A child in the skyworld

Flashback.

Not long ago, I suddenly remembered how my daughter Josephine tied the shoelaces of Liia’s shoes as little girls.  That made me recall ballet classes and tying the ribbons of my pink toe shoes. My mother sent me to ballet classes as a child of five!  Holding my hand, we walked to the studio. With intent eyes, she watched my every movement as Ricardo Cassell taught me and I was guaranteed dire consequences when I didn’t do well. She was a moving spirit for an only daughter. Mr. Cassell was a strict teacher, training us, mostly skinny students, I could say, in a most unusual way. For instance, in perfecting the arabesques, he would put a lighted cigarette under our extended legs so we wouldn’t put them down… a technique that seemed torturous even though we knew he wouldn’t really burn us.

It’s a pity then that Catholic schools — and Maryknoll was no exception — frowned at ballet altogether and prohibited students from taking up dancing for the same reason that girls must never exhibit their bodies publicly by wearing bathing suits. But mommy’s love for the dance and my own was so tremendous that I secretly continued going to class. I had daily classes that began with warm-up exercises at the barre which future ballerinas held for support. We were taught to focus on a single point on the wall as we pirouetted.

On my first ballet recital, Mommy dressed me up in a red and black lace tutu, my hair pulled in a bun. This was held in Far Eastern University so long ago. Their auditorium was the only one and the best. It had the biggest stage with evenly laid flooring. I remember being the lady from Spain at 12 years old. With the energy of a youngster, having memorized each step, I looked high up, never to the floor below, performing turns and leaps, holding my black and red fan. Having accomplished that, it was back to regular dancing and training. After each ballet lesson, Mommy and I went home, my mother still clutching my small hands, with either a smile of fulfillment on her lips or mine, or the fear of being scolded. By the way, we also got a little tap as a threat from Mr. Cassell who held a stick even if Mommy was watching. A mistake in our posture, stance, feet or hands… oops, there went the stick’s tap. I learned to focus and concentrate on the sequence of my dance steps, commanding discipline. In the latter years, my ballet teacher was Yvonne delos Reyes, my aunt, after Ricardo Cassell left the Philippines.

The rewards of ballet were plentiful and I am grateful to Mommy Lita. In ballet all motion flows from the dancer’s upright axis; her body parts must be correctly centered to permit ease and stability. Ballet gave me an upright posture. As dancing requires body coordination, it enhances grace and fluidity in all movements. 

Now I am back to adult ballet class on and off with Tony Gonzales Garcia, slim mommy of two kids. My mother no longer holds my hand each time I go to ballet classes but I remember her when I’m on the floor prancing. No more lace tutus. No more lighted cigarette under my legs. No fear of castigation if I missed a pirouette. What is still there is the eagerness to be among would-be professional dancers in a ballet studio for discipline and my memory. Now more than ever, I appreciate ballet as an outlet to heal an aching spirit and straighten up one’s back, to feel my heart throb… I am single, young again with my parents and my two obedient brothers, Ramon.

So, being Mother’s Day, it’s also time to be grateful to grandmothers who doted over me. I must credit them for many of my inherent traits: graciousness born out of their tutelage, education and elegance. My grandmothers were both very dignified women. They had an eye for fashion and jewelry to match and their accessorizing talent passed on to me. One day, Dada Nena, the term of endearment for my mother’s mother that I coined as a baby, said to 12-year-old me as we were in the car, on our way to Escolta, “When I die, all my jewelry will be yours.” I asked her, “When will you die?” She lived to be 93 years old.

Many of my cherished childhood memories are of my Lola Gloring who gathered jasmine flowers from her garden to put in my drawer with my underwear and handkerchiefs until I was aged 18.  Every week, she gave me a bottle of butong pakwan painstakingly peeled by her with a knife. She never, ever opened it with her teeth.  I remember her watering her plants at 4 a.m. and spending Sundays cleaning the bathroom for us until water seeped into the walk-in closet. I’m also a stickler for clean, immaculate bathrooms so that during our fieldwork and out-of-town sojourns, my cousins Raul and Ricky Manzano dash to the bathroom after I clean it. Lola Gloring taught me well. She also filled a Johnson’s Powder container with coins every weekend for my weekly allowance to add to that given by my Pappy Manzano, who gave me a weekly allowance but not to buy the prohibited dirty ice cream. I never ate it then but now I’m the boss: I’m free to taste the keso flavor. 

Bits and pieces of what have passed throughout the years appear… with Mommy Lita side by side, her mother/my grandmother Dada touching the table to feel the dust… I’m doing that now. Lola Gloring hated dust too and wore a bandana inside her Cadillac to protect her hair. That was the time there were no air conditioners in cars. I acquired the “hate dust” policy. I was exasperated with the dust in Tarlac with uncemented road in the ‘60s; we sped along them every time I crowned town queens with Ninoy. After all that dust and the showers, my beauty regimen then was alcohol and powder like Lola Gloring’s. Now my children spread both on their children. Although my children tease me about it, powder has been a common cure for all their children’s illnesses — due to virus, bacteria, fever, bad tummy…  and too much perspiration.

I believe my unrelenting spirit came from both sides of the genes I inherited: De los Reyes-Manzano. Our families are go-getters, resolute, stubborn and persistent. I believe he who knows his past will surely reap the fruits of the present and prepare for a better future. We know our genealogy. We have our weaknesses too, but that I am going to keep secret.

My mother taught me that life is a marathon. It’s an endurance event played out over time. My advice to mothers: Stop setting yourselves up for feeling inadequate. Motherhood is heroism!