Not only you once were, but ever will be

True or not, a YouTube/Kusala (source) post that I stumbled upon on Yahoo! News resonated with a crowd of voices and flash of images in me; it’s about a voicemail that a grandmother left in her granddaughter’s phone regarding a “box of donuts she found.”

Seeing a strawberry sluice off the pastry’s soft body, she couldn’t help but lift the box’s lid and, with her forefinger, scraped and licked the filling; with an embarrassed, though joyful, catch in her voice, she confessed to have eaten the whole thing. The voicemail ends with a plea: “To keep donuts in their bedroom, as she’s not to be trusted with sweets.”

I’m sure that, like me, you, too, could compile quite a volume on our cravings, no matter the warnings of constant pains that could disfigure, even debilitate us the rest of our finite years. And it’s all taken for granted that such urges rise from a fathomless deep of which we have absolutely no hold. But do we even try to confront them? Apparently, never, or have you heard anyone pull out that culprit, and with manacles, pin him on a wall?

This concocted scene does read as a hyperbole, which I intended; in truth, the actual attempt of ferreting such inner phantoms belongs to a psychiatrist. But except for extreme indulgences, the dictates of this “being” have proven to be sparks of joy, because, it turns out, even if rarely acknowledged, it’s of the child not only we once were, but ever will be.

Listen to your own self like, say, when you teach a partner how to perfect a beef mechado the way mom did it or, beyond food, how your grandmother ironed the seams of pants. Browse through memoirs that had since burgeoned in bookstores or on Kindle—who often figures as the main character? Dig into biographies of the famous and invariably find an epiphany about the child that spurred a career.

I’ve met two of them (also married a third) and gathered firsthand, their “child” within. The late dance director/choreographer of the Bayanihan Philippine Dance Company, Lucresia Reyes Urtula, who tenderly recalled the little girl her father brought to fiestas in remote towns while in the Army on tour of duty, where she tried out the steps and body sway for a proper kumintang, would be then, still her.

Not on the urging of a famous conductor or composer had the late, musical director and composer, and later Cultural Center of the Philippines president, Lucrecia R. Kasilag, been led by the hand to the peak of her calling; ‘twas a slip where she hurt a finger, which degenerated, so much so that “Sor Baptista, my teacher would literally scream for ‘more melody,’” she recalled, dashing her dream to be a concert pianist.

Who dictated a less gainful, un-celebrated career as restoration architect for my late husband, Felix N. Imperial II? From snippets of after-school narratives at Letran, it’s the boy engaged in war games among the ruins of Intramuros, who sallied forth into a quixotic dream of restoring what he imagined had been those stone walls.

Often, nary a hint of this child shows up unless triggered, like the European lady I met at a fair, who had felt faint suddenly, as she shivered under a steaming summer sun. Recovered, she whispered to me that a young man’s unexpected appearance in a cosplay (costume play) as a Nazi soldier had hit her with the same fear as in that evening, when as a child, a la Anne Frank, her family scrambled to an underground hideout.

While Maria Popova’s piece at “Brain Pickings,” which attempts to dissect “the self” from philosophical and psychological writings, ends expectedly in a conundrum, for me, by drawing out and pinning down the child that lurks in us, no matter how persistent the mystery we carry, some clarity could spark, as in these moments I had gathered.