Mama Wouldn’t Cry If Papa Died in the Operating Room
by Derco Rosal
He was even more cruel to the children whose flesh and blood are his own. We couldn’t understand how he could attract friends effortlessly, but could not even tell a bedtime story to his children, or make a coffee to his wife.
A few weeks before a major ischemic stroke took control over Papa’s body, he was nowhere to be found, but Mama knows what kept him always missing. We know it too. He would only tell Mama that he had to visit a nearby friend to catch up to each other’s whereabouts. If not that, he would tell her that he had to search for vacant rice fields within the town because our ducks need to be transferred so as not to interrupt the egg-laying season. If not that, he would just say he’d leave without telling her why.
Mama had gotten used to it because even before I came to life, he already had his life revolving not around us, but around his peers, liquors, cards, and cigarettes.
This is the truth our family doesn’t hide, especially my older siblings who happened to suffer Papa’s cruelty. He was cruel to my cousins when they were still young. He was even more cruel to the children whose flesh and blood are his own. We couldn’t understand how he could attract friends effortlessly, but could not even tell a bedtime story to his children, or make a coffee to his wife. He was so distant, and yet so powerful that my older siblings had no other option but to nod their heads and obey even the insignificant commands he would make.
It is still clear in my memory when Ate Ghay, my sister, told me how she was told to buy some bottles of gin and a pack of cigarettes at the store on the other side of the mountain. “It was almost dusk,” she recalled, “but I had to run as fast as I could, bare-footed, just to get home before the night,” guided by the fleeting light from the setting sun.
She barely recognized the people she met along the trail. Her feet were racing against the drying saliva that Papa spat on the doorway. It was his time clock. They understood how it worked; if the saliva went dry on the ground before she arrived with the bottles of gin and the pack of cigarettes, she would still be ordered to lie flat, facing the plain, wooden table, and would be asked to promise — while getting beaten by his belt — to move faster next time.
When he would come home after squandering his bills on gins and tong-its (a card game), he would still have the audacity to put malice on a locked door. He’d suspect that behind the locked door was Mama having an affair with just any guy from the village. Just when they thought it couldn’t get any worse, he would become so ridiculously cunning at tweaking his logic just to justify his suspicion.
When he came home drunk for the second time, the door was left ajar for him, and yet, he still suspected her that she had been anticipating for another man to secretly creep into the house.
Mama never argued. She did not raise a voice. She never stood up to him despite his skewed logic. If she was brave enough to leave him the first time he was caught cheating, and take custody of their first two daughters, Mama would only have two daughters; and I, the youngest of nine, would have never heard of this story.
In December 2021, Papa was rushed to the nearest hospital but, for the reason that that was a public hospital, he was not immediately diagnosed. Only when he kept on screaming and holding his throbbing head did we transfer him to a private hospital. We, later on, learned that he has been afflicted with a major stroke causing paralysis to the left side of his body.
The day before the cranial surgery, we were warned that if we could not decide to have him undergo operation, he would be comatose for the succeeding days. The reality is, it might be his final sleep.
In all honesty, we still feared losing him. No one slept on the night of his surgery, even those who attended to him around the clock.
Mama said she was okay with whichever decision we’d come up with. She even managed to sound casually when Ate Ghay called to tell her that Papa’s fate would be in the precision of a surgeon’s hands, and it might not succeed. His grim reaper was just lurking around the corner.
We weren’t certain about how Mama felt that day, but Ate Ghay knows her too well. She is well-versed with the past that she remembers how they missed too many lunch meals while Papa was raising a glass in his friend’s house. She remembers how Papa found out when she and Kuya Ño, our eldest brother, took a bite of the kalamay (native candy), and instead of sparing each of them a bite-sized chunk, he made them eat the whole kalamay, which they failed to do. She remembers him punishing them for a petty mistake a father could just forgive.
A weekend after Papa’s surgery, I paid a visit to Ate Ghay and her family. Before I left, I found myself listening to her stories — and I threw her some questions too — until the conversation shifted to Mama and Papa.
Mama, among all of us, has the most seasoned heart.
I think what she meant to say was, “Mama has withstood the patriarchy.” I believe it because she knows her well. There was certainty in it and in the next thing she said, that Mama is not evil; she would mourn but she wouldn’t shed a tear if Papa didn’t come out alive from the operating room.
