Storyteller
A tale of four fathers
When I was nine years old I wrote in a piece of paper “I am confused, who's my father?” That was when my mother started to hate me. . .
Hero father
He was a manager in a telephone company, one telephone call and he'll rush to our home just to clean my little butt after I poo until I was eight. I was his princess. He helped me memorize the multiplication table by phone. I can't deny I was really a naughty child, every time my mother hits me my father would cover me with his back. He always took me to the farm, he'll dig a seed hole and he let me drop the seed, it was an achievement for me. Every summer he brings me to Mindanao and I had fun meeting my cousins. The night before he left the country to have a job in the Middle East he sat beside my bed, he took me and carried me into his arms like a baby and he cried, I pretended to be asleep but I heard him sob. The next morning he was gone. He wrote me letters, encouraged me to collect stamps and coins which I did. My letters made him happy. Since then for 15 years we only see each other once every two years for only a week.
Stepfather
He was the reason for my confusion. No one ever explained to me why he was in our home playing as my father and why he sleeps in my mother's bedroom, I was nine. The question I wrote in that piece of paper was kind of a breaking news for my father and for the whole clan. Marriage was broken and I was broken into pieces. He was a stranger who broke in into our home. I hated him but through the years his presence became usual and accepted. He was a figure I never looked up to, but always looked down with as a sort of an example of why life is never perfect though he was looked upon by my two children as their grandfather.
Estranged father
He died 3 months after I was told the truth that he was my blood-father. My mother told me while she was lying in bed weak from the chemotherapy. Yes, the truth came out like a vomit in her nauseated state. I could have retaliated if she weren't sick but I just cried. At the age of 30, I don't know how to take that truth, I think it has filled the empty vacuum I have been feeling all my life, ignored, hidden and thickened by my own miseries. In those three months he sent me messages every 4 a.m. in the morning. He begged me not to call him because he don't know what to say, he just promised he'll see me summer of 2003 but it was too late. He died of a heart attack in my mother's arms. I saw his picture, I was a woman version of him.
Fairytale father
He told his family he had a daughter. He was my mother's first love. When my mother was set for marriage by her parents his heart was broken. One of the strategies he did to cancel the wedding was claiming that he impregnated my mother, but nobody listened. He belonged to a rich family while my mother was a bourgeois. He died a mysterious death with my mother's picture in his pocket. Until now his family is looking for that mysterious daughter he had because she was the only heir for his fortune.
I am blessed to have four fathers, the father I grew up with -- without him my childhood days could've been all villains, he was my hero. My biological father was just a memory, the reason why I have this human form. My step father, although we don't get along but I have spent my life with him more than any of the four. And my fairytale father adds spice to my life, although many times I was called and visited by his sister to bond with their family and probably claim his last will, but I refused.
Two of my fathers already passed away, they have the same first name and nickname like mine. I haven't seen them, but they will always be part of my story. I still have two living fathers left each having their own lives the one with my mother and the other with his wife and I am left with none. When responsibilities are over and each is living their own lives, only memories lives on and I will never ran out of father tales since I have four.