My Tatay Doroy

Today is Teodorico Gayatin Enginco’s birthday.  He is my Tatay.  If he was alive he would now be 72.

I admit I found it difficult to appreciate my father when I was growing up and searching for someone to look up to.  My Tatay became an alcoholic when I was yet to be weaned from the milk bottle.   Because I was the youngest in a brood of six boys and had to share the bed with my parents, I was the most traumatized by the almost nightly fights between my physically drained and emotionally spent mother and my drunken father.  

I grew up knowing only angst and frustration directed towards my father.

Thankfully my ill feelings for my father did not carry on to my adulthood or else I would have allowed the legacy of a great man to pass by unhonored.  And this shift in perspective started when I began to acknowledge that man’s true beauty is not in his perfection or his reflection of the ideal, but rather in the flaws that make him human and relatable.

 

The more I think about it, I am a lot like my father – imperfect but blessed.

My Tatay was a learned man.  He did not excel in school but he read a lot.  Uncannily, just like me.

I took after my Tatay who was an artist.  He drew beautiful sketches and was keen to using his imagination.   He did unconventional things and had a way with words, just like me.  Though he could be charming and funny, he was a bit withdrawn and introspective – an enigma just like me.

For all his gifts, my father was a free spirit and a troubled soul.  This is what makes him beautiful.  Because inside the body imprisoned by the chain of alcohol is a man who refused to speak ill of people, even those who have harmed him growing up in the countryside of Mindanao, and those who spoke ill or took advantage of him when he was strong and willing to share.

When Tatay was sober, he always had a ready smile and had the kindest and most sincere gaze.  I remember that between my mother and him, he was the more affectionate parent, not hesitating to kiss me on the cheeks or on the forehead even when I was already an adult.

My Tatay loved me in his special way.  And he loved my wife just like his own daughter, perhaps because he never had one.  When we were still living in Makati and visited Lipa only during weekends, Tatay would always see to it that he would prepare his strange but supremely tasty vegetable stew composed of leaves, flowers and stalks – all freshly picked from the backyard.  And before we left, he would hand my wife cut flowers from his garden so that she can put them in a vase when we got home in the city.

My love for my Tatay has taught me that true love comes best with imperfection.  It is when we look for more than what is in front of us that we begin to find loneliness and frustration.  And the more we wish that things were molded according to our notion of what is ideal, the more we realize that we are moving farther and farther away from that reality.

Today is my Tatay’s birthday.