Ay, Rosing!

Just like little children today, I spent more time with my mother than with any other member of the family. But like many children in middle-class Filipino families of the time, there was another woman. For me this was my yaya, Rosing (probably short for Rosita or Little Rose).

The family teased me endlessly for supposedly being in love with Rosing. This was a little boy of two or three years. I remember Rosing’s face and the flowered dress she wore so my memory is probably false. That’s how she looked in a photograph in the family album. My mother indulged, maybe even initiated the teasing. She would take out her maroon-bound volume of sheet music from inside the piano seat and play the Ilonggo song, Ay, Rosing! Hapless I would be persuaded to sing the love song in my reedy, childish voice.

Thus are we trained about love the puny understanding of which we carry the rest of our lives. Some of us, already feeble with age, divorced or with a string of relationships like school trophies on the shelf, are still searching for that elusive fairytale we were introduced to as children. It was an almost embryonic closeness we try again and again to find in sexual, physical or emotional intimacy.

Many of us find it, but late at night, sleepless and queerly restless, we ask ourselves if we’ve simply given it up as a dream. “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things….” Maybe growing up is a matter of putting away what we treasured as a child. To each season are its own treasures. We have to throw out the old to make room for the new. Others do, not I. For me the past beckons even more today, promising treasures I have yet to unearth.