This is an excerpt from a short story I wrote for and dedicated to a good friend, the writer Rica Bolipata-Santos of the famous Bolipata family of artists and musicians, who one day told me about one specific struggle she faced in dealing with having a special child.
I wrote this story about two years ago, in Casa San Miguel, the Bolipata’s ancestral compound at the foot of Mount Pundaquit in Zambales, after I got back from the United States for the International Writing Program in Iowa. But truth to tell, Rica had already given me and a bunch of other writer-friends–Luis Katigbak, Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta, Tara FT Sering, and Yvette Tan–this challenge of dramatizing a specific event in her life as the mother of an autistic child, in 2008, when we were in a café in Baguio, contemplating our writerly lives. She promised the first one to write that story a mango tree planted in our name.
The story I wrote just won second prize in this year’s Palanca Awards. I guess I have a mango tree now in Zambales bearing my name. Here is an excerpt from “It Always Breaks My Heart a Little to See You Go”…
Deo has turned feral again. He lunges at me in a mad burst of energy I have come to suspect must be concentrated and kept in deep and scattered pockets of his eleven-year-old body. His anger–always sudden–has grown mass. It is an intruder into my old quiet, a kind of cancer thinning out the increasingly impatient years. I blink back tears. Don’t cry, I tell myself. But this is no longer an uncommon morning, not for a long time. It is almost too cruel now to know how familiar it has become.
When he lunges in a furious twist of body parts, I catch again the vacant brightness in his eyes. They seem to taunt me, my son’s eyes. I flinch from the slap of his unrecognition; when he gets like this, I am just like anyone else, not his mother. And it is all that I can do to turn my face away from his screaming. As Deo flails his small arms against me, the staccato of his wail piercing deep, I snatch remembered prayers between my uneven breathing and shield my face. I know the drill–to cower, to plea, to pray, to catch the tantrum tapering off. Then, later, when quiet returns and he has exhausted himself, I rebuild slowly the small shattered pieces of life around me.
His fists make contact, and I feel my skin burn anew.
“Deo, please… no.”
I say this almost in supplication. Still, my words seem to fall around me as empty shells of pleading rigged with exhaustion. I have been saying those words for what feels like an eternity. Every day has come to be rehearsal and performance of the same mad bit.
By the time morning turns and has dissipated in the spiking ravages of the noon sun, the toll of the hours has taken away my last reservoir of strength. By then, the boy has been led away, his undefined anger simmering perhaps ready to erupt again.
“Rica,” my husband calls out in a low voice.
I look at Robert briefly, and he knows he doesn’t have to ask the question. Are you all right? That’s what that voice asks.
I close my eyes. The small nod I give him tells him I am all right–whatever that means. That I have survived another battle and that I am ready to pick up the pieces? But my husband has now taken charge, and I am allowed to breathe again. The househelp has disappeared into the kitchen to prepare lunch. Upstairs, secure in her quarters, I can hear my mother turning on the television, volume turned very low, her channel set to EWTN, the Catholic network. I feel tired. I know too suddenly the weightless inconsequence of prayers. Dear God, I close my eyes when I mutter this. Please exist.
Around me, in the living room, the evidence of the most recent bout lay scattered–a broken lamp, a torn book, an alarm clock smashed to reveal its innards of springcoil and such. Several decorative china toppled from the shelves now lay as jagged pieces on the carpeted floor. There is a fresh dent on the newly varnished front door. For some strange reason, I can hear my mother’s voice at the back of my head, some remembered admonition recovered from beyond the haze, jagged as these broken pieces of things I am about to sweep up.
I don’t call for the help. I know where the broom and the dustpan are hidden: in the dark and slim cupboard near the door. Such convenience. With these in hand, I proceed to do what has become part of this sad ritual. In my head, I can hear other admonitions, these ones from old friends. “Buy plastic things,” they all have said. “That way, you know there won’t be a constant cycle of broken things and cleaning up.”
But no.
I have stubbornly done the opposite: all the more I buy things in glass and crystal. They don’t get it, I think. If I start buying the plastic things now, that means I have given up. I wage my battle every day precisely because I cling to an awful hope, and the broken pieces of things… well, they are just broken pieces of things, replaceable, apt mementos that I am still mother to this child born in a dervish.
What I do not say is that my secret wish is to run. Away from all this.
Here’s what’s also true, but which I do not tell anyone else. I need the sound of those fragile things breaking. That familiar splitting crack against hard surfaces. It has become a strange and welcome soundtrack. I think it must be how a soul must sound like when broken–and yet… And yet, and yet. That sharpness. Those slivers of sound so resolutely alive the way pain becomes a reminder for the living and not the dead.
I feel the throbbing of a new bruise on my arm. It takes slower seconds to remind myself there should be no crying over this.
