One of the greatest lessons I learned as a Dad
To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase ‘terrible beauty.’ Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it’s a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else’s body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away. ― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir
As a teenager, I wanted to be the sort of father who closely resembled Marlon Brando’s character in Mario Puzo’s blockbuster novel, The Godfather — Don Vito Corleone. Tough, masculine, a ‘reasonable man’. Having lived my growing up years largely without a father by my side, I couldn’t have picked a better substitute or so I thought.
But since I wasn’t raking in millions of dollars from casinos and all his other rackets at 16, to mention little of sons with the temper of Santino and the calm, murderous demeanor of Michael, I thought to myself, hell, maybe I’d be able to raise that kind of mullah someday, whatever it takes, and treat my children like royalty.
Clearly the Fates had other plans. Little did I know back then that the road I was on would first take me to the newsrooms of some of my country’s most pitiful publications. By the time my eldest daughter Rei was born, I was halfway into my ‘career’ as a freelance writer for a magazine no one knew existed, let alone read. This goes without saying that I was pitifully unemployed for the first two years, cranking up 500 to a thousand words each week for little more than a hundred pesos a pop. Minus taxes.
I was no more the great father to my kids as I was the superlative husband to my first wife. I was a bumbling idiot, your worst-case scenario if ever there was one. We went our separate ways soon enough as expected, leaving me hankering for my children for the next 365 days.
Exactly a year later, my then 13-year-old daughter Rei and her little brother Lenin chose to return to me for reasons I will not divulge here with respect to my former spouse. Suffice it that I must have done something good to merit such affection from my children. In the course of several decades I raised both kids alone — as mom and dad — teaching me the first of several lessons I know now about fatherhood: that to be a good father, one must work twice as hard to be a great Mom.
What do I mean by that? Everything I know now about being a father — courage, sacrifice, self-effacing love, among other things — I learned by standing also as a mother to my children. Simultaneously and without pause.
My idea of a father revolved around what I saw in my own dad prior to his self-exile (he was a wanted man during Marcos’ martial law) and 15-year incarceration for ‘murder’ in Oklahoma State — largely aloof, somewhat cold, an immovable pillar made of stone and steel. He was one of those whose presence disturbed the relative calm in the room, like a superstorm ready to pounce on an unsuspecting neighborhood even as he sat quietly in a corner, caught in an endless spiral of wind and hail which could explode at any given time. He was a force of nature, for lack of a better cliché, a quality I could never dream of possessing even if I tried.
Given little choice but to go by the example of the one person I’ve lived with for the longest time — my mom Sonia — I made the choice to take my cues from her.
It wasn’t easy. I grew up among the din and brawl of Manila’s streets. Not a week passed without someone running away with my shirt collar, bloody and torn, or me with what was left of his broken jaw etched in my knuckles. As a teenager I’ve trained my senses to retaliate at the slightest provocation or threat. I have a temper and a rage much too unmanageable that oftentimes I even scared myself. My life was nowhere near being a role model. I had feared many a cold night that it would get in the way of my being a dad.
So, there I was, two brilliant, scrawny kids in tow, knowing little about fatherhood. The least I could do was try. My kids know bullshit when they see it, so I might as well not even make the attempt. To be honest to a fault seemed the better tact. And so came the expedition that was to bring me from one fearful height to the next, knowing that if I acted like the bumbling idiot that I was, I could lose them again for good.
Raising my son Lenin wasn’t as hard as I thought it was. Us boys know the landscape pretty well.
But my daughter Rei? Sufficient for the day what Hitchens said on the matter: Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it’s a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else’s body.
Rei’s endless days at the hospital, her first period where I had to buy her the feminine napkins — with ‘wings,’ the day she left home to live in a dorm in college, the first date, that unforgettable night-out with friends that took her way beyond my curfew limits (I probably texted her a gazillion times), the first boyfriend (which even today forms part of the greater paradoxes that would put Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to shame), the first cigarette she shared with me, the first beer, and that fateful day when her last boyfriend asked for her hand in marriage: no father with even the most extraordinary superpowers could’ve survived such a punishment.
Thanks to that decision to raise her the way a good mother should — with both ears ever ready to listen—she turned out mighty fine. For any of my children to end up like me was one of my greatest fears. I would do anything to keep that from happening.
Today, Rei is a few months shy of making a grandfather out of me. That’s another happy chapter in a slew of happy stories worth writing about. Of course, there’s my five-year-old Likha from my wife Che, who is proving to be more of my twin than my first two kids could ever hope to be. While some of you might think it’s a compelling tribute to the laws of lineage, I find that scarier than any of the Netflix horrors combined.
And so I am back to square one, reading her stories at night as I did my first two, making sure she knows the limits of her freedom until such time that she can fully wield it. Turning 57 soon, I consider her my child of old age. That Likha has a loving mother this time doesn’t in any way relieve me from my duties as a mother-father. Our professions as journalists and editors leave us very little wiggle room for quality time, thus the need to tap the hands every so often.
Fatherhood, to me, is motherhood. Let me say that again: fatherhood, to me, is motherhood. To be a good dad, one must work twice as hard to be a great mom. Most good fathers have it easy, standing as the image of strength, principle, and perseverance. But if you really want to know what these qualities mean to a child, watch a good mother show you the way. The well-nigh angelic patience, the tenacity, the hard work, all the while refusing to renege on the love, that coup de foudre, children deserve: these are the very cornerstones that shape strong people.
Truth be told, I still feel like a bumbling idiot. I am no ideal father any more than I am Superman. More than life itself, in my case, children are the most potent teachers. They showed me who I was, what I am capable and not capable of doing. Even today, they test my strength as well as my mettle, stretch my patience to such extents that oftentimes I feel more like a failure than a success.
But I love every minute of it. I am happy that they are all the best of what I can only dream of being.
