I remember I wasn't even 13 back then when I started to become a cause for distress for my parents. It was something they were not used to or even prepared to handle, especially for parents who were raising kids in farflung towns where old-fashion traditions were the fashion. No, I wouldn't figure in any school fights nor became a dreadful classroom bully. It was worse than that.
At that young age, I learned not to become a blind submissive follower everytime they had me subject to something unconventional. I started to bombard my parents with questions about reasons behind doing certain things they asked me to do. I wanted to understand why everything has to be like how their grandparents and greatgrandparents did it. I wondered why things can't go against the tide, why can't things be done this way or that way, and why every decision has to come from the top.
You see, I had to endure several physical pains because things handed down from way back from whomever were never questioned nor studied. I can't accept that I had to be the one guinea pig who became pathetic casualty in the end. I had to swallow my idealism and let my parents run the show hoping they knew much more. Besides, I had to obey them somehow lest I'd be outcast and banished to the hills. It was too late when I found out that they were no better than my classroom seatmate who would race his snot up and down his nostrils complete with slurping sound.
Strike one happened inside the public dentist's clinic. It was summer that time and my two canine teeth were halfway down already threatening to displace my incisors and some pre-molars. By this time, I had been harassed tirelessly by my mother to go visit Auntie Norma, the public dentist, and have them extracted. I would then start a litany of reasons, mostly from the World Book Encyclopedia I've been reading that time, why it couldn't be taken away. They wouldn't hear any of it and insisted that I go lest they do permanent damage.
I finally relented and made that visit only because I didn't want them to breathe down on me anymore. I regretted profusely that decision up to now. It wasn't just because the dentist should have been in the butchering business instead, but more because they caused permanent damage after all. Months later, I went with my Mom to visit my cousins in the city. I told them what happened. They yelled at me. Turns out my readings have been true. Canine teeth are the most powerful of them all. The rest could have been pulled out, but that them. I threw piercing glances at my Mom. She didn't look my way.
The next summer, my parents sent me to the city for vacation. I was having a grand time palying with new friends and catching up on cartoons when my mother's eldest sister asked me to join her to the clinic she was working. I didn't know why. I thought there were more kids there my age and she wanted me to have a good time. I should have known better.
Together with an aide, they led me to a room where a makeshift bed was the main furnishing. All of a sudden, I understood why my older cousins would joke about tomatoes and scalpels when I'm around. I froze as the nurse helped me take out my pants to prepare me for my date with another inevitable in most young boy's lives. I still don't get it why they are so incensed with some piece of skin and obliterate it from the world despite dutifully fulfilling its role.
I asked them why they had to subject me with that cruel and barbaric act. My parents say it has always been that way for most boys. Did they ever ask why or what for? I'm afraid this is another heartless case of willfully submitting one's intellect and sanity to habit and what's popular.
On one hand, I keep thinking, maybe that's why I'm working hard now so when I have enough money, I'll go see the doctor and ask him to re-attach that skin which should have always been there in the first place. Or maybe that's the reason why I'm so fixated with.....well, forget it.
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