Pest Control

There is someone in my life whom I strongly dislike, have disliked for 14 years, and there is nothing I can do about it. I wish there was a way I could reason this perennial annoyance away, and writing it all down is the only way I know of doing it. 

The feeling of dislike I have for this person has lasted since I met him when he was just 12 years old. He is the younger son of the woman who lives with me. I can’t get away from him as long as I am involved with his mother. I have tried to make sense of the feeling he inspires in me by explaining it on this blog. In 2011 I wrote: 

He has been living in my house since he was 12. His mother has been my constant companion, translator, and protector since late 2007. And after three years of living under the same roof, the boy and I remain almost total strangers. 

I am willing to take some of the blame for this, but the boy is no day at the beach, either. He was always, I am told, quiet and self-effacing. I would often fail to notice that he was there. Walking around the house on a cool afternoon, I would be convinced I was alone until I saw his feet sticking out from behind a door, sitting there reading his bible. 

When he arrived in my house he was a second grade drop-out. He gave no indications of what he intended to do with the rest of his life until I had had enough of his sullenness, his sneaking comings and goings, and proposed to him that he return to school with an allowance of five hundred pesos (a little more than $10) every month. I only did it to get him out of my house during the day, five days a week. 

This change of outlook apparently had such an incredible impact on his life that he somehow found Jesus - with a vengeance. In fact, he couldn't have devised a better revenge on the man who usurped his good for nothing father. I couldn't have been less pleased if he'd announced he was a Republican. And he couldn't have opted for the gentle Roman Catholic Jesus, whose worship is conducted once a week in church. No, he had to be "born again" - a boisterous, exclamatory worship of Jesus, conducted everywhere: in their hole in the wall church, at the dinner table, before bed, in fact just about every time it occurs to them to emit their passionate cries of devotion to their savior. The boy was made aware of my utter disdain for his new found faith when I told his mother to tell him to shut his trap one night when his bed time prayers were beginning to drown out the comforting drone of my electric fan. 

I am confident enough, and saddened, that he will perhaps never read these words or comprehend how much it pains me to know what a failure I have been as a step-father. If I had more influence over him, I would try to get him away from the people in his church, where he spends so much of his time. I should thank them, perhaps, for giving him the ego-gratification that he found nowhere else. But I have serious misgivings about a religion that makes it impossible for a 14 year old boy to act like any other normal boy, that instructs him to act like a lunatic at every opportunity and that makes living in the same world as everyone else harder than it already is.  

One of the things that aggravated me most about him was his evident refusal to take any part in my household. His little sister called - and still calls - me “daddy." He never does. (He has the effrontery to call me "kuya [brother] Dan.") At night when we said good night to one another in the dark, like they did in the old TV series The Waltons, he remained silent. When I taught the two children a few simple manners  like saying please and thank you and you're welcome and bless you when someone sneezed, his little sister complied but he ignored me. I tried to make sense of this by thinking he was suffering from an Oedipus Complex. He resented me precisely because I had replaced his deadbeat dad. The undeclared and unspoken conflict between us came to a climax in 2014 just after he turned 19. In 2015 I wrote: 

I had been anxious for him to leave my house until last August, when, after pulling the latest in a very long line of stupid stunts (like breaking into my house when I wasn't there), I told him to start looking for another place to live. I expected that it would take him weeks and perhaps months to accomplish the task. Imagine my surprise when he moved out the very next day, pouring forth as he did so what must've been a reservoir of pent-up resentment toward me. The only thing that bothered me about it was that it broke his mother's heart. 

I am poor by any standard you care to apply - including my living for seven years in a backward province of a very poor country and having to support four people on a miniscule pension. When we got here and the four of us settled into a life that has been a constant struggle with severely straightened circumstances - the everyday life of poor Filipinos - what I've witnessed from the boy hasn’t been disappointing – how he went back to school (to the 2nd grade) at the age of 14, twice the age of his classmates who would, out of simple curiosity, ask him why he was there. He told them that he had to get his education, regardless of his age. He swallowed his pride every day that he went to school. By now, he has swallowed enough pride to sink a hundred Titanics. He's a handsome kid. I can take a little credit, I think, for the fact that he has grown up in my house hale and hearty, as has his little sister. I wish I could help the boy, but I am in no position to do so. I wanted to get him out of my house precisely because I couldn't take care of him any more. Despite this, I continue to feed him three times a day. 

He knows how hopeless his life would be if he had no other choice but to stay in the Philippines. The young people here seem to live foreshortened, doomed lives. And they always seem to make the same mistakes. Their fates seem to be aligned for them from birth - the same fate that their parents suffered - to meet a girl, experiment with intimacy (what little intimacy they can find in these overcrowded islands), get her pregnant inadvertently, or as inadvertently as the complete absence of contraceptive choices allows, and be forced to provide for her and her child. By the time they're 21, their lives are as good as over. The boy sees this happening around him, and he knows the finality of such a fate. It happened, after all, to his older brother and sister, who live a few hundred miles from here. Unlike him, neither of them has an education. Their horizons are drawn in on them. Looking to their futures, they know that there isn't much more for them to look forward to. They will look for happiness in small increments, taking each day, each one of them like every other, one at a time. A long time ago I noticed a difference between myself and these poor people: why does it take so little to make them happy and so very much to keep me from being unhappy? 

By now, January 2022, with all of the water under both our bridges, I suppose we’ve arrived at a kind of armistice. We have to deal with each other as long as his mother lives with me. (This is something I am currently taking steps to correct.) He graduated from a local university last fall with a degree in computer science, and intends to use his degree to get a job overseas as – I kid you not – a caregiver. It’s actually a much better idea than staying in the Philippines, where even a 4-year degree won’t get him a well-paying job. Success in this country depends entirely on the family you’re born into. So he’s getting training as a caregiver and talks of possibly landing a job in Canada. 

Meanwhile, he comes to my place at least twice a day to eat and use my WiFi. Since my apartment is small, he does this in my small back yard. He also rewards me by pissing there. It’s a Filipino thing, but since he can piss anywhere, I find his pissing in my yard especially insulting. Every time I see his face as he walks past my door or hear his voice, I wince. It’s a reflex by now. I am certain he is looking forward to seeing the last of me with as much anticipation as I am. Whether he leaves the country before I do, our parting won’t be an occasion for tears.