'Anak, you'll grow up to be guwapo one day'
That’s my mom, the eternal optimist. Thank you very much, Mom. I hope that that day still comes. Even if I have stopped growing in the right places.
Allow me to distract you from the reality teleserye thriller tragicomedy that is the National Elections. Just like the rest of you, I am not only trying to lobotomize the portions of my brain which continue to play back three month’s worth of campaign jingles, but I am also waiting for my testicles to descend back to my lower extremities upon discovering that less than half of the PCOS machines were delivered to their precincts on Sunday morning. Haaaaaay, this is the type of idiosyncratic stress that unnecessarily accelerates hair loss. As I write this column, I am still unsure as to whether the PCOS machines were effective electoral counting machines or if they turned out to be very expensive paperweights.
Speaking of which, many of us may have neglected to offer proper concern due to an important holiday last Sunday (particularly because many of us were storing up ahead of the 24-hour liquor ban prior to elections). So I want to dedicate this column to the other legally permissible woman in my life aside from my wife and my baby daughter — no, no, no, not my yaya. (That will come in a separate seven-part special.) Not even my three female readers. I am talking about my mom.
I thank the Lord that my mom, a devout Catholic and a staunch believer in corporal punishment, does not regularly read my column unless she is alerted by the proper authorities. She is (thankfully) content enough with clipping out my columns and pasting them in a scrapbook for undetermined future reading, blissfully unaware that those columns are about DOMs, Brazilian waxes, natural aphrodisiacs and flatulence. That is why, despite all the drivel that I have written for the past five years, she still has not given me up from adoption.
Let me tell you, though: If nagging is a sign of love, then my mom loves me and my siblings very much. According to the book Why Men Don’t Have a Clue and Women Need More Shoes, nagging is really about the balance of power between individuals. If that is the case, then the Ledesma residence was once under a constant state of marital, este, martial law where my mom was all the branches of government rolled into one. Meanwhile, my dad was chief of NEDA while all of us kids are the Morong 43. However, once all of us kids got married, we were able to apply for political asylum. Unfortunately, my mom has managed to detain all of our children.
My mom subscribed to the Attention Deficit Disorder school of raising us children: Why say something once when she can say it 20 times? My brother and I were loved into cardiac arrest during our adolescence. You see, mom is fond of nagging us in threes: the first time she says something to us is to make sure that she has said something (i.e. “Did you brush your teeth?”). The second time she says something is to make sure that I remember the first time she said something 30 seconds ago (i.e. “Have you brushed your teeth?”), and the third time she says something is to make sure the first and the second time have set into what passes for our brains (i.e. “Remember I told you to brush your teeth?”). And then if I remind my mom that she has told me the same thing three times over, she will lovingly use her inhuman strength to lift me up and say with an ear-to-ear grimace, “Don’t talk back to me! Have you been listening to me? Now brush your teeth!”
For my mom, there is nothing that love, homemade chocolate cake and a little electroshock therapy won’t solve. For everything else, she formulated a de-facto guide on “How to stay alive if you live under my roof” for her male children — which she jackhammered into our cardiac-arrested, testosterone-imbalanced adolescent heads. These rules — which were crafted and re-crafted (without the benefit of charter change, I might add) — were strictly imposed on my brother and I during our heathen bachelorhoods. The guiding principles she dispensed were simple, succinct and easily heeded if you feared for your life. And for your afterlife. I thought, why should I keep all this homemade knowledge to myself when all my three female readers can benefit from raising a child who will turn out to be like me?
Of course, I removed some of the advice she offered us which I felt was rather dated. For example, her advice on good grooming. During my first day of college, my mom told me that I should tuck my shirt into my underwear so that my shirt would look neatly pressed. (Really.) Despite the fact that I was the subject of merciless taunting of my co-ed classmates because my Voltes V underwear would peek out of my pants because my shirt was tucked in so tightly, I believed that her advice on good grooming would help me attract the attention of the college cheerleaders. Instead, I attracted the attention of the college disciplinary officer. I am still receiving counseling for that.
Here are some excerpts from the Ledesma guidebook that my brother and I have kept so close to our hearts, mostly because we fear the DSWD’s investigation into our mom’s child-rearing practices. My brother and I plan on inflicting karmic retribution on our own kids by subjecting them to these nuggets of wisdom after nagging them 20 times to brush their teeth.
(And to both my mother and my wife, before you read this, please remember: I am a humor columnist. These were all written in loving jest. Please do not try anything that might be misconstrued as election-related violence. I love both of you very much but I cannot help you with any problems with the law until I win the presidency in 2016.)
Tough Love, Ledesma-Style
On respect for elders: Do not raise your voice at me or else I will kill you.
On religion: Go to Mass every Sunday or else you will burn in hell. Then you will not be with me and the rest of the family in Heaven. I will kill you first before I let you burn in hell.
On weight training: Make sure to wear gloves when you lift weights so that your hands will not be magaspang (rough) or else your girlfriend will not want to hold your hands. If you break up with her just because your hands are magaspang, I will not have any grandchildren and then I will have to kill you.
On hygiene: Make sure to brush your teeth in the morning after you wake up and right before you eat breakfast. If you swallow your bad breath because you did not brush your teeth, that will kill you.
On hosting a party: Have a piano player or a combo for one of your parties. I’m sure it will be a hit. Better yet, why don’t you get a ballroom dancing instructor? I don’t like the type of music that you play during your parties nowadays. The songs you listen to have no lyrics and they sound like police sirens. Don’t worry if your friends will laugh at your music, at least I can invite my friends to come to your party and dance with the ballroom instructors. Your friends who do not come to your party are not your true friends and you do not want to burn in hell with them after your music kills you.
On bed-wetting: You are 31 years old, for goodness’ sake! Do you still want yaya to clean up after you every night!? That’s so embarrassing, you should just kill yourself.
On bathrooms habits: If you spend more than five minutes in the banyo doing anything else aside from sitting on the toilet, taking a shower or brushing your teeth, I will break the door open with my bare hands and then kill you first before you can burn in hell.
On good manners: Do not adjust yourself in public. They will think I did not train you well. Do I need to explain why pa further or should I just kill you?
On dating: When it comes to selecting your girlfriend, remember to collect then select. Even if you see two or three girls at the same time, that is fine by me. But if they find out about each other, they will kill you.
On choice of women: Never, never date a starlet who is named after a soft drink, a candy bar, an Italian dessert, a name that is ripped of from an American actress or a coup plotter. Do not especially date them if these starlets have appeared in movie titles that are named after fruits or animals or sappy song titles. If you try to date her, I will kill you with fruits, animals and sappy song titles.
On girlfriends: I should get more kisses than your girlfriend or else sasabunutan ko siya (I will pull out her hair). When I am done with her, then you will feel like you should kill yourself.
On intimacy: If you conceive a child out of wedlock, I will kill you. But I will get to keep the child. However, if I am 85 years old and I still do not have grandchildren, then I will relax this rule. I can kill you over time.
On having children after getting married: Your firstborn is mine and I will kill you to get it. (RJ’s note: I have escaped several assassination attempts.)
And, most importantly, on love: Walang nagpapakamatay dahil sa pag-ibig. Kung magpapakamatay ka, papatayin kita. (No one kills himself over love; if you do, I will kill you.)
And the most recent rule I learned after marriage and children: Name your firstborn daughter after your mother. That is a better guarantee than any educational plan that is currently being offered in the market. And the killing will stop. For a while.
(Post-script: I was recently re-indoctrinated by my wife with a new set of survival laws which oftentimes are diametrically opposed to the laws set up by my mom — except for the part on brushing your teeth. I have further learned from veteran husbands who have suffered accelerated hair loss that you will learn another set of survival laws once your daughter hits 18. At this rate, I think I need to learn self-euthanasia.)
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Congratulations to my mom for being the recipient of the Ulirang Ina Sectoral Awardee for Government Services during the Ulirang Ina Awards last Mother’s day 2010.
For comments, suggestion or if you want the Ledesma guidebook to raising children please text PM POGI <text message> to 2948 for Globe, Smart and Sun subscribers. Or email :ledesma.rj@gmail.com” ledesma.rj@gmail.com or visit www.rjledesma.net.
