Tito Monster

A month ago, I attended a seminar called 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and one of the things I had to do there was make a list of the most important roles I play in life. Naturally, I put in English Specialist (my job title at the call center), athlete (my aspiration), son, brother and lover.

But there was one other role which, surprisingly, I found myself writing down: uncle.

Unlike my lover, I have never really been into kids, especially the pesky sort, and can stand them only in small doses. In fact, silly as it may sound, I often quarrel with the three-year-old kid who lives next door to us, a good-looking, adorable boy named Jacko who unfortunately likes hanging out in our apartment and climbing all over the furniture, in the process reducing the number of drinking glasses in our house (which came in a set of six) to three. When such quarrels erupt, my lover, who spoils him like a son, often finds himself caught in the middle, unwilling referee in a potentially apocalyptic battle between Zaido Blue and the Ultimate Warrior.

I guess I'm just not the kind of person who finds poetry in baby talk and bliss in the smell of pee. I have nothing but respect for those pre-school teachers who have this uncanny ability to herd young kids around like sheep and recite ABC a hundred times in ten minutes, but God forbid that the time should come when I should find myself in their shoes.

A friend of mine once told me that this allergic reaction to kids may have something to do with my own unhappy childhood. For the truth is, as a child, I didn't have many friends, was often teased and bullied, and was always treated unfairly, even by adults. One memory that sticks is the time one of my aunts on my mother's side of the family came home from the states with her husband, and our family joined our relatives in Taytay to get our pasalubong. All my cousins were there and we formed a circle around our tita who stood beside a sack full of toys and chocolates. I was eight or nine years old. I'd requested a viewmaster, nothing fancy, and I felt a delicious thrill just thinking of all those pictures -- the Golden Gate Bridge, Niagara Falls -- that I'd get to see with just one click. However, as the sack started to empty and one by one my cousins got their giant cars and laser guns, I realized, with a sudden sureness, that I wasn't going to get my viewmaster after all. And true enough, when my tita finished reading the list of nephews and nieces to be given toys, my name and my name alone wasn't called.

What I felt that time -- I remember it clearly -- wasn't sadness but embarrassment and panic that someone would notice I got nothing at all. I wanted to disappear so I could avoid my cousins' pitying stare, my mother's worried look. But, of course, someone said: "Oy, what about Puroy?" And my tita just laughed and said, "Oh I'm sorry, we forgot it."

Without doubt there are other people (my baby is a perfect example, his being a classic Judy Ann Santos childhood) who suffered more than I did as a kid but who ended up adoring kids all the more, perhaps because they knew what it was like to have their hearts broken at such a young age. But my experiences as a kid made me want to grow up too fast, made me cope by trying to skip childhood altogether. And this -- though it sounds like such a lame excuse -- is probably why I can't stand kids now.

Overwhelmingly out of character and against my nature then is this -- what else to call it? -- incredible affection I feel for my nephew and my niece. Call it familial bond, but for them I sometimes find myself doing things I wouldn't normally do, or I would do but only grudgingly. Like Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets, I have discovered in myself, through them, a certain measure of kindness, generosity and patience I never thought I was capable of.

No, I haven't bought my nephew a PS4 yet or chipped in for my niece's tuition fee (roughly equivalent to my two-months' salary), but it is with a genuine smile that I occasionally take out my wallet and buy my niece a piece of chocolate when she asks me to. And every time I visit Booksale, I rummage through the children's books section to see if there's anything about dragons and aliens for my boy genius of a nephew. I don't mean to make it sound as though I should get a Best Uncle Award for such paltry gifts, but coming from a Scrooge like me, hey, they represent an unexpected, altruistic gesture.

Funny thing is, I didn't always feel this way about them. I mean I've always loved them -- especially my nephew, Galo, whom I was able to babysit when he was just a year old -- but I didn't feel very, well, attached to them. They were just these funny little creatures with big heads who had some really charming antics (Uyen thinks of herself as a boy and does push-ups to prove she's one), and while I enjoyed watching them make fools of themselves once in a while, I really preferred reading a book than listening to them sing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" or chatting with them about Dragonball.

I don't know exactly when my paradigm shifted. But when Galo was hospitalized because of dengue, my heart broke every time he cried and begged the doctor not to give him an injection anymore. And that's when it dawned on me: I loved this chubby, smart-alecky boy like nothing else in the world. Nothing else, except maybe his little sister.

I'm grateful to these two kids for teaching me how to be a kid again, to reclaim that part of my life that I renounced out of bitterness and anger. This is not to say I have now turned into Brooke White, the coolest, singing nanny in the whole wide world. But just the other day, I played Touch the Color and Find the Shape with Jacko and Uyen for two hours in my apartment, and though I can't say I had a blast, I sat there with them and let them run around and clamber all over me and the furniture.