Parenting

I read somewhere that women in Canada are given a year’s maternity leave, three months of which are paid. After a year, they can expect to have a job waiting for them. Wow!

It isn’t so bad here. Mothers get roughly two months off for normal deliveries or a little more than that after C-sections. The female body doesn’t take long to get up and running after childbirth. What’s really difficult is the separation. I remember crying when I had to leave my first baby to get back to work at which point my father-in-law took me to task and reminded me that I had to pull myself together and work for milk, diapers and seventeen years of tuition fees.

Two years after I gave birth to my eldest child, I decided to go freelance, a term I prefer to use for picking odd tasks in a constant state of panic to make ends meet. So by the time I gave birth to my second child, the situation was a bit different. I had another C-section but I couldn’t take time off from my laptop. I was hooked back to my virtual dextrose only after a few days in the hospital. I swear I could feel my intestines jiggling to the tune of Jingle Bells as I typed away.

Within a few days, my stitches popped and I nearly fainted. The doctor assured me that an ingrown nail with a sprinkling of nail fungi on the side was a far worse condition than my dislodged stitches but I just couldn’t help myself. One part of my wound was pouting like a pale lip. At night I dreamt of my gut and the possibility of finally getting intimately acquainted with them through Emperor Palpatine’s cavity infested grin on my belly.

But I survived and that belly grin is settling into a smiley smudge, a reminder that I have a lot to be thankful for even if I don’t live in Canada. I’m a live mother to two live, happy, healthy babies who still love me even if they can talk to me sensibly only on weekends after I’ve come off of my internet dependence.

The realization of the year just hit me. Our parents are not as neurotic, psychotic, paranoid or unreasonable as we think. They’d been telling the truth all along but we’ll never really get it until we’re about their age. By that time, we’ll look back and realize we acted like medieval thinkers hell-bent on burning our parents at the stake.

Now I look with horror at my own future burning. She is only four and already she scowls at what she perceives to be my dictatorial reign.

If my mom were half the antagonist I’d imagined her to be, I suppose she’d be cackling right now. In between her sounds of mirth she’d probably say, “I told you so.”

I hear about them all the time. Those women who say they feel absolutely wonderful when they’re pregnant. I wish for at least one day that I could relate to what these women feel because pregnancy for me is 8 months of grueling distress, like 8 months of daily colonoscopy, 8 months of being suspended on a hand glider or 8 months of being suspended by Google.

I shouldn’t be complaining. After all, I wanted baby #2. My agonized whining would also be a slap on the faces of many of my acquaintances who would readily give me a million neck rubs so they could suffer in my stead and have babies. But I can’t help it. Why me? It’s like getting picked in a lottery you don’t want to win.

It all begins when I wake up in the morning and an invisible pump suddenly starts forcibly drawing out the contents of the deep well that is my gut. I throw up nothing but for a moment, it feels like my entrails would like to go ahead and take the place of that nothing. I eat so I can have something to throw up. If my previous pregnancy is any indication, I’d probably be in this state for the entire duration it takes my little one to form ten toes, ten fingers and the gray matter that fourteen years from now will acquire the potential to challenge a mother’s reasoning and break her heart.

But my frequent voiding from the opposite hole is not my only problem. My last pregnancy introduced me to the discomforts of regular infections. I am beginning to show clear signs of my first one today. They say it’s all because of my rising sugar levels. That’s why I have to limit my food intake. How in hell am I supposed to limit my intake more when I vomit everything?

Through this all, my patient, enduring husband takes care of everything— the laundry, the cooking, the washing, the cleaning, the toddler and the earning. Maybe it’s logical to first fall madly, deeply in love with each other before deciding to get married and have babies because the challenges can break apart those less attached.

Right now I keep telling myself that this is what I want. What I really want to say is, somebody help me!

In my husband’s eyes, our daughter was showing great promise. For years, she watched mainly Batman and the Justice League; she preferred cars over dolls and she actually asked to have a Captain America figurine on her birthday cake even though Cinderella was right beside the man in star spangled tights.

To my husband, the unconventional taste of our daughter was something to be happy about. It’s like an assurance that she’d never grow up like other girls in frills and skirts, some of whom end up with huge Avon bills for daddy and long lines of salivating packs of testosterone at the gate. Then again, my husband was a popular kid in school so he doesn’t know that unconventional girls in school are the butt of all pranks and don’t fit anywhere, not even on the walls as wallpaper, leaving them to wonder if they were really alien babies switched at birth. Yes, weird kids pray every night for spaceships to come along and take them to a home where weirdness is the norm.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) there’s been a switch in our kid’s interests lately. After initially showing reluctance at watching singing mermaids, dancing chambermaids and effeminately beautiful prince charmings, she finally agreed to watch some of Disney’s fairy tales. Disney must have invested on hypnotic techniques because she is hooked and is now singing Under the Sea, not knowing that in reality it should really be Under the Oil Spill. Well, at least our kid doesn’t have to think she’s an alien and she can now relate to girls her age when they talk about the latest fashion in pink and baby blue.

Of course, there is a price for normalcy. It is now my responsibility to find a way to tell her that people don’t get married and run off into the sunset after meeting only once and singing to each other in chirping voices. People meet; fall head over heels over each other’s nice teeth, eyes, brains and pleasing personality; grow sick and tired of each other then either stab each other in the back or muster the will needed to crawl (after all that tiresome running) to that sunset together.

Then of course there are babies, rising costs of everything, unemployment and the husband’s former officemate with better vital statistics to think about…

A friend once told me that if he had been Hitler’s father and he had known that his son would turn out the way he did, he would have (ahem, excuse me) done the “ACT” all by himself instead of with his wife (you get the drift, don’t you?).

I wonder what Hitler’s parents would have done if they had known who Adolf would grow up to be. Would they have taken his life even before he was born or would they have allowed him to be born and changed his environment or the way they raised him instead?

I used to be a staunch supporter of the nurture theory—that adults are more a result of how they were raised and of the influence of their environment (that’s like saying you have my parents and the world to blame for the plague that I am to you; Hahaha). I’m beginning to think though that nature, our genes, does have as much of a hand at influencing who we become.

At this point, I would like to divert from my usual depressed, bitter self to look into the brighter side of things—that side where Barney teaches the Care Bears to sing family-oriented songs in a ghastly way. Seriously, there are just some things that can soften not just the hardest of hearts but the more tragic cynical and sarcastic ones too.

On the first day of this year (when we Filipinos got another excuse to stuff each other with too much food) our pressure cooker blew up in our kitchen. That resulted in a near Jackson Pollock cow oil masterpiece getting imprinted right on our kitchen wall and ceiling. My husband got a share of the rare abstract work on his skin because he was standing in front of the pressure cooker when it blew up. You can imagine what he was doing then; he was the one cooking because people get sick when I cook. Since he had second degree burns, he had to sleep on the floor near our bed so he wouldn’t accidentally rub his ointment-coated skin on me and our daughter.

Our two year old daughter who had always slept beside us since she was an infant couldn’t keep her eyes off her father. After a long time of just staring, she took her stuffed toy, puppy dog, and placed it on her father’s stomach.

I could only stare at her in disbelief. My daughter never sleeps without her puppy dog. I asked her why she did what she did. She explained in her usual simple talk that she wanted her father to have her puppy for the night because he was sick. She had trouble falling asleep the whole night but she never took her toy back.

That just blew the caps off my jaded heart and my bladder full of bile. Of course we try to teach her to be a good kid but never specifically to do such things. I was expecting she’d exercise her right to be a tyrant at least until she turns three.

A counselor once told me it is only at around three that a person’s moral self, his ability to determine right from wrong and his ability to understand compassion, develops. How could my little daughter know that her dad needed her puppy dog that night? If I never forced her to give up what was most valuable to her, then she probably did it out of her own accord because she has some innate goodness that can either be nurtured or redirected.

I suppose all of us have that seed of innate goodness. Maybe Hitler had it too but then he could have digested it out of his body or others did that for him. I wish the good seed could just grow no matter what.

I was thinking I’d write something wise and inspiring for Christmas and the New Year, something filled with such beautifully constipated words that you’d have no choice but to hail me as the next great religious cult leader. But alas, my dreams of world domination and wealth beyond my capacity to count would have to wait for the next season. I’m stumped. It’s not just because I’m nearly incapable of thinking of pink cotton-candy-cloud puffy positive thoughts. It’s not even because my writer’s block has grown into a brain tumor. I can’t write right now because I can’t think. I can’t think because I’m potty training my daughter.

The New Year is fast approaching and she will soon be three years old so I was thinking that it’s about time she knew where real shit should go to. Sadly, I am the one who is swiftly learning that shit does happen in life— the real kind that smears on floor vinyl, stains every fiber invented by man and gets into your nerves. It’s a good thing my poor father-in-law is an ace at wiping poop off floors. Otherwise I would have wept over the offending deposits until they got up and walked off by themselves.

If I think hard about it though, I feel as if my daughter is indirectly teaching me something. It’s like she’s telling me, “Other kinds of shit happen in life ma. Chances are, some of them will happen to you next year and they don’t always go down the toilet like you want them too. You’ve just got to learn to wipe and disinfect.”

Sigh. Of course, that’s exactly what this little cute tyrant is telling me. I can just make out the words of wisdom if I listen closely to her broken syllables and her nervous weeping.

What I want to tell her in response is, “Bless you my child. May you have a potty full of shit this year and may all your potty contents go down the toilet.”

I wish all of you the same this year.

It’s getting harder to shop for toys for my kid every year. It’s not just because every single cheap toy that we average earners can afford seems to come with a bonus service— free lead poisoning. Actually, I used to play with cheap, lead-coated toys when i was a kid and look at what that made me— insane and loving it.

Although I still do worry over the paint messing with my child’s cells and making a better monster out of her, my real problem is the issue of gender toys.

My daughter loves playing with cars, action figures and basketballs. We didn’t teach her that. She does have at least three feminine dolls that she has so neglected that dust has now made dreadlocks out of their hair.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with my daughter’s toy preferences but my blood boils over when people call my attention. Society says girls should play with little tea cups and anatomically impossible dolls in pink tutus.

I was wondering, if my daughter absolutely refuses to host perpetual tea parties for rewinds of Ken and Barbie’s wedding, preferring instead to fight crime with Batman and Robin, would that make her any less female? Would she suddenly forget that she doesn’t have balls and insist that she can grow facial hair just as well as her father?

Honestly, I’m afraid that society’s stress on gender toys might confuse her about what she really wants for herself. She can grow up preferring to be a member of the third gender but I want her to make that decision not because people told her she wasn’t a normal girl.

Believe me, I’ve been there. For a time I thought I wanted to be a guy just because I played with G.I Joe and Voltes V until I met my husband who could spit farther than me, looked more manly than me and shared my passion for little katana-wielding plastic toys that could bend their knees and arms. So then I wanted to become a girl because he liked girls who liked boys and not girls who liked girls and would compete with him for the attention of other girls (whew!).

I want my daughter to know that she can still be female if she wants to even if she likes racing cars and shooting hoops. But gender toys are a reality so I would have to deal with that. At least my daughter likes pink over any other color. Maybe I can just buy her pink wheels and Barbie with a pink broadsword.