SUPERMOM By Ysabel Cacho 2011
It’s 6:32 on a Friday morning and the Tantuico household is silent but not for long. The doorbell rings, and rings, and rings. I can only assume that it is no other than my five-year-old cousin, Marco, who is consistently pressing his finger into the doorbell. As soon as the door is answered, he runs inside, still in his white pajamas. Cherry Tantuico, 42, emerges at the front door wearing an oversized orange hoodie, dark shorts and black flip-flops. Her shoulder-length black hair is not in its usual ponytail. She has just come from dropping off her two older daughters, Gaby, a 17-year-old senior and Timmy, a 14-year-old sophomore at the Assumption high school carpool terminal. Her youngest daughter, 2year-old Robby, runs inside the house and watches as her older brother Marco grabs onto his mother’s leg, which nearly causes her to trip over him. After my tita and I greet one another, she tells me that for the past week, she has been coming home at 11pm due to her velada practices. She settles down in her dining room for breakfast. There is a Lazy Susan on top of the table full of jars of different assortments of cereal such as Koko Krunch, Choco Frostees, Captain Crunch, Milo and K with Strawberries. Cherry looks over at Robby, who sits down next to her, and asks, “What would you like to have for breakfast, little one?” Robby replies, “You mean big one.” My tita raises an eyebrow at me. My cousin grabs a jar, opens it and pours in too much cereal, which prompts her mother to pick up a spoon and put some cereal back in the jar. As Cherry sips her glass of whole psyllium husk, she tells me about her velada practices. She talks about how her batchmates from all over the world are flying in just to be there and mimics a friend’s reaction upon finding out that she would be in the front and center. We eat our breakfast (K cereal with Strawberries for Cherry and Koko Krunch for me) to the sounds of Robby reciting the alphabet from her mattress (with the letters of the alphabet printed all over it) and Cherry humming Everybody Wants To Rule The World, a song that is from her velada. Robby hasn’t touched her cereal so Cherry picks up her spoon and starts feeding her. As Robby eats, she plays with her glass until it slips from her grasp and rolls of the edge of the table. When I catch it and hand it over to her, Cherry reminds Robby to say, “thank you”. Cherry watches me write down my observations and asks me what subject this is for. When I reply that it is for anthropology, she is suddenly reminded of her 23-year-old niece, Katie, who took up anthropology in college. “She flies to Cebu and digs up fossils,” she tells me. “One time, Katie’s Facebook status was ‘I’m in lab’ with a little heart at the end and I freaked out and wrote, ‘Katie! You have to make me kwento!’ It turns out that she really was in a lab.” While Cherry dines on her cereal, she reads the entertainment section of The Philippine Star. She doesn’t set the newspaper down on the table as she reads and she doesn’t rest it on her lap. Instead she prefers to read it at eyelevel and tilts her head as she does so. We start talking again about the velada. She tells me about meeting her baking teacher for the first time in several years during the velada lunch.