oh, the fictions we tell ourselves. to make the living of our piddling lives sufferable.
i wonder what my mother tells herself. my mother who, until this very late in her life, never seems to get any wiser as to men.
first she hooked up with my dad. big time philanderer. messy break up. then, her current husband. used to be this guileless church guy. turns out, same fish.
no dirty, disorderly estrangement, yet. i don’t think there would be any. the only thing mother has learned all these years, it seems, is to just slog through this.
we never talk about this openly. i mean, this talk about her chronic marital woes.
the closest we got was when i was still in manila and crazy in love with this intelligent but recusant boy who hardly believed in anything. including exclusivity in relationships.
she called me up one time. she didn'’t sound harried. just a bit peeved. annoyed that until that time i have yet to show any signs of interest as to processing my immigration papers to the states.
i, who has yet to come out to my mother, told her everything was sort of copasetic with my life in the city. and she paused.
you’'re in love, is that it? she asked. i didn’'t answer her headlong. and she respected my reticence. a familiar family trait.
she told me that it would be wise, no, kind for me then to come home, visit her now that i am not really into deep preparing my visa.
and so i did. despite the fact that it was the height of her husband’'s affair with this woman.
everyone in our neighborhood seems to know about it. an irrepressible one, manang lila, asked me if why i came home was to console my mama in this time of deep anguish. i told her i was doing nothing productive in the big city.
nothing productive either for me to do back home. my friends were all working somewhere else. i hardly knew anybody around. nothing much to do but watch soap with mother.
mother, and i, eventually, particularly cared for this one that featured a washerwoman married to a physically abusive, good for nothing cockfighter. and despite the abuses he heaped on her, she cleaved to him like sweat stains around the arm holes of his favorite shirt.
one night, while mama’'s husband was once again on a late errand, we watched how this washerwoman was just humiliated by her husband publicly.
one of the other characters, a friend of the stupid washermoman, told her to just dump him like a soiled wash water. he is a sickness, she told her.
the washerwoman told her friend she couldn'’t. but why, her friend asked back. because,she told her she, too, was sick. sick with this incurable love for this man.
the character then took these typical melodramatic steps towards the camera. teary eyed, she gazed right through it and spoke her lines. something about no other cure for the sickness of being desperately in love but to love more.
i heard my mama cleared her throat after the woman on tv spouted these mawkish lines. i felt so uneasy that i just had to say something. so i asked her what were we having for breakfast tomorrow.
without taking her eyes off the tv, she told me, in between the lines of the soap characters, that we should have something good. i told her i hope so.
our voices were as grave as those coming from the tv like we were kindred characters in this late night soap my mama watched while waiting for her husband to come home.