Scaregiver

My sons are young and strong and resilient. They'll have to be. The world is a harsh, scary and unpredictable place, and the sooner they find out, the better it will be for them. What won't kill them will only make them stronger.

Not.

Not by a long shot, dammit!

I feel so helpless about having failed to protect and shield my babies from real life monsters. Especially if those monsters hide behind the mask of a caregiver.

Woog finally snapped and rang my office from the apartment next door. Yaya Merly had locked him out. Hot and sweaty in the noonday sun, he knocked and hollered while she ignored his pleas. In desperation, he ran to Door 4 and dialled my number. Oh bless little 6-year-old boys who have just recently learned to use the telephone!

I was speechless at her temerity. How dare her! I called her straight-away and she whined about how noisy Woog was, and how disobedient. Then she hung up on me.

We sent her away without preamble, trembling with rage at her haughty assumption that she was indispensable.

Did she hurt you, Woog? We asked. He didn't let out a single tearful word until she had packed her bags and exited the door.

Sometimes. Because I'm so misbehaved.

That he would think that of himself, my wonderfully precocious, hyperactive and insatiably curious little boy. That she had stomped down on his delicate self-esteem, stooping to the level my children, the bitch! Were she in front of me I would have punched her square on her insufferable smirk.

But she was gone, and good riddance to bad rubbish.

I blamed myself for each time I pooh-pooh'd reports from next door of how Woog and Yaya Merly held regular shouting matches: oh, he's always that noisy, I'd say. And whenever poor Eli cried while she gave him a bath, I put it down to his being skittish about water. I didn't give a single thought to why my normally sweet children were standoffish around her.

Even my own mother was vocal about how the nanny would continuously be texting on her cellphone while the baby made his own unsupervised way about the living room. She makes my blood heavy, my intuitive mother often said.

And now it comes to this. Because I didn't listen. Because I didn't take time to sit down with my babies and feel their inner temperature.

Despite the horrible guilt I harbor, I take heart that my sons are tenacious. In time, they will forget, I try to reassure myself, strengthening my resolve to be more involved and more vigilant about these two priceless jewels that I need to protect with my life.

Two Weddings and A Monkey (Part 1)

The city was in a fever. It was the month of the MassKara and traffic swelled to horrendous proportions everywhere. Not helping matters any, the sun beat down on every available surface, melting asphalt and frying stagnant dura matter. Erupting tempers were rife, as were drunken knife fights in the plaza at sundown. It was a wonder to certain irate locals why tourists kept flocking to this city every October, despite the traffic and itinerant vendors, despite the heat and violence at happy hour, year after year after year.

At the home front, the flurry of activity was building up, as well. It was the 18^th, the very height of the MassKara festival. It was also Nat's wedding day.

She arrived from Manila a couple of weeks before that, taking a leave from her sub-specialty stint as an OB-Gyne-Ultrasound internist to join with her one true love. Atch and family breathed collective sighs of relief, the youngest was finally settling down.

Like a mini-reunion of sorts, my husband's teeming cauldron of kinfolk came pouring in from all four corners of Christendom. We managed to stuff some of them into the already tourist-laden hotel where the wedding was to take place that afternoon, and the rest we crammed into our two cramped apartments like so many flopping sardines.

Apart from the mad scramble to get suitcase-rumpled suits, barongs and dresses pressed, there was an equally hushed moment when we all held our breaths as Atch carefully inserted Eli into his elegant satin coin-bearer outfit. He had previously threwn passionate tantrums at all his fittings, pawing at the shiny material. He rolled on the floor at the wedding rehearsal, as well.

Atch turned the hotel room's air conditioning full blast on our diaper-clad son, and when he was sufficiently covered in goosebumps, eased him into his costume. Eli was surprisingly compliant. Until he left the frigid zone.

Meanwhle, Woog's fingers and feet were literally everywhere he could get them into. He prowled the hotel lobby, shaking the silver-cast condiment containers, cruising the floor on the bellboy's baggage trolley, picking pebbles from the landscaped garden and dropping them surreptitiously into the blossom-bedecked pool.

It was when he almost tipped over one of the tall crystal centerpieces brimming with calla lilies that I gave in to my itchy finger compulsion to give his femoral artery a hearty tweak. He subsided momentarily, eyeing me with wounded sheep eyes, but only until he took fraternity with a spoon and fork not five minutes later and discovered the lovely tinkling sounds that wine glasses make.

Atch took over at this point, herding the boys away from livid temperaments and melting make-up. By the time the wedding march was set to start, three of them looked like drunken survivors from a stag party.

The wedding planner and her minions separated the whole messy gaggle of entourage and relatives, and cordoned everyone off in the sweltering garden where we awaited curtain call.

In the end, Nat's wedding was a breathtaking vision of bubbles and butterflies and smoke. Strains of violin music pierced through the mist of our tears as my ethereal sister-in-law floated down the aisle to meet her destiny...

Nat and her Eric


The bible bearer marched.


The coin bearer didn't.


Atchbund and Aifee


Smiling for the requisite shot, tummies rumbling for dinner.

Finally

Siesta Hour

October.

He wouldn't sleep. Not even to close his eyes and be still. He had began to yawn, but still he preferred to sit up and talk in single-word mono-syllables, ride giddy-up on piled-up pillows, and burrow under the blankets like a green-and-orange flowered ghost.

I pleaded and cajoled, scolded and screeched. I fabricated stories of red-eyed furry creatures with long sharp teeth that would burst from the windows and swallow noisy sleepless children whole. But siesta hour was fast approaching its zenith, and not a single grain from the sandman's potent arsenal had found its way into this little boy's eyes.

I was sleepy and irritable. Manong Woog, also sleepy and irritable, had scrunched into a tight ball at one corner of the bed by the wall, protecting his tenders from energetic kicks and overly enthusiastic toddler tackles. In spite of the air-conditioning, in spite of the sweetly drugging sleepy-weepy music on the cd player, in spite of my rhythmic patting of his plump thigh, Eli remained wired on the adrenalin of his very youth.

Frustrated beyond all reason, I seized about for something substantial to throw at his shrieking, bouncing self and I chanced upon Goofy, one of the stuffed animals that had taken permanent residence on his bed. Goofy stared back at me with such insufferable dumbness, sure of his place in the face of my son's sleeplessness that a red un-motherly rage shut down all sense of reason.

In front of my happy frolicking son, I started to violently slap Goofy's face. Left and right. Left and right. All the while shouting: “You horrid little dog! I'm mad at you! Mad! Go to sleep, now!”

Not content, I grabbed hold of Alligator, an ancient 3-foot relic dating back from my own childhood. I stretched poor Alligator's mouth wide by two of his remaining chicklet teeth and yelled at his soft green non-ear: “Set a good example, you %^&*@ ! Close your eyes and go to sleep! You're keeping Manong Woog awake!”

Pooh with his yellow belly fat was not spared the force of my wrath, neither was Mr. Monkey or Barney or Blue Bear. I was on a roll, vaguely aware that Eli had gone very still in the middle of the chaos of pillows and piles of blankets.

I seized Goofy on my return trip, ready for another lambasting rerun, but Eli snatched him back from my grasp with a whimper. His eyes were swimming in unshed tears and his lower lip a 5-kilo piece of blubber whose ends were quivering downwards to his collarbone. Sniffling, he crushed Goofy to his chest and gathered the rest of his stuffed menagerie closer about him. He was asleep in two point four seconds.

Behind me, Woog gave a hearty sigh of relief as he settled in for some deep slumber of his own.

Gazing at my sleeping sons, I debated whether I did the right thing. I may have solved the problem at hand, but the long-term consequences might very well translate to an adult Eli spending long hours on his therapist's couch trying to rid himself of the replaying images of his mother's stuffed animal abuse.

But then again, didn't I just teach him the value of empathy?

Feeling better about myself – after a fashion – my own sweet siesta hour began.

Zzzz-zzzz.