When did I first learn about bedbugs? In high school I had half a crush on one of the junior basketball players. He would call me up almost every day after school. On one such evening he said, "Teka, ang kati, ang dami kasing surot dito. (Wait, I’m itchy. There are so many bedbugs here.)" You guessed it, he fell off my list. I didn’t know what bedbugs were then but I thought they were disgusting and controllable. You had to be very dirty to keep them alive. But no, they don’t eat dirt, they bite to suck the blood from people.
When I had only two little girls, we moved into my grandmother’s house while our own house was being built. Every morning my older little girl would wake up full of giant hives. I didn’t know what gave her that until my grandmother said, "Maybe there are bedbugs." So we stripped the mattress they were using and found that indeed there were. We poured boiling water on the mattress seams, left it out to dry in the sun, then sprayed it royally with insecticides. In a second, the bedbugs were gone. Those were the days before I knew how "dangerous" insecticides were. None of my children died or even got very sick. To this day I have my can of spray insecticide that I pick up to use on cockroaches, worms and slugs. I cannot live without insecticides.
Now in the USA they recommend that you call your exterminator to get rid of your bedbugs. He will vacuum them off and spray your bed with insecticides, too. The dangerous thing about bedbugs is when you feed them your blood, they get fat and grow and then they mate and have babies until they overpopulate your mattress and damage to your comfort zone. You get very itchy from their bites. So it’s better to get rid of them as soon as you can.
Twenty years ago my daughters used "Don’t let the bedbugs bite" as an alternative to goodnight. Those were during the last of the good years when we all lived together in rather rambunctious harmony. Then we began to separate. I came home here first, so I lived alone and when I missed them, I would imagine them as my "bedbugs" and I would say they "bit." I was stung by the pain of missing them. Now, 20 years later, how do I feel?
Now I live alone, completely alone. No maid. I only have a driver who comes in every morning and goes home in the early evening. My girls are all in their forties, my son a few years behind. Everyone is married and lives far away from me. There are nights when I look out my window and miss them still but I miss them as young children, when you could squeeze and hug and tickle them all you wished, when we would sit and joke and laugh a lot, when we had a lot of fun together. Those days seem to have gone forever.
Now I cannot get them all together. One lives in San Francisco, the other in England, the other on the extreme northern part of town, the other way down south. Also, I feel they have lost their need for me, natural for their age. So I leave them alone and try to build a life of my own because that’s what motherhood is about: to have, to hold and finally to let go, until, as I have learned from my mother, nature takes over and mother inadvertently demands attention again because she has grown old and cannot take care of herself, then our children must discover us again and take care of us again. Before we die we become their bedbugs and bite them without knowing that we do. What a terrible story, a horrible tale, just from watching bedbugs on Today.
Let me end with an aging parent note. If you want to know more about what to do about your aging parents, attend the Bantay Matanda lecture on Depression and the Elderly at the Janssen Hall, Christ the King seminary, E. Rodriguez Boulevard Extension, Quezon City on Saturday, August 26, 2006. Registration is at 8:00 a.m. and the session ends at 12:00 noon. If you want more information, don’t text or e-mail me. Call Adele at 373-2262. Maybe I will see you there.