by : Gilda Cordero Fernando

"Maternal Affection"by Ninoy Lumboy

My granddaughter Chin-chin got for her birthday a play stove and a sink that pumps water for her toy dishes. Her sister Mahal took some real vegetables and cut them up wit the plastic knife, then put them in the pan “to cook”. And guess who insisted on cooking them－their two-year-old cousin Io. And he was a more intense and assiduous cook than the girls, seriously ladling vegetables and stirring the pan and all. His mother was flustered, she brought out Io’s new helicopter to distract him. But he was not to be derailed, so completely engrossed was he “frying”and “pouring coffee.” Until I guess she realized that Io sometimes sees his father cooking breakfast, too. It’s okay by all of us.

My friend Peng used to own a record of feminist children’s song entitled “Michael Wants a Doll.” Michael wanted a doll so his father bought him a baseball bat. So he played baseball, and he was so good at it he became the pitcher of the team. But Michael still wanted a doll. His father and mother explained why he could not have a doll. Finally, his grandmother bought Michael the doll he wanted because, she explained, Michael will be a father someday.

Lots of Filipino fathers renege on their job because they believe that fathering is sissy. It’s a mother’s job. (When boys ask permission for anything at all, they say “Ask your mother.” That’s more like what produces gays.)

Of course, it is very easy to be smug when it is not your own son you’re talking about. For instance, I have this eight-year old friend (practically my best) who wanted to take up ballet. Bingo used to dance Madonna stuff when he was four, but after he’d seen the real thing, he wanted to try some ballet. He told his mother, and she got scared. She told his father, and he put Bingo in the football team.

Once, we wanted ballet classes at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, and the dance director said, “Put Bingo in, and we’ll give him a scholarship; we’re desperate for danseurs.” So I asked his mother. I really can’t understand why they would rather see Bingo gyrate like a second-rate Madonna in their sala when he can express his body classically and gracefully ins some genuine art. You don’t become a gay because you like to dance ballet. ( Although you indeed may be a potential gay who wants to dance ballet. But that’s not ballet’s fault anymore. Look elsewhere.)

Finally, Bingo got to be First Honors in his class, and he asked me anxiously, “You think my dad will now allow me to dance ballet?” Poor Bingo. Apparently, it’s non-negotiable.

I didn’t see him for some time, and I heard that in between soccer Bingo had managed to join the school’s dramatic club. Last December the Third Grade has a Christmas tableau. None of the boys wanted to be the Virgin Mary. That really wrenched Bingo’s heart－so he told his dad and mom how bad he felt about no one wanting to be poor Mama Mary. And that’s how Bingo got to be the Blessed Virgin in the Christmas tableau.

I hope things are really changing with us. I see many young daddies preparing formulas or burping babies and that’s hopeful. Too many macho men and macho women create a weird society. Each human being contains male and female elements, and the best people are those who can manage a balance of both. If one can’t anyway eight sexes are now being recognized in the rest of the world.

I thought I took care of my sons’ egos, but no, they take it for granted that they’re not so neurotic not so cuckoo, that’s not important. “What’s traumatic,” said my Youngest Son (now a bank executive), “was my pants. You never bought me good pants. I was always having trouble with them.” One time, during basketball, he recalled, he was about to shoot when his khaki shorts ripped open from stem to stem. He and George (now a doctor) had to go to the lavatory to staple the shorts together. Even John (now an executive) remember it, he says. It was embarrassing.

So now this son of mine has a one-year-old son who’s like the smartest dressed kid on the block. His imported pants will never experience a tear. He will not feel deprived about clothes, his parents will see to that. But you can’t cover all the ground. Somewhere else they’ll slip, and the kid will feel his insecurity in some other area.

My mother remembers being very small and shivering with cold with no one to cover her with a blanket. (Her mother died when she was born.) So she sheathed us in our growing years with shawls and stoles and jackets and blankets. I was the warmest kid around. What I felt deprived about was not clothes, it was books. All through the Japanese occupation period (until I learned to borrow), all I had to read was a lousy novel called Ishmael. Our one shelf of books had nothing but medical literature and my mother’s collection of miniatures, including a frog orchestra carved in wood.

When I mentioned it once to my mother, she said, “What books? What do I know about books when I was running my father’s pawnshop at eight years old? I could look at any piece of jewelry and tell if it wasn’t glass. Our father should have taken you to the library.” I guess they didn’t believe in buying books even then. Filipinos hate buying books; I had to make my own.

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