...and Atch holds up traffic so I can take this picture with my camera phone

...because the grass is always greener

A Toddler's Birthday Tantrum

Look at you, Pet-a-poo. Crying your eyes out. Mommy tries to snap a picture of you on this night of your second birthday, but all you want to do is grapple the camera away from her. Tears are coursing down your miserable face, and runners of snot are dripping down your nose.


Do let up, 'pet. It's your birthday.


This morning you woke us up inhumanly early, raining kisses down on random body parts and grounding your chin down where you kissed. You left us groaning and ill-tempered on this blessed dawn while you chuckled and burrowed through the blankets and bared our warm limbs to the too cool morning air.


Tatay finally got up and asked you if you wanted to go for a ride. "Come!" You squealed, lifting your arms up imperioiusly. Manong Woog roused himself too, and the three of you left Mommy in peaceful blissful sleep.


Downstairs you continued to shriek, "Car! Brooom-brooom! Go....go!" Mommy had hopes that Tatay would bring you to Church for a birthday prayer, but he brought you to the market to buy coffee instead. In your 'jamies. With a full to bursting diapy.


(Doesn't matter to Tatay where he brings you, or what state he brings you in. As long as he gets his supply of heady caffeine, then all is right with the world).


But you are happy and you come home excited from your foray into the realm of native coffee beans, chattering incoherently to the neighbors about your grand adventure. And then not a few hours later, we leave for work and school, and you are in tears again. Poor 'pet. Bewildered each day as your nearest and dearest abandon you for long stretches of time. No wonder you are in a constant itch to go out and explore.


Look at you now. Night has fallen and you are in your 'jamies again. Your universe has shrunk to a minute space where you and Mommy engage in a tug-of-war with the camera. You are wailing piteously, turning your face up into the sky as if to ask, why? Why do I have to suffer such injustice? You look exactly the way you did two years ago at this exact same time: a yowling bundle of pug nose and fish lips, inconsolable at being pulled out from your warm watery home.

Poor 'pet. You are channeling your newly two-year-old self in a tantrum of great dimensions. Your own personal version of picketing at the roadside with a huge placard of protest for being left at home.


If only I can make you understand why we have to go away to work each day. And as I try to explain, you reject each placating offer of Tatay's laser pointer, a story book, and Manong Woog's fancy red ruler. Tatay finally puts Enya on and I twirl you around to Orinocco Flow. You settle down then, head deep in my shoulder, arms holding me tight. Music to soothe the savage beast. You have missed me, it seems, but never more so than I.


I hand you over to Tatay and you dance with him too, a sliver of a smile peeking from your lips and flaring your too damp nose. We wish things were different, that we could spend whole days with you as you grow. But for now we settle for waltzing away your hurt and sulk. Anything to put a smile on your face again.

Ah, good. You are laughing once more, shaking your hands to a Celtic beat. But you keep your arms tight around our necks, unwilling to let go. For now.

Because you are newly two and we are your whole world. It would be nice to keep it that way for as long as we can.

Happy birthday, 'pet.

Just so you know. You are our whole world, too.

Manog-hilot

When I was a little girl, I fell out of a neighbor's bugnay tree. The branch I was hanging from broke with a sharp crack and I landed flat on my back, gasping for air like a catfish on the chopping block.


The next day I was running a high fever and had the hoarse raspy cough of a veteran smoker. My parents brought me over to Tyo Gunding, a silver-haired man with a brown seamed face and a nearly toothless grin. Tyo Gunding enclosed my thin wrist with two knobby fingers and felt my pulse for a second or two, questing for a “kibit”. He laid me face down on his lap, and with his gnarled hands did something twisty to my back. I felt a mild uncomfortable snap, and then he let me up gently. The fever left me that very afternoon.


Through the years of various childhood mishaps, my siblings and I were Tyo Gunding's frequent customers. On some visits, I even came face to face with some kids from school who were there for the very same reasons I was. Tyo Gunding was obviously a manog-hilot of great reknown.

I never really thought deeply upon this phenomenon. The Tyo Gundings of my world were as accepted as rubbing Acete de alcamporado and binding the tummy of a colicky baby, or calling out “tabi-tabi” to unseen spirits when transversing an area of heavy vegetation.


It was a time when adults would append the requisite “puwera buyag” to every sentence someone would utter in praise of their younglings. And when these same younglings came down with fevers oddly coupled by cold clammy palms and soles, they would send for a “manog luy-a”, usually a female healer who would rub key areas of the child's body with a piece of ginger, blowing on it at intervals while uttering strange hispanic-sounding incantations. I vaguely remember a “manog luy-a” working on me once. As far as I know, this is done still.


I grew up and had kids of my own. When Woog was a rowdy toddler trotting faster than his equilibrium could keep up, falls were a frequent occurrence. Some of his more spectacular acrobatic performances were followed by a fever and dry hoarse coughing the next day. Without any second thoughts, we would bring him to Tyo Jimmy, an elderly man who owned an aquarium in which swam the ugliest fish I have ever seen.


Tyo Jimmy would briefly take Woog's wrist. It always intrigued me how the manog-hilots could tell something was wrong, some vein misaligned or pinned between a bone or cartilege, simply by taking the child's pulse.


Tyo Jimmy's next step involved either rotating Woog's arms from the shoulders, or stretching his legs backwards at the socket, depending on where the “kibit” was. He always ended each session by rubbing Vicks Vapor-rub front and back. “No baths until tomorrow,” he would say, “and no air-conditioning for at least an hour.”


We would thank him profusely and drop a twenty-peso bill in a small bowl in front of the hideous fish. He never touched the money himself. Nor did he ever specify his exact charge in “medical” fees. At any given time, the bowl would contain a motley collection of fifties, twenties, and coins of various denominations. I suspect if you offered him a loaf of good bread or a tray of eggs, he would gladly have accepted them, too.


And within the next few hours, like clockwork, Woog's fever always disappeared. The coughing, within the next day or so. When Eli would take sick from performing magnificent stunts of his own, we brought him to Tyo Jimmy, too.


They were almost always elderly men or women, these manog-hilots. Some say they were born with the gift of touch, others say they apprenticed for a long period of time under older healers before they could practice their craft. It seems they followed a code that disallowed them from charging a monetary fee for their services. It is said that if they did, they would lose their gift. Probably the reason for Tyo Jimmy's hands-off-on-money policy.


Needless to say, my sisters-in-law, both doctors, disapproved of our visits to these local chiropractors. “No scientific basis whatsoever”, they would say, or “of course your body aches when you have the flu, the manog-hilot massages it a little to make it feel better, is all.“


Yes, I suppose taking our febrile kids to the manog-hilot does take a stretch of faith. Why risk your children's bodies to someone with no formal medical schooling when there are hundreds of over-the-counter chemicals to pour into them, right?


But how do you argue with what may just be thousands of years of efficiency and effectiveness? Or with wide-spread word of mouth? And its not as if these manog-hilots dance around a bonfire in the dark of night, shaking an annointed palm branch over our kids and chanting all manner of satanic summons to raise the malignant spirits.


When my boys are grown and have kids of their own who are wont to slide down bannisters, tumble from headboards, or fall from trees, I hope they remember manog-hilots like Tyo Gunding and Tyo Jimmy. I certainly do.



Glossary of terms:

kibit – term used by the manog-hilot to describe a vein trapped between two bones, or between a bone and its cartilege after having been misaligned from its usual position due to sudden forceful movement.

manog-hilot – term used for a local chiropractor who heals through touch therapy.

Acete de alcamporado – camphor oil

tabi-tabi – literally “excuse me”. A phrase used to beg passage from unseen spirits who are believed to inhabit heavily wooded or grassy areas. It is said that harming these unseen entities by inadvertently stepping on one will bring unexplainable bodily harm and sickness.

puwera buyag – a superstitious phrase used to ward off “buyag” or “usog”. Buyag or usog is used to define a mysterious weakness or sickness accompanied by fever, excessive yawning or a tummy ache that come over a child when caused by a comment directed at that child by a person with “isog dungan”, or an overpowering personality.

manog-luy-a – a healer who negates the effects of “buyag” or “usog” by performing a ritual that includes rubbing a piece of ginger on parts of a child's body, blowing at the ginger and at the child's head, and chanting Spanish prayers.

Twists and Turns

I've been getting such wonderful surprises lately. For the past week, instead of having my heart and throat bruised each time I call home from work, it seems Woog is bent on proving he is Mommy's sweetest little boy after all.


Yes, Yaya says, disbelief apparent in her voice, he is upstairs ready to take his siesta. Yes, he has put away his clothes and taken a bath. Yes, he has finished his lunch. And five chocolate-coated cookies besides.


All this before the clock has even struck two.

Hello, Mom! Woog suddenly chimes into the receiver. I tell him I love him and I miss him, not wanting to start nagging and destroy this perfectly wonderful series of days.


I wuv you too, Mom! He exclaims, and launches into a description of the latest Battle B-daman model to hit the market, not without a hint of avarice in his high piping voice. I let his enthusiasm wash over me for a couple of moments more before asking him how class went and what Lao Shr has taught him today.


Maybe it's the new school, with its central rubber-floor indoor playground and air-conditioning, not to mention the Chinese half of the curriculum that may have inspired my older son to make this sudden a turn-around. Lao Shr is his Chinese teacher, an affable young man who hails straight from the People's Republic and is himself struggling to perfect his English.


Lau Shr has taught Woog how to say Wo Ay Ni, and Woog is pronouncing it to me now, very carefully trying to get the accent right. I throw the phrase back at him, insanely proud of how hard he is trying to please me.


When I wake up, I'll eat more cookies, okay, Mom?


Okay, Woog. I wuv you!


I wuv you too, Mom.

Before we ring off I ask to speak with Eli, and suddenly Woog is shouting in the background


Talk to Eli! Special delivery!


even before I finish the sentence.


Then the baby is on the line with his signature Mmmmm?


How are, 'pet? I ask him. Have you eaten?


Mmmmm.


Are you watching tv?


Mmmmm.


Where's my kich?


*smooch*


Where's my hug?


'Ug!


At this point he suddenly remembers he misses his mother, and demands Up!


But I can't carry you, 'pet, I'm at the office.


Up! He insists more vehemently.


I'll carry you when I get home later, ok?


And then Yaya's voice is there, telling me my toddler has just, all of a sudden, handed her the phone. Seeing as how I couldn't lift him up right that very moment (you useless Mommy, you), he has lost all interest in conversation, such as it is.


I sigh and ring off.


Oh well, I think to myself, its not like I can have everything all at once. But what I do have is beyond wonderful, and I am absurdly blessed.