The sacredness of rebellion

Ang Tigbuhat grew up in rebellious times. He was born in the confusion that followed the war, grew through adolescence as martial law was declared. He was a young man at the time of the first Edsa.

He grew his hair long and defined his individuality by what he felt was a healthy irreverence to authority. He might have learned this from his mother. She who spent the greater part of her life looking after the health of generations of her family. It is told that during the war, she saved the life of her older brother by discovering that the antibiotics he bought for his respiratory ailment was chalk. She proceeded to treat him with the correct medicine until he recovered.

She was a pharmacy graduate from the University of the Philippines Manila. She  intended to proceed to medicine but her father would not allow her as he felt this might ensure that she would never get married. The irony was that she would have to care for the health of her seven children and her husband who in his last years would be stricken with and die from cancer. How frustrated she must have felt for this turn of fate. She who was not allowed to be a doctor for being a woman and yet was practically forced to doctor those closest to her for the rest of her natural life.

And she would have been a good one. She was bright, read incessantly and at one time in her life expressed her social conscience by involving herself in a family planning program for poor people. It would be her short stint as an activist. She, of course, looked at her world with a singular critical-mindedness, which some of her  children inherited. She could look at herself and the life she led and see it exactly for what had gone right and what had gone wrong. She taught her children to love their neighbors. And since most of their neighbors were poor, she taught them especially to love the poor. And in a country such as she inhabited, that attitude required a rebelliousness that needed to be both nurtured and contained.

Which was why she allowed her fifth son to grow his hair long after he graduated from high school. If ever she desired the son to get a haircut, she would give him due respect with an  offer of a bribe or cut his hair herself. She was not a good barber. In due time, the regular offer of a bribe became the practice. But she never pulled parental authority over the issue. In the ’60s she understood all that she needed to understand about the war in Vietnam. In the ’70s she stood with her children over the issue of martial law.

The fifth son suspects she might even have enjoyed the rock music he regularly played over the record player, though she never said a word about it. But never did she ask for the volume to be turned down. He remembers above all that until the day she died there was always the innocent rebellious child inside her. She abided not by any orthodoxy. Everything she thought about herself she thought of herself and always with a healthy disregard for orthodoxies. And if incontrovertible proof was ever required of this, it would be that she did not marry the man her family liked. She chose for herself, which might explain the absence of wedding pictures.

But she never flaunted her own rebellion. Stories about her wedding and the lack of photographs of it would be told in hushed tones but not by immediate members of her own family. Her family owned land with tenants who were extended family members. They knew and told the better story of her marriage whose details as it turned would be a secret she would take to her grave.

But even so, her own life personified the sense of individualism she always abided by. Hippy, weird and geek would not have been for her disparaging words. They would simply have validated her own bias for the unexpected and the unique. She did not always plot her trajectory through life. But where and when it most counted, she was her own woman. And by the end of it, her fifth son has no doubt at all, she was a free and liberated woman.

She might have taught him back when he was  young to remember exactly well that we are, after all, the end products of periods of obedience and rebellion in the normal course of our lives; never to forget, one is just as sacred as the other.