylot. I look at Atch helplessly. He shrugs and pockets the car keys. It is my call, apparently.

I sigh despondently. Spending family time together with my little foursome only three-fourths complete does not sit well with me. It evokes feelings of panic and foreboding and a deeply-rooted loneliness.

But my first-born is growing up and outwards, and pretty soon I am going to have to let him go and make his own way. If he wants to do a sleep-over, there are worse things than allowing him to stay at my parents' house.

I hug him and kiss him and remind him to behave, knowing deep in my bones he is going to do the opposite.

Later, back at home, I refrain from calling him half-a-dozen times like I did the first night he slept away from me. I only called once, and he promised that he had eaten and brushed his teeth and scrubbed behind his knees. And also that he loved me, and bye-bye, Mom, Manong Kylot and I are playing at the computer.

The family bed seems empty with only the three of us in it, and the night-sounds ring sadly hollow. Even when Eli cries and thrashes in his sleep, dreaming of fragments from his busy day.

In the morning I'll feel better, I try to assure myself. I wait for the daylight, but it is a long long time in coming.

Slices of Sunday I

It is another of those power-interrupted days when the city's electric cooperative has magnanimously decided to do maintenance work on our neighborhood's power lines during these last few scorching days of summer. And so Sunday finds us at my parents' house for lunch and siesta.

Woog is asleep. Atch is asleep. Eli is giggling with my father in a generations-old kick-ass tickling game called Pong-Pong-Piyadong. I am in my mom's storage shed out back, looking through dusty cobwebby memories of my childhood.

Eli screams. Long, loud and piercingly.

I run back inside, ready to hurl frightened angry accusatory words at my father, but he is cradling my sobbing son in his arms, and those words die a guilty death at my throat. Eli has made mushi.

I lay him down on the couch and change his diaper, wincing at the sight of his marble-hard turds. In his easy chair, my Tatay wrinkles his nose over a cup of coffee.

Eli whimpers. I thrust Optimus Prime at him and he is instantly engrossed, silent. My poor baby son is the unfortunate recipient of the hard-bowel malady that has plagued countless ancestors from both sides of his family. It is an ailment that has so far eluded capture, through countless formula and diet changes, and futile attempts at toilet training.

It is excruciating to watch, this process of voiding his bowels. He finds a nice quiet corner and squats on one fat haunch, lifting the other cheek into the air to create a pocket of space. And then the pushing comes. His face turns red, he sweats rivers, and his legs tremble with the effort. He grunts and groans and gives birth to dark awesome monstrosities while the air is filled with his ululating cries.

Sometimes we ply him with prune juice. Other times, his poor abused behind is speaklessly violated with a suppository. Always, it is an agonizing time for him. Except during his good days, when from out of nowhere, he tugs at my leg, pats his heavily sagging diapered bottom, and proudly announces, “Done.”

Today is not one of his good days. And together, we feel his pain.