Anthological

Together

Words: 1884

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1.   For things to fall apart, they had to have been together at some point.

                     For you to understand how I became what I am today, you had to have been me. Picture this;

               You're born into a mess, your mother in college and your father too but now only one of them is going to graduate and it's not your mother. She's in a cheap hospital with too much sick people and not enough money and you're born into a bed with blood and sweat soaking the sheets from the previous mothers and everyone's  yelling and everything's confusing. But, the thing is, you're born, and your mother's smiling and crying and your father's freaking out and everything is a mess but it's beautiful, this tiny thing being born and provoking large reactions.

                 Your mother is no stranger to work and had gone through poverty before settling into being one of the higher up middle class families but your father was born and bred rich so he just needs a little time to learn that sometimes things don't get served up to you in a silver platter and that sometimes you have to serve them yourself in a regular platter, like normal people. His family had just sort of, well, estranged him, so he needs to learn how to take care of you because the only person helping him now is an intelligent girl who made some stupid decisions that he made pregnant. But your mother is confident that he'll learn and you're not even walking and therefore don't know of all these yet so it's all okay. You live with your grandmother and your mother and your father in a big house that's more like a castle that was once too big, but her grandmother had filled it with children and nephews and nieces and it's nicely full, and it's nice. It's nice. 

             But your grandfather still doesn't know how to deal with having two perfect, golden, hardworking children of average intelligence but then having one (your mother) with a high IQ and a husband and a child and no college degree. And you aren't kicked out because the grandfather still loves you and your mother but your mother is tired of being the bad child and so you end up in a yellow and blue apartment a short way aways from the white castle with the grandparents and the children and the nephews and the nieces. Your grandmother argues that the school is nearer the castle and I know how to raise a child better and her mother argues that it's her child and her apartment and stop nagging me, mother and you end up in the castle on weekdays and the apartment on weekends, and everyone's fighting but it all turned out right in the end, didn't it?

             So now you're a little bit older and it's becoming evident that you inherited your parents' high IQ. You learn how to read by the age of three (Grandma takes credit for that) and you're bilingual by the age of four (Mama takes credit for that) and you can read proficiently in both Filipino and English by the age of five (Papa glares at both of them and tells them to shut up, raising a child is not a contest.) Pressure is put on you but you can take it so you live, normally, but suddenly with a lot of textbooks shoved your way.

         You go to school and you're the youngest because you skipped a grade. You manage to reach the lower half of the honour roll and your mom and your grandma are disappointed but they don't show it and there wasn't that much pressure put on you so you're okay with it slightly, a bit. You're the youngest, you're lucky you made it into the honour roll at all. At least, that's what you mother and grandmother say.