Reconstructing my deformed meaning of home

WHEN I WAKE UP, my mother is screaming. The choral sound of plastic objects hitting concrete fills the house. My nephew Coy-Coy must have climbed in somewhere, now sending things flying here and there. Of course he did. It’s daytime. People are supposed to do a routine.

It’s been years since I’ve felt that the meaning of home for me has been deforming in slow-mo. My mother screeching again. My sister screeching in return. My nephew screeching to follow the trend. You might as well throw in our father’s normal speaking voice before, which was louder and more powerful than a scream. My father who used to be the balancing force that put everything to quiet. Except now. He’s locked inside his coffin. Sleeping forever in the past two years. I still find myself screaming at night because in my nightmare his ghost was haunting me. Or smiling because in my dream he was talking to me in a meadow, asking how’s my career. Oh, my father who I thought died never reading the stuff I’ve published on newspapers or in technical journals. Whom I loathed because I assumed he wanted me to become an engineer like him, or a medical professional, and yet he was not that civil engineer who found a fortune for us. The father who resigned from his jobs because he wanted to be his own boss and ventured into an ambitious business that was bankrupt, leaving our family savings depleted. When he passed away on the bitterest April morning eleven days after my twenty-fourth birthday, I realized I was wrong for hating him. During his burial, I saw my aunt who recognized me. She said I was the boy whose achievements my father had often talked about when they were in Tagaytay recently then, building a family vacation house. She said I was the boy whom my father had always been very proud of. Things I was fully unaware of… Well I thought I’d gotten used to this. The noise in our house, I mean. But every time I get a one week off, because I wouldn’t go home to my hometown for a tryst in the city, it’d feel like a whole new environment again when I return. Maybe it’s not a matter of getting used to something, like the noise. Maybe it’s a matter of living with the dramas of your life until the end.

I swing my leg off the bed and slide in my slippers. It’s time to take in a role similar to my father’s. Not actually a balancing force but at least an object of fright for my nephew. I assume Coy-Coy regards me as someone with an air of sternness. I know, because I felt the same toward my oldest brother when I was a kid. He used to pursue his schooling somewhere in the metro, where I work now, and go home once a week in the province, whereas his other four siblings were studying in the nearby university or school. I don’t know the exact explanation for this kind of… behavioral pattern. But when you’re a kid and rarely see someone older who lives in a far-off city, the tendency is that you’re not fully comfortable with his presence. This happens in areas near the countryside like my home. Is it because of the culture? Of keeping to one’s self when there’s a guest? Well I’m not a guest. Nor was my brother then. I don’t know. But it certainly is not the setup in the metro, where shame and keeping to one’s self are the least of options.

I enter in our living room and see Coy-Coy holding a collection of several pieces of unrelated stuff. Plastic cars, scotch tapes. Spoons and forks. Cotton. Tissue. Clothes, towels, my mother’s belongings. There are things I did when I was a kid that make me understand why Coy-Coy does them now. Like climbing in high areas. Trying to jump so I know if I survive. Tumbling when alone even. I used to throw toys, to simulate a war among my toy nation, only to collect them all later on. My mother paces toward the exit door. My nephew sees me and his verve decreases. He trails my mother, mumbles something, instructions to keep quiet and calm down. I recall two weeks ago I yelled at him because an object he threw found a nice landing area, near my head. He must be avoiding the same now. If he can remember. My nephew and I don’t have that connection we used to have before. When my cat Girbaud was still alive. He could behave so well and talk to me casually, beg even, so I would allow him to get the cat out of his cage. Oh, Girbaud. Whose odor of fecal matter used to reek in the house. Until now I imagine the little orange creature running around the backyard as he did. I still missed the need to clean his litter box on weekends. Even if the experience was almost disgusting.

At the kitchen stands the woman who gave birth to the boy who quarrels with my mother. My sister Dette. I stare at her only to quickly flit away. Without a word. I know she knows the questions running in my head. Why she’s barely doing something to discipline her son. Why she does something after the fact. Why she’s allowing such disturbing scenes in our house, like her son throwing objects everywhere, even at our mother. Why she has long succumbed to believing that the only way to make our home a peaceful place is to leave. She and her family plan on going to Canada. To find the same fortune our oldest brother has found in Australia. Does she think that life in there will be easier? I know better than to verbalize these thoughts, of course. Because I can’t question her disposition. My sister, the young girl she was, had had the least of good attention from our mother. Or so I was told. When I was in college, remembering her school days, she said that when she needed money our mother wouldn’t give her enough so she’d have to filch some to afford a notebook. Which was so different from me. From my oldest brother who had everything he wanted. From my other sister who had always been cared for. We still have one more brother. I don’t think he received that much pampering from our parents when he was studying. But at least my mother has been very proud of him now. Maybe not for earning much―in the government municipality is where he works―but for his frugal lifestyle. That save-money-for-the-future attitude. Something our parents have always instilled in us. Something he’s been very good at.

Dette is pregnant with her second baby now. Almost after seven years. Whether it’s a boy or girl I don’t know. I’m not even aware how far along she is. I make for the bathroom. In the background I can hear my sister starts talking. She tells my mother to keep quiet. I used to say the same line, but often a slight shiver would go through me afterward. The idea of my mother being quiet. I'm not referring to the usual kind of quietness, the literal meaning. I'm talking about the event I dread most, even more than my own death. I remember weeks ago, my mother told me that Dette has been working on the requirements for her husband’s migration. Sooner my brother-in-law will fly there, and later take his family with him. The house will be a much more peaceful place, without people fighting. I don’t know if I’d be happy with that.

My mother herself is afraid of being alone. Of being abandoned. Even if she’ll still be with my sister Rei, who works for a microchip-manufacturing company in Clark, a place nearby, but who has also received an invitation for an opportunity somewhere far before. I prepare my breakfast. It’s then that I conjure up a conversation I and my mother had once. Long ago. She had seen on TV the life of old people living at the homes for the aged. She said she felt so much pity she couldn’t even contain the idea of being in their shoes. She said we have a relative who chose to leave her mother to the care of such home, but then the old lady had been very depressed. I had the chance to visit a home for the aged once when I attended an event organized by PBO. Kanlungan Ni Maria was the name of the place. It’s a small house. Series of beds lining everywhere, even in areas for the kitchen and living room. Inhabited by old men and women with hunched shoulders, many who have long since stopped preventing the lines on their sunken faces. Their eyes fixed in a distance. The very old ones uttering indiscernible words, as if urged by some purpose, only to quickly become still. Locking themselves in a gloomy world. Or maybe in good old memories only their minds can allow them to revisit. If not only for the strangers paying a visit, the nurses taking care of them, I wouldn’t doubt if they don’t know about hope. One woman in there was abandoned by her rich children who found fortune abroad. It was a hard one. To this day, I cannot shake the connection between them and my own mother. It threatens to kill me. The thought of her being abandoned. Or just the thought of her feeling abandoned. If I could do something, like make a fortune of some kind and create our own family business dynasty here, so the members of this small home won’t have to seek greener pasture somewhere else. If I could prevent my siblings from going somewhere far-off, I would for certain. Because I want my home to be intact. Like a child collecting objects strewn across the floor, holding them tightly, all together.

When I finish my breakfast, my mother approaches me. She tells that she’s going with my sister Dette, together with her family. They will go to my mother’s hometown, hours away from here. My mother, my sister, my nephew. They manage to mingle, as if they haven’t just argued. Amazing. The noise has somehow settled now. I appreciate it, as if I can hear a pin drop, knowing it isn’t the end of this. It’s when they have left that I miss the clatter. That I dread the moment the silence would be permanent. When the only home I ever knew would all become empty and quiet.