Friendship Studies

It came as a surprise when Dear took in the kid and decided to become a mother.

Her motives were pure; she said she always saw the kid, wandering around the neighborhood. She took pity on him. He was in a pitiful state.

At first it was just the usual altruistic works: she allowed the kid to spend the morning at their house, arranging for the helper to give him snacks and prepare him lunch before he is sent home. After a month she arranged for the kid to come early for breakfast, bather in her house, nap at her house and prepare him dinner before he goes home to his parents' for thing night. His parents live a few houses away.

She said he mother enjoys having the kid around. It gave her something to busy herself with, having just recently retired. She said she likes the idea of having a kid around, too, enjoyed it so much that they took the caring to the next level. She started buying the kid clothes, arranged for him to spend a night at their house. A night turned to 3 nights, then to a week, a month. Next i know, she'd enrolled the kid to a private nursery, under whose guardianship, i don't know.

At dinner one time, she mentioned about letting the kid on vacation--Palawan, or maybe Manila, let him shop at Mall of Asia.

I was alarmed.
"Have you told the parents?" I asked.
"I will, but you know, it's not really that necessary. His parents have four more kids to attend to. They'd love it for me to spare them a mouth to feed. And besides, he's almost my kid."
"Well, i have to tell you this: You will be taking him away from his parents, on a plane ride. Airline personnel would look for birth certificate for a boy his age, and  knowing that you're not of the same surname, a letter of authorization from his parents," I explained.
"Wow, you're harsh. It's just a plan, don't make it a big deal."
"The worst case, if you haven't been informed yet, would be that authorities would charge you with kidnapping or child-trafficking keeping a kid that is not related to you, without the necessary papers. You know that, don't you?"
"The parents have assigned me the guardian. What's it to you?"

She was obviously pissed that i questioned her motives.
It was never the same again, and I vowed not to offer advice on the kid issue, even if asked. And because friendships that appear seamlessly happy, predictably sugar-coated are the kind that become stale and rot away. Everyone should be on the look for that and upon detection, should run away. Fast as they could. Change phone numbers and address, if possible. Use the "block person" option on facebook.

After what appears to be a long time, I happen to attend a dinner with her and our bunch of friends around. I overheard them discuss parenthood notes, with one of the bunch having been a parent recently. She floored everyone with her amazing altruistic stories. Everyone forgets about the reality of the kid. Everyone is so excited with this Angelina Jolie, and they freely offered advice: "Get him to this school, it will teach him to speak straight English." She overwhelmed the singles with talks on how motherhood is so difficult, how this milk is the best preschool milk it made a healthy genius of her then-malnourished kid, riddled with delays in cognition, because all that his parents do is fuck and make babies. The truth is the kid is older for his age in cussing and reciting liquor names.

The helper became a full-time nanny.

Although I have said that I will not ever talk about the kid--her kid--anymore, I was left without a choice when, one night after dinner, we ended up alone, together, just the two of us, inside her car. She was assigned to drive me home, her car-less friend.

The Bruno Mars song softly playing on her car radio helped broke the ice.
She blurted out: "How did you teach your kid to eat properly?"
"Me?" apparently amused that she asked for my useless, highly intellectual opinion. "What do you mean?"
"You see, my kid, he won't eat anything but hotdogs, so all the time I just buy him hotdogs. But apart from that, he throws tantrums when he's barred from eating in front of the TV."
I sighed. Remember the saying that one has to think over 77,000 times what he'd say lest he'd hurt another?If there was any other time that called for it, THAT was the time.
"Experts said that you have to eat with your kid in order to teach them meal manners."
I played safe.
"The thing is, i always have to rush up and I don't have time to eat with him. But my mother does, and the nanny. My old girls eat with him all the time."
I sighed some more. This is clearly putting me in a difficult situation. Based on my readings, Dear was clearly wrong at this. It was wrong to take in the kid in the first place.
"I don't know, Dear. Kids, y'know, they're like dogs. They're the same but they are different. My trick might not work for you."
"If only i knew it'll be this hard."
"What is hard?--LEFT," I directed her. She almost missed the intersection to my street.
"Having a kid."
"I thought you were enjoying? I mean, clearly you were enjoying. You talked about the kid all the time."
"Well, i was. He was pitiful and then he was adorable but when he started being this brat and started throwing tantrums it was a different thing all in all. I mean, you know, I never really like kids but i felt responsible because the first time i gave him real food, he was all so excited. I mean, all that the babies in his house were fed coffee in the morning! Him and his siblings would grow up with a brain not larger than a pea? A coffee for breakfast! For a toddler!"
"Watch for the blue gate."
"Oh, blue, wait. Sorry, it's just that it's all really left to me--"
"There's my gate."
"And you know, all of you seem to be happy with your own."
She parked the care, waited while i gather my things and got out."
"It's harder than Angelina shows it, Dear. Harder than what the excited mothers show on FaceBook."
She sighed.
"I know."
"Good night, Dear."
"Yes, good night."

I opened the gate and never looked back. She always loses her way on our street.

Writing on the wall

In 2 weeks he will be speaking on stage in his graduation ceremony. It will be his third and last, this year, after our long procrastination to find him a non-sectarian pre-school (still have not found one, though). Many of his peers left the day care and went to a formal pre-school (the one that comes with books and periodic tests and homeworks) after they turned 4 but he stayed on. Every time we asked him, he would say he'd like to remain in his play school. We never insisted on leaving. I wasn't ready for homeworks, to be honest.

He came home from school one day bringing a truck he assembled from milk cartons, cut out rubber slippers and balloon sticks. He beamed every time he showed it off to every one who arrived home from work. His grandfather could't be prouder. He said kid is going to be a good engineer. At times he would sit at the computer (desklaptop, he used to call it), wear his father's heavy watch, work on the mouse and announce that he has a design to finish and a meeting at 4 o'clock pm to attend to. He would glance at his borrowed wristwatch, which looks so humongous on his short, chubby arms. No matter what time of the day it is, the meeting is always at 4 o'clock. His grandfather would say kid is going to be an architect. At the dinner table he would butt in in adults conversation, provide us logic wherever it is lacking. His grandfather, beaming, would say his grandson is going to be a lawyer.

But all he wanted to be now is a prime truck driver.

A couple of days ago, i received news from his teacher that kid "vandalized a black board" in the university auditorium (he goes to a university day care). He has been enjoying writing since the Santa letter-writing activity last christmas, and he has been enjoying drawing since he got the coloring pencil gift from one of my friends. I never thought he would take it to another level. But was it really him? I asked. There was no denying. Amongst the stick figures, teacher said, written in bold, black permanent marker is his full name. He wrote it so perfectly he did not even miss his middle initial, "P."

He took to street art quite too young.









- end -

for this is how WE roll.

oh yeah. Sang my lungs out to this song at karaoke last night. To celebrate the 2-day successful forum I organized.

Now i can rock. and can sleep well at night.

yeah. for this is how I roll.

at the bottom of the stairs.

babies have no sense of time, just a sense of what they want, and always they want it now.

Gogol is no different. When he was younger, he would always wonder on the days i do not leave the house, and just play with him. He would wail every Monday morning, when i again start my work week.

I didn't have much pictures left from our childhood and with a borrowed camera (my father's) I would always snap photos of gogol at every moment possible, sometimes a million burst in a minute. But as he grew older and wanted more interaction, i realized that things like cameras, they get in the way. They break  moments of what could have been a seamless interaction between a performer and an eager audience. I stopped taking "candid" pictures of him, and started choosing only moments that i thought he would want to to remember when he gets older, and jaded about life.

This, my brother shot one weekend, at the house we are renting, weeks before he left school and left my parents' house, without them knowing it.

They are the only young boys in the family.

Negatives found.

january 7, 2012.

Airport: yesterday was a terrible flight mix up.

Today, just before leaving for Davao, I found the negatives I lost. It's the film roll that bears the last photographs of my grandmother.

A month after i took her portraits, she died, in my hometown, on a Friday morning, just before sunrise.