My other family...

I’ve always loved to read. I remember during my earliest years in elementary (grade school), the only books I loved to study and browse were the ones with stories. I loved to read the stories about Filipino families, the picture perfect family who ate together, prayed together (usually they’d go to Antipolo on Sundays), went to the beach, and had pets (Muning and/or Bantay). There’d be Lolo (Grandpa), Lola (Grandma), Nanay (Mother), Tatay (Father), Kuya (Older Brother), Ate (Older Sister) and Bunso (Youngest). Tatay would come home from work just in time with Nanay just finishing to set the table for early dinner. The kids would study together, with the older kids always helping Bunso. They’d always have time to play and do house chores. They’d even grow fruits and vegetables in the backyard. And, they were always the most respectful, polite, kind and happy kids.

I would always imagine myself as one of the kids in such stories. Not that my family is not a happy one. It’s just my family, like any other, is not free of problems. Young as I was, I didn’t understand this reality. I couldn’t understand why we couldn’t be like the perfect families in my textbooks. Why were both my parents always out? Why did I have to spend more time in my mom’s office playing or talking with the grown-ups than at home playing or studying with my brothers (my sister wasn’t born yet or was too young)? I always wondered.

Every time I studied, or read my stories, I would pretend to be one of the children in the stories. I would talk and play with my imagined (imaginary) Ate and Kuya. I would ask them about things that bothered me, like why my feet didn’t touch the ground whenever I sat on chairs, but my parents’ feet and sometimes even my brothers’ would always touch the ground or be on the ground. That was the biggest mystery that bugged my very young, innocent mind like crazy. It took me a few years to solve that mystery.

I’ve always been very sensitive. Every time my parents would fight or whenever my brothers wanted to do boys’ stuff that I couldn’t be a part of, I’d retreat and go take refuge in the company of my imagined, perfect family. I’d start reading and go on until I forgot what was happening and where I really was. I’d be happy and contented.

Thinking about all this now makes me laugh despite myself. But, it also gives me more knowledge of myself (people always say that in truth we don’t really know ourselves). I am thankful for that sensitivity I had then because that somehow made me a devotee of the written word. Those times when I “disappeared” in the company of my imagined, perfect family were what made me the kind of reader that I am- a reader who gets transported to the pages’ different places and times, a reader who gets to befriend the characters and experience both good and bad things with them. I became the book addict that I am, all thanks to my “textbook family!”