MY LITTLE ANGEL TURNS 28; SHE’S GROWN OLDER, SO HAVE I

By Manny Pinol

“is this the little girl i carried?/ i don’t remember growing older,

when did they?/ wasn’t it yesterday when they were small?”

“sunrise, sunset, swiftly flow the days.”

Yesterday, my eldest daughter, Maria Krista, turned 28.

Now a medical doctor, married and expecting her first child five months from today, I asked her to sit on my lap yesterday as I tried to reminisce the days when she was a little girl who gave meaning to my life.

Maria Krista and her younger sister, Josa Bernadette, who is also in the college of medicine, were small when I entered politics in 1995 as mayor of M’lang.

My involvement with politics deprived them of the nights when they would play the tumbling game with me in bed. I could still hear their wild shrieks and laughter during those happy moments.

It deprived them of the afternoons when I would come home and they would wait for me at the door expecting a pack of Yakult and a box of Chips-Ahoy.

I missed the years when she and JB were growing up and that was when I decided to bring them down to Davao City from Manila when I became Governor in 1998.

In 2002, a young boy, Bernhart Immanuel, came 13 years after JB.

Maria Krista has grown to be a woman who is bull-headed just like me. And bold too.

She is a very loving and understanding daughter though.

I remember the hard and trying years when my television production business flopped in Metro Manila and she saw how sad I was looking at her having hotdog and instant noodles for breakfast.

“It’s okey Papa. When we will have money again, we will buy better food,” words coming a young girl who was only in the grade school.

Once, inside a jeepney, I whispered to her to lend me the P20 her grandmother gave her for our fare and much to my embarrassment in a very loud voice she said: “Basta Papa bayaran mo ako.”

I saw how happy she was when I won as mayor of my hometown, M’lang where she and JB who was only six years old joined me in the campaign.

But just like her younger sister, she has never bragged about her being the daughter of a Governor. In fact, she tried hard not to catch people’s attention to her family name even when she was wearing a nameplate as an intern and later as a doctor.

Two years ago, she married her childhood boyfriend, Chito Solis, following years of relationship which started when they were in high school at the Ateneo de Davao.

It was a relationship which I have never opposed and have always supported as I did with JB’s affair of the heart too because I feel that their happiness is my happiness as well.

I have never been and could not claim to be a perfect person, husband or father.

But my children know how much I love them.

Now that I am out of politics, I work everyday to make sure that as I prepare to leave them in this world all by themselves, I would be able to build the foundation of a better life for them and their children.

My only desire now is to make sure that their children will have a better and happier life than I and they had.

“seedlings turn overnight to sunflowers,

blossoming even as we gaze.

“what words of wisdom can i give them,

how can i help to ease their way?

“now they must learn from one another,

day by day.

“sunrise, sunset (x2),

swiftly fly the years,

one season following another,

laden with happiness and tears.”

(Lyrics from the song “Sunrise, Sunset” from the movie “Fiddler on the Roof.”)

(Photo caption: Dr. Maria Krista and her sister JB in the farm yesterday. The youngest child, Imman, could not join because of his final examinations.)