Once Upon A Hot Dark Night

I finally had the boys all to myself when Atch left for Cebu on a conference over the latter half of last weekend.

For the most part, I dreaded having to fend for myself as soon as our self-appointed family driver and resident cook boarded his plane Sunday morning. I did plead with him to stay and cancel his trip, but he hemmed and hawed and all but told me to shut up and quit acting like a child.

Sniff.

And so being the childish and utterly spoiled female that I am, I rang my father who jumped at the chance to spend a rare Sunday with his grandsons, with me tagging along like an extra leg. He agreed to pick us up. The boys were ecstatic. They were probably wary about me taking over the cooking again.

While waiting for our “substitute caregiver” to pick us up, I was able to get some work done on my writing while the boys tumbled about in the living room. Their play area spread outward to my minute office, and pretty soon I joined in the fun. Funny what a camera phone game (stuff-three-faces-into-the-viewfinder) can do to liven up a lazy Sunday morning.

My Tatay finally arrived and we piled into his car for the drive to our refuge-for-all-seasons, my parents' house at Bata, and we spent the rest of the sleepy afternoon doing nothing in particular.

Totally unproductive, Atch would have said. And he would have been well-vindicated: the power failed at Bata that night and we were duly chauffeured back to our tiny apartment where the electricity died exactly 10 minutes later. Payback time for missing Sunday Mass, Atch would have smirked.

So there we were in the family bed, the boys in their 'jamies, writhing and sweating miserably on the sheets. I sat at the foot of the bed, fanning them with the sturdiest cardboard folder I could find while the single candle cast grotesque shadows on the walls.

Woog, ever resourceful, had taken off his shirt and lay on his back spread-eagled, looking for all the world like a lab frog awaiting dissection. Eli just wailed. The heat was stifling, even with all the windows open, and he refused to be divested of his pajama top.

And so I fanned and fanned, sweating rivulets and swearing silently at the local power company that gifted us with cringe-worthy per kilowatt rates and consistently unreliable service.

Woog lay in silent resignation. Eli wailed. I fanned and fanned. We all sweated rivers. An hour and a half’s worth.

Outside, the neighbours came out and loudly cussed the power outage, perhaps in a bid to drown out Eli’s cries. He crawled towards me, my poor hot baby, and pressed his clean sweaty self upon my dusty sweaty self while I tried to manoeuvre my aching fan arm to get some flurries of air into everyone’s faces.

Atch was, post-conference, relaxing with bottles of beer in some snazzy Cebu bar with a live band and arctic air conditioning. He texted me a cherry “how are you”, and fanning the boys in a frenzy, I bitched back that he could’ve at least stayed. He maintained infuriating text silence after that.

Finally, just when I thought my arm would fall off and Eli would lose his voice, the lights came on. My younger son’s bawling was suddenly cut short like a guillotine falling on some 18^th century French noble’s neck. He chuckled through his snot and tears and clapped his hands like a toddler possessed. Woog merely sighed like a long-suffering martyr whose trials and tribulations were finally over, and wriggled back into his shirt.

The hell with the electric bill, I turned the air-conditioning on full blast.

_________________________

All of this I confided in a muffled voice into Atch’s armpit during a family hug when he arrived the following night.

“Poor Aif,” he said as he stroked my hair, not sounding very sympathetic at all.

Fast Facts

• Woog has yet to meet a dinosaur he didn't like.

• I'd like to try for a girl-child. But each time I see a pregnant woman, I feel nails-scratching-across-a-blackboard on my belly.

• Of all the people to end up together, Atch and I are both sulkers. It takes me a couple of hours to get over a snit. Atch takes two days, minimum.

• All four of us have cowlicks and curly hair. All four of us have terrible tempers. In a fit of rage, Woog once trashed his room. He turned six this year. I'm scared to think of what he'll be like as a teenager

• We've been married seven years. Some days it feels more like seventy.

• Atch promised to quit smoking by the time he turned forty. It's been 129 days since that day. And I'm still waiting...

• Despite his rep, Eli is one of the sweetest, most engaging toddlers on this earth - once he gets over his temper and sheds his I'm-mad-at-everyone take on the world.

• Atch hates cockroaches to the very depths of his being. When he sees one, he screams for me to come and kill it.

• Woog has three albums full of pictures that date from age zero to three. There are even more photographs of him still waiting to be organized. Eli has not one single printed picture to his name.

• I see dead people. I have horrible terrible visions of my sons getting into various sorts of accidents and dying in mortal pain, calling for help, and me powerless to do anything. I realize everyone goes sooner or later and my daily prayers include pleading with Papa God that when He does take them, to please whisk them away painlessly and very quickly. Morbid, I know. But still...

• Woog knows his way around a laptop better than I do.

• I am vain about aging. I dragged Atch to a derma clinic two weeks ago to have our first diamond peel together. I still can't get over the fact that his face looks better than mine.

• Woog is one of those shrill annoying kids who won't quit talking. Eli doesn't talk. At least not in sentences.

• I am guilty of letting my kids watch too much tv for their own good.

• But they eat loads of vegetables. Ha!

• Our idea of happiness is to pile all over each other at night in the family bed.

"Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself..." - Khalil Gibran

...and so I called him after lunch on a Friday, eaten by regret that I was too harsh with him for not writing down his homework, leading to my punishing him by withholding a story at bedtime, and because, still vindictive, I lashed out at him for lingering too long at the breakfast table the next morning.

So I called him and I told him I was sorry.


And he said: "That's alright, Mom. You're my only Mommy, and you're beautiful, and I love you!"

Oh be still my guilty beating heart! To be over-loved and outclassed by my achingly sweet, wonderfully forgiving little boy.

I may never forgive myself.

___________________________________________

"...they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams..."

Toddler Tales 2

These days, it seems, most members of the family have been seeking their own little spaces of alone time. The patches of inner peace that we find during various times of the day are our way of dealing with the chaos surrounding us, particularly the chaos emanating from a two-and-a -half foot tall shrill and belligerent dynamo, whose painfully imposing presence, it seems, has started to take a toll on all of us.


They say the Terrible Two's are one of nature's ways of ensuring that our sins against our own parents are equitably balanced by the magnitude of tantrums thrown by our children. If this is to be believed, than it may very well be the combined weight of our filial iniquities that have amassed in a roiling dark cloud over our Eli's head, breaking into storm-tacular extravaganzas at an average, it seems, of 30 minutes or so.


As Woog is won't to say, in the lyrics of his favorite Queen, “...thunderbolts and lightning, very very frightning....”


“.....Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh......!” Eli seques, calling to mind the unending siren-screams of the alien-infected in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It seems we are living in an audio version of the movie, with our baby's glass breakers calling forth the same kind of goosebumps.


*shudder*


We suppose he would be that kind of a baby, being not only the coddled youngest, but also unable to harness the wealth of words that had come so easily to Woog so many years before. Whereas Woog was lisping complete paragraphs at age two, Eli can claim only one complete sentence to his name: “Oh no!”


This frustrated inability to express himself effectively may have great bearing on this constant rearing of his temper. That and his persistent constipation that has resisted formula changes, a high-fiber diet, and sippy cups full of prune juice, ending with a final violent struggle to insert a suppository.


It would seem his frequent tantrums are his way of expelling the emotional waste his nether orifice cannot. In any case, it has put quite a damper on all our efforts at toilet training:


Eli (squats in a corner): Mush!


Mom (hurries toward him with the potty): Sit here, 'Pet, not on your diapy.


Eli (scuttles further into the corner): Oh no!



And so, between bouts of soothing him, distracting him, extending our stretched-to-the-limits tolerance, and flat-out ignoring him, we are forced to escape into realms of our own making: Atch relaxing outside with the neighborhood toughies taffys, smoking poison sticks and downing a shot or two; Woog assembling complicated Megabloc structures with his eyes glued on Pokemon at full volume, and Eli's mom in front of her blog, waiting for the moment when tiny rays of sunshine decide to shine through her younger son’s rain.