Te Adoro

Perhaps my story begins when I named him Teodoro.

The original Teodoro is my mother’s uncle, my grandfather’s half-brother to whom we owe much of who we are, and what we own. Teodoro Yangco was famous for being the first Philippine philanthropist, founder of Insular Life insurance, ambassador to the court of St. James, once owner of Divisoria and Quiapo. But more than this, he was a god. People spoke of him in hushed tones, he would appear in history books, his face on busts, his revered name on schools and streets. I should have known then that it is always dangerous to name the new with a name that carries with it too much meaning, too much myth.

In my mind and heart, naming him after such a great man, bearing the distinct gift of being first apo on one side, meant he was destined for great things – he was not allowed to be ordinary in my eyes. I strove to make everything about him extraordinary, perhaps even to the point beyond embellishment that most mothers are allowed. Introducing him to my extended family, people would ooh and aah that he was a Teodoro, and in a way, they agreed with me on this destined greatness.

It would be clear later on, however, that Teodoro is different – and not in the way I imagined him to be. We married in 1995, so his arrival on April 2, 1997 was filled with joyous anticipation. He came the usual way and there was nothing to warn me in the first few months of the journey ahead.

But when Teodoro was six months old, I would put him between my legs and lay before him an array of toys while I read. I knew then that something was not right. He would simply stare at the toys and never attempt to play with any of them. He would respond most to music. His evenings were spent dancing with his grandfather to tango music. Even then, he had musical preferences. He would swoon at the opening bars of Besame Mucho. As an infant, he preferred his father’s singing to mine, which surprised all of us, as I am the singer in the family. In my arms, he would squirm and fidget while I sang Brahms’ Lullaby with my mother’s invented words from my own childhood, a surefire hit among all our nieces and nephews. In his father’s arms, he would stare wide-eyed in wonder as he sang Jose Mari Chan’s old song Red Roses for a Blue Lady in his mellow baritone.

Things progressed slowly for him. His teeth came out on his first birthday. Never having pulled up or crawled, his first tentative steps arrived when he was nearly two. As for words, these did not arrive until almost recently. At the time, though, it did not alarm me as I did not know any better.

It was on April 28, 2000 when he was three that his teacher spoke to me about checking several delays in his development. That moment is clear to me.

I had enrolled him in summer class at the school where I had planned to put him beginning the regular school year as I wanted to give him time to adjust. There was a picnic on the school grounds that day, and we had brought brownies to share with his classmates. I noticed that the teacher was handing out folders of finished works to parents and that she was pointedly avoiding me. When I approached her to ask for my folder, she awkwardly called Teacher Joy, the school directress, who luckily enough is a childhood friend.

"The teachers had a couple of observations about Teodoro that we wanted to verify with you, Rica," she began. "As this is a summer class, we wanted to make sure we got the picture right. At home, does he talk?"

It was at this point that I felt myself disappear from the conversation. Suddenly, the roses on her blouse looked so interesting. It was important for me to identify precisely this shade of red. My mind began to wander. Why are these roses fuchsia? Do fuchsia-colored roses exist? I held on to those roses for dear life.

"Perhaps you might want to consider taking him to a specialist, Rica," were her last words. I must have been nodding all this time because she was nodding as well. She put her arm around me, and I remember trying to assure her that I was okay and not at all upset. We left the picnic quickly with Teodoro still clutching his brownie. We drove home in silence. At the gate, he turned to me and his face was filled with brownies all the way to his hair. His saliva, filled with chocolate, made his T-shirt messy beyond bleach. The chair of the car had this messy gob as well. Looking at this picture of mess and mayhem, not even knowing where to begin to clean, made me burst into tears. And in his fear of seeing me cry, he began to wail as well. I took him in my arms and we continued to cry together. I knew it was useless to try to stop us both. This, then, I said to myself. This I must accept and love. I knew my fears (the undertoad, as John Irving called it) were not unfounded.

As I write this today, now that he is almost seven, we still do not know what it is that ails my son. We have run the gamut of ADHD, autism, learning disability, etc. He has had therapy for more than half of his life now. There are days when all is well and it seems as if we are over the worst. And then, there are days when it feels like we’ve just begun.

The running total of doctors we’ve been to is 12. We’ve been to many different kinds, such as a developmental pediatrician, a clinical psychologist, a behavioral psychologist, a neurodevelopmental pediatrician and, lately, a neurodevelopmental psychometrician. In the beginning, these visits paralyzed me. Literally, my husband would have to escort me back to the car, prop me until I was safe and could cry unabashedly. It is painful enough to sit with a doctor and listen to a list of things your child cannot do. It is even more painful sitting in a room with a panel of doctors whom you hope has the key to the mystery of it all, keeping your tears in check because the last thing you want to do is collapse in weakness in front of them. So, you smile as they tell you how alarming it is that he cannot hold a crayon.

After awhile, though, the pain would become clearer to me. The longer I was with Teodoro, the more I knew him, and the more I knew doctors would never be able to know him. The tests they gave him would never be able to measure him. It was a liberating experience – to have faith that he is more than what we measure. Once I knew where the pain came from, I knew I could bear it. I do not doubt their expertise but the difference is they do not have what I have, what I call the everyday-ness of his human life, my moments of pure gift of being his mother.

Like once, when he was four and I caught him locked in my bedroom with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 playing loud enough to make the walls shake. I was banging on the door while the maid rushed to find the key. All I could hear was his singing, "Da da da dum… Da da da dum…"

"Teodoro, open the door!" I kept screaming. But, of course, he could not hear. And finally the door was opened and there he was, with a chopstick in his hand, conducting away, eyes furrowed like Beethoven himself.

I asked him angrily, "What is wrong with you?"

He answered me calmly, "I’m just a music-lover, Mama."

The anger mixed with absurdity just resulted in laughter. It seemed like the most appropriate response.

After that, I moved on and began to introduce him as, "This is Teodoro, my special child." I would find myself explaining him to everyone around me. Sometimes, I would simply be at the checkout counter of the grocery, and I would find myself explaining his condition. At the children’s gym where I enrolled him to improve his gross-motor skills, I found myself divulging my entire life to a stranger simply to explain why my son couldn’t jump like her son.

Part of the compulsion to explain, I guess, was the need to excuse my son’s behavior. I felt it was necessary to educate people around me regarding the difficulties of being different. But also, I think it was partly therapeutic for me to keep talking about it. It was a way of making something so difficult take a form, a shape, a story that would make things accessible, at first sight, to a stranger; but at second sight, to me.

But then, I’d look at my daughter, my nieces and nephews and realize that they are "special," too. And I started to feel the word "special" grate in my ears. I would feel like a fake to myself – and to all children, who are, by their very existence, special.

Then he was Teodoro, my gifted son.

I always think of my son as three (his developmental age) going on 35. He has been listening to classical music since two. His favorites are Bach’s Double Concerto, Ravel’s Tzigane and Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. He knows all of the different orchestral instruments and can tell them apart when he listens to them. He has been watching concerts since the age of two as well. He is the kind of kid who watches TV not for images, but for sounds – his head cocked to one side, his eyes bright with recognition – "Mama, it’s the violin section!’’ He and his father often have fights about this. When he is brought to school, they listen to classical music on DZFE. Teodoro is always good at identifying instruments, and one day insisted that the piece that was playing was a clarinet concerto. His father disagreed for he had never known of any clarinet concerto. At the end of the piece, the announcer said that indeed it was a clarinet concerto by no less than Mozart.

His hearing is impeccable, not only in terms of differences between sounds, but also in terms of distance. He might be in the bedroom, but hear the water running in the bathroom. He knows all of our neighbor’s different horns. ("There’s Mrs. Paz again, mama!") Sometimes even when extremely focused on something else, he’ll turn to you and ask, "What’s that, mama?" And then he will have to guide your ear till you hear it as well.

His memory is perhaps his greatest gift. Sometimes, he’ll remember something from infancy. My favorite story comes from his pre-school teacher. One day, he went up to her and said a word. She could not get the context of why he said it, until he started to give the context of the word (what she was wearing, who was in the classroom, who was crying, etc.), then she realized he was answering a question she had asked months ago. Tied to this memory is his sense of direction as well. He knows the nuances between Libis, Edsa, Cubao, Aurora Boulevard and Marikina.

Asleep at night, I’d caress his cheek and wonder what it is like to be him. How crazy the world must be inside his head. If he hears everything a decibel louder than we do, how noisy it must be. I think of him as Alice in the Looking Glass, where things are simply out of proportion – his sensitivity simply much too much for his frame.

My sister always calls him an angel. His hair is in a crewcut so his features are far more defined. He has chinito eyes that come from my father. He has my exact lips, full and small. And he has a killer smile. He wrinkles them at the top, and lets his bottom lip slide to cover his upper teeth. But more than looking like an angel, he doesn’t seem to belong in this world.

Just last year on Christmas day, I took him aside and told him we were to have a serious talk. He was wearing the Mickey Mouse pajama set I had bought a year ago. The sleeves were too short, and the pants now only reached above his ankles. I remember thinking how big he is already, and all the more I got frightened at how much we needed to do "to catch up."

Sitting on our sofa where we make tsismis every afternoon, we sat together and I held his hand. "Teodoro," I said, "we have to start on our goals for the year. Let’s take it one month at a time, a new skill at a time. For January, choose: To learn how to give yourself a shower, or to learn how to feed yourself at dinner."

He turns to me with this smile that I have come to know like the back of my hand and says with a slight shake of his head, "I don’t know, Mama." He stops and sighs. "I just want to learn how to f1y.’’ Suddenly, my goals seem so… shallow.

I look at children now and realize more how each one is special, is gifted, is different and is destined to be great. It has been a journey for me to simply get to a point where I wish nothingness for my child. It is a difficult place to describe – this wishing for nothingness for it is natural for us to want many things for our children. It is an unfamiliar place where I have learned to find love in all the unusual places. It is at once frightening and beautiful. Our family is beautiful beyond all description because this, too, is a story of my marriage and my family.

Perhaps hope is what best describes this place. It is hopeful that I can say with deepest and often-flawed honesty and love that I expect him to be nothing except who he is. Every day is a struggle. I go back to that heartfelt embrace in the car and renew my acceptance of this child.

Today, I simply call my son Teodoro. And ironically, I remember in the middle of a crying fest in my heart, that Teodoro really just means gift of God.