Raising Miranda
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By Elizabeth Lolarga
"Good morning, Mommy and Daddy!" the obstetrician exclaimed after catching the slippery "fish" that emerged from me. It was a little past midnight, the early hours of August 5, 1987.
By this time I was too exhausted from trying to hold back the urge to push, from waiting for the doctor's cue for me to finally give it a strong heave-ho. The nurse poured cold water on me "down there," and when she saw the baby's head ready to pop out, advised me to stop pushing until the attending doctor, Felipe Sese, arrived.
I desperately wanted to feel a sense of relief after stoically enduring the overlapping contractions that signified my baby was in a great rush to be born. I was already from seven to eight centimeters dilated when I reached the delivery room of Polymedic General Hospital in Mandaluyong. The nurse didn't even have time to shave me, a prep, I think they call it, which was a blessing as regrowing pubic air could be inconveniently itchy.
Earlier,
I saw red spots on the crotch of my panty, I knew
this was no case of indigestion. My eldest child Kimi,
then two years old, and I were living with my parents
and siblings. Everyone had gone to bed while I followed
the third of a four-part telemovie on the Romanov
princess, Anastasia, when the painful contractions
began.
Before long my body became a stranger. I was not in control of it anymore. I threw up my supper, then staggered to the phone to tell my husband, a newspaperman so enamored with the craft and who stays at the office until he gets a copy of his paper, hot from the press, to come fetch me. I described what I was feeling, but he dismissed it as plain gas. No, I insisted, the baby was really on its way.
As though I were on auto pilot I blindly tossed a receiving blanket for the baby, some diapers, pins and my own housedresses into a bag. Before I knew it, my breasts started to leak a bluish colostrum. As if nudged by her sixth sense, Kimi woke up and in the dimness saw me dressing up, my nipples exposed and dripping, and instinctively latched on to one. Her sucking movement triggered another wave of contractions. I panicked that she might use up all the nutritious colostrum and leave none for her sibling, so I gently unplugged one breast from her eager mouth and told her to go back to sleep.
When my husband finally arrived with the car, we took off, with me squirming in the seat, trying to cross my legs tightly because I could already feel the baby's head crowning. The rest, as they say, is personal history.
This second child would turn out to be the physical antithesis of Kimi. Where the ate is dusky brown with big, marble-size eyes that don't miss a thing, Ida (the nickname I chose for Miranda Bituin) is fair and has squinty, chinita eyes. Kimi was a cool baby, uttering no sound at all when she was born and immediately brought to a tub of lukewarm water where her father bathed her for the first time.
Ida, on the other hand, was a tempestuous wailer, especially at night when she needed my breasts for food and comfort. During bathing time she could be restless and frisky until I once accidentally dropped some shampoo into her eye and she let out an angry yelp. It was just as well. After all, her first name is taken from the character in Shakespeare's "The Tempest." Other memorable Mirandas of literature are found in John Fowles' novel The Collector and Katherine Anne Porter's short story "Pale Horse, Pale Rider."
While Kimi enjoyed long auto rides with her father, infant Ida suffered from motion sickness and would often throw up even when the car was just backing out of the driveway. We had to make sure that she was about to sleep or already sleeping whenever we travelled together. In time she would overcome this because at age one and seven months, she would be nanny-less and enrolled in the Infant Development Program of the Community of Learners. Her sister and I rode with her in a school bus five times a week. I would leave my baby, her bottles of milk, diapers and change of clothes with the nurse and teacher aide in a bahay kubo in the school compound while I went off to work.
Ida was entering nursery when my husband and I decided to move to Baguio City for a change of pace, for the healthier clime, for the flowers, parks and gardens, to be beyond the reach of the malls. We didn't want our children to grow into merry mallers, at least not right away or for as long as we could manage to keep the material culture at bay. This meant being far from their beloved lola, doting titas, who enjoyed spoiling them rotten, and playmate-cousins.
I found a small Montessori school for Ida in a split-level bungalow near Engineers' Hill. Kimi, meanwhile, went to the Special Education Center for her grade school. Because Ida could already read at age five, the teacher moved her up by one level, although she continued to remain a quiet child way past the adjustment period. The teacher once called me to report that she was getting a little frustrated with Ida whose voice couldn't be heard as they rehearsed the Christmas tableau.
She has stayed that way, better at written tests than oral recitations. Her report card often carried the teacher's comments to "speak up," "recite more." But at home she was a stark contrast to her public conduct. The Leo in her emerged: she could boss around her father, terrorize her beleaguered ate into not even laying a finger on Ida's stuff, go into a long sulk, complete with pouting and shaking of her fists, if things aren't going her way, engage her Barbie dolls in well-plotted conversations, watch the movements of black ants with utmost concentration, scribble off and on in a diary, studiously keep a scrapbook about the Spice Girls, each singer carrying a caption composed by the young fan. I began to fear that she was too caught up in her own fantasy world.
Sometimes though she has inspired outbursts of maturity and insight. When my husband and I were engaged in one of our petty wars that saw me fleeing our abode for, she held my arms and pleaded, her eyes shiny with tears: please don't be mad at Tatay. He's just that way. He likes to tease. He's not a bad person. He didn't mean for you to get hurt. She and her sister always paved the way for endless rounds of reconciliation.
I had always toyed with the idea of adopting a baby and would ask my children's opinion. Kimi was indifferent, but Ida, perhaps afraid that she would lose her exalted position as the baby in our family, voiced her disapproval in this manner: "You might wind up with a tiyanak, not an anak!"
During those five years in Baguio when I was a full-time homemaker, I would bring Ida's lunch to school during her lunch break to ensure that she had a hot meal. After awhile, she suddenly announced that she'd rather bring her lunch with her in the morning when she left for school.
Feeling bereft of her need for me, I quietly asked why. She said that her friends did the same: they ate their picnic-style lunch on the open field, and after eating, they lie down on the grass, watch the clouds and identify the shapes they see until the bell rings to mark their afternoon classes. And what did they see? I asked, secretly glad that she was learning to trip on Nature. "Oh, Santa Claus, sheep, crocodiles," she answered. When I retold this incident to a spiritual mentor, I was assured that I ought be pleased because Ida was manifesting that she has a soul.
At Quezon Elementary School, where she went for Grades
One to Four, she reaped medals and ribbons every Recognition
Day. On her last year there, she received a bronze
medal for academic excellence, this after getting
silvers and golds in the past. For a 
minute
there I thought she would be disappointed that her
ranking slipped. Instead, she told me, with nary of
trace of bitterness, "Nanay, I already have completed
all the prizes. I have gold, silver and bronze!"
Whenever summer waltzed in and the sisters went down to the big hot city, she'd come up with a list of summer activities. One summer it was learning ballet for an exam conducted by the Royal Academy of Dance, and such was her fastidiousness in dressing that she refused to wear tights with runs on them. Another time it was art lessons with children's book illustrator Lyra Garcellano. Summer also meant sleepovers at her cousins', counting the funds of their Nana Yala Club (don't ask me what it means because I still don't know what a nana yala is, but I do know they've saved their Christmas money and part of their daily allowance), and rewarding themselves with a shopping trip to Toy Kingdom.
This summer Kimi, Ida and a cousin polished their crawl, breast stroke, back stroke and butterfly stroke under the stern supervision of coach Bert Lozada. Ida, who displays the Leo's desire for being the center of attention, would invite her grandmother or me to watch her do laps and obey Bert's instructions. And indeed I'd feel a strong swell of pride rising in my chest, threatening to spill out of my eyes. I once tried to capture in a haiku what a parent felt as a child became more independent: "Daughter treads water / Air and sun kiss her round head / Swim back to mother!"
Elizabeth Lolarga is the author of two poetry collections: The First Eye and dangling doll: poems of laughter & desperation. She does freelance writing on the side while maintaining her job at the communication agency Raya Media Services, Inc.
