Happy Father's Day: The Father I've Grown To Respect

Today we celebrate father’s day. I consider myself lucky to have both a father and a mother while growing up. It is a privilege not shared by all of us. For some, it’s their harsh reality that they ended up with just one parent raising them and for some unlucky beings, to be raised without any parent at all.

I am grateful, indeed, for being lucky knowing that I always have two faithful supporters and cheerleaders on my side—my father and my mother.

I have already previously attempted to paint a picture of what my mother is, so today I’ll take this opportunity to make a colorful description of the father I’ve grown to respect and love as a father over the years.

Physically my father looks like a cross between Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Brown though my father probably has 70% more likeness to the latter. Can you picture a morph of those two images? The flat nose is very prominent and very infectious as well. In fact, of all seven of us, none of my siblings was able to do away without the flat nose. It is almost like a characteristically indelible genetic link that we all have to inherit from our father if we were to be considered his sons and daughters.

My father though has that almost always sympathetic, down-to-earth, no-mean-bone, I’m-here-to-help look and demeanor. Every time he talks he always lets out a silly grin and giggle to finish off a phrase or a statement. It could be annoying and insulting for some people but for those who know him, that gesture always gives the aura of a relaxed, welcoming atmosphere.

If you ask me about the one most influential person in my life, that would be my father. He basically taught me life’s most noble and profound lessons. Whenever me and my siblings would argue, I’ve learned to shut up because my father would always say that “shallow waters are noisy”. All the while growing up, I have to come to acknowledge the truth to this simply because most people who are vocal are usually not logical per se. The loud ones are usually the empty ones up there.

My father also taught me to be kind and giving especially to the lowly ones. He always has a heart for the less fortunate ones. He mourns over other people’s sorrows. He easily tears over sad things that happen to other people especially to the real helpless ones. He always feels bad when the already disadvantaged people are exploited by the merciless in our society.

And this is all because my father grew up without a parent or a sibling. He calls himself “the son of a bamboo tree’s crack”, if you know what I mean. It simply connotes that he is the son of nobody—that he just came out of some silly crack from some silly tree and ended up in this world without people he can call and own as a family.

He had probably the hardest life than most of us. Without a parent to take care of him, he learned to tend for himself at a young age. He learn to farm, to fish, to find food, to entertain himself by making toys made out of palm leaves, banana stalk, coconut shell, twigs, seashells, wood trimmings, empty cans, sea debris and probably from the mere mold of his imagination and creativity.

With utmost respect to my dead grandmother—my father’s mother, she died not knowing that she left a son.

Her own story was a tragedy that can only happen in fictional layouts. She was a pretty, fair-skinned, tall and shapely lady at a young age who suffered from occasional epileptic seizures. She regularly goes into the deep woods to pick up twigs for firewood and to gather fruits in the wild for food. On one tragic occasion, she was burning some wood alone while clearing up weeds from a shrubby area and she unfortunately had a seizure attack that helplessly threw one side of her body to the burning ember. Half of her face was burnt and a portion of her cranium was burnt too. I don’t know if there is any medical explanation for this, but she did lose her sanity after the incident.

With the loss of her sanity, she still went on to do the things she used to do and wandered off in the thick forest. Then some heartless bastard (my grandfather that we never came to know) must have stalked her and sexually molested her because her tummy was slowly growing in size and nine months later, my father was born. And there wasn’t any word or any clue that my father’s mother left about who was my father’s father.

My father never felt the warmth of love from a mother, either. It was clearly etched in his memory that every time he was put beside her mother so he can lactate as a baby, his mother always pushed him away. At five years old, all that grew in him was the pain of rejection from a mother and with the innocence and trauma of a young child, he would then one day hit her mother’s forehead with a hammer, the strength would be equal to the might of a rejected five year old kid.

To this day, my father would tell this sad story, and he would acknowledge that if there’s one thing he won’t forgive himself of, it would be that one moment when he hit his mother with a hammer in the forehead, though understandably it didn’t cause any fatal blow but the emotional pain left by the incident is forever haunting my father. But what better does an unloved child know?

My father though used to being on his own and was basically growing up with the knowledge that he was unwanted by the rest of the world, grew up to be a smart, creative, efficient and compassionate person. The pain of rejection didn’t kill his spirit instead it nurtured him to become a better person than what his predicament would have allowed him to be.

I always adore my father and respect him so much, that it is even impossible for me to talk back to him or refute his sometimes twisted views because I know that somewhere deep within his core is a true believer of his convictions and a truly humble and “ego-less” person.

He is a simple man, who is always enriched by new philosophies in life. He has never rendered himself a slave to materialism and the greed for money. For him, being able to eat his regular meals everyday and live a peaceful and harmonious life with his neighbors is richness far more valuable than any material possessions this world could offer.

When I was a little girl, I remember getting wounds from running around with other kids in the neighborhood with my bare feet. One time the sole of my foot got pricked by a rusty nail and my father nursed the wound like any quack doctor would. He would brew some guava leaves and washed the wound with the warm guava leaves concoction. Meanwhile he would squeeze out the juice from a clove of garlic and rub it to the wound as some kind of antibiotic. Whenever the wound would get swollen due to infection, he would take some banana bud leaf and wrap it around the wound. It did work all the time, giving me some cool comfort to a wound that would almost turn to gangrene. I would be able to sleep despite the throbbing pain of the swelling, and by the following morning, as we take off the banana leaf wrapping, the obvious relief is undeniable with the pus being sucked out and the swelling and redness dramatically reduced. Or he would crush some penicillin pill and apply it to the wound. This process, he would continue to do, until my wound would heal. I don’t even remember my mother ever doing any of that for me.

My father is practical and creative. One time, we went to visit his land somewhere in the coastal area off of the city of Dapitan. All we had was a bolo and a match stick to burn weeded-out dry grass. By noontime we were hungry. I thought I would starve, but my father cut off a bunch of ripe bananas from the tree, covered it with wood, grass, and dried twigs and actually cook the bananas on the ground without any kitchen utensil. That memory has taught me to be creative and ingenious. It made me think every time, especially when I am trying to accomplish something, that there is always a solution to every problem and about eight hundred strokes to kill a cat with nine lives.

Now, my father is in his mid 70’s but he is still able to laugh about things and he has not changed a lot. He is still not a slave of this material world. In fact, if you would ask him what he’d want for his birthday, it would be something that he can build, enjoy and share with his much less fortunate friends.

I would probably be less of a person now, if I had a rich, famous dad. If I have to do life over again, I would still choose to be raised by the same father that raised me as a person all these years.

Mothers build the strong pillars of our character being someone we always look up to, but the fathers are always the ones who reinforce those weak corners in our lives—those hidden corners with too much load but with less supportive structures. The fathers always take care of making sure that those uneven corners of our foundation as a person are well bracketed, so we will be nourished with strength and level-headedness as we brace ourselves to partake in the real world.

My father always knew the inner workings of things. He’s a good logical thinker. But he has a bigger heart than most people I know, thus, he often sets the logic aside and let his emotions rule.

I adore him and respect him, not just as a father but as a faithful mentor who molded me into the person that I am now.

A great salute to my father who has always embraced his difficult life—one who sees neither gloomy skies nor the silver lining, but the grandeur of life in every day that comes, rain or shine.