I was a sickly child. Juvenile arthritis. Rheumatic fever. Tonsillitis. Hepatitis. Tuberculosis. Meningitis. Not to mention the milestone diseases. Chicken pox. Measles. Mumps. Mumps. Mumps. I got it more than once.

My mom must have thought me a broken child, always in need of fixing. I remember seeing all kinds of doctors and being in hospitals a lot, and with the concept of health insurance a mere penny in some greedy corporate executive’s thought, I think she resented me for being an expensive child. So she took me to faith healers.

Back then, her belief in the supernatural was absolute. This was before she became a born-again Christian. In fact, growing up, it felt like, every year, she was into a new religion. Baptist. Catholic. Pentecostal. Lutheran. She was the fiercest woman I knew, unafraid to speak her mind. She did not conform to stereotypes of a mother and a wife. And yet, here she was in desperate need of believing in something other than herself. Even then, I could not understand her desire for a spiritual crutch.

We did not go to church. Not regularly anyway. But she enrolled me in Catholic schools where I learned that my family was a bunch of sinners who, for sure, were going to hell. My dad was a drunk, a gambler, and an adulterer. My mother did not obey her husband. Hell, she was not even married to him, I found out later. And me. Well, I had impure thoughts all the time and learned to masturbate to my uncle’s girlie magazines before I even learned to speak or read English.

On the days she was free, she would have Tita Et come to the house to read her fortune through playing cards. Tita and Tito are what we Filipinos call beloved friends of our parents; aunts and uncles who are not related by blood but are part of the family. Looking back, I think it was then my parents planted the idea of a chosen family in my head. Tita Et’s full name was Estrella Kuenzler. She was a half German, half Filipino character actor, known for her European nose and smoker’s voice. She would shuffle the cards, my mom would cut and choose one, and Tita Et would lay the cards on the table, my mother’s chosen card in the middle, and Tita Et’s animated face would reflect my mother’s destiny for the week or until they saw each other again. Once, Tita Et’s brows furrowed. Naku. Wag kang lalabas. Baka ka kamadulas.

But my mom said not to worry, she already slipped and fell in the house that morning. Okay na ako. I will be fine. As if there’s a universal rule that two bad things of the same nature could not occur in the same day. Only one tragedy at a time.

It was raining then, but she still decided to go with my dad to pick me up from her friend’s place, where I had stayed for the weekend. On the way, she slipped and fell in the slippery sidewalk, breaking her patella and dislodging her knee joint. She lived the rest of her life with screws in her knee, and I lived with the guilt that my bad luck might have caused this misfortune.

My mother also took me to these crazy religious phenomena they often featured in National Geographic –faith-healers or spiritistas claiming divine guidance. The hilot or bonesetters, I didn’t mind. That’s another thing, too. I had weak ankles and it seemed I sprained them all the time playing jumprope or Chinese garters. My mom would take me to Aling Miling, the grizzled betel-chewing hilot, and she would massage and manipulate my ankle gently with efficascent oil, turning it slowly, left, then right and with a final pull—crack – “Arayyyyyyyy” – she would reset the misaligned joint. There was one hilot who wrapped thin ginger slices on my ankle with a cut piece of white stretchy cloth. It felt nice and warm so I kept it past the day I was supposed to remove it. When I finally did, my skin was black from where the ginger burned it.

There was a time I was feverish and in pain, my tonsils on fire, and she took me to a faith healer conducting healing in what looked like a converted barn. He was wearing a long white tunic with white pants, talking in tongues with his eyes closed. There was an amp with a microphone and a chair in the middle of the dirt floor and all these ailing people hoping to be healed were seated in a circle about three feet away from the batibot chair. My mother led me to the rickety chair like a helpless inmate about to be executed. The faith-healer pressed his hands on my shoulder, rubbed my back, and then my neck and then asked folks to stand up and put their hands in the air like they do now at the clubs when the music is jamming. Some came forward and lay their hands on me, including my mother, as the healer’s incoherent praying grew loud. There was no viscera taken out of my body, at least not that I remember. In fact, I had a tonsillectomy when I was 21.

Perhaps the most interesting thing my mother took me to was a little church in the outskirts of Manila where there was a woman who, at the time of orasyon, the 6PM angelus, would be possessed by the baby Jesus. She fell into a trance causing much commotion and when she came to, she spoke in a little voice announcing that she was in fact the child Jesus Christ incarnate.

Tingnan ninyo. Behold, she said, holding her palms up in front of her. People pushed each other to see what were supposed to be imprints of the baby Jesus’s hands. They oohed and ahhhed, but I could not see what they were seeing, and I was too scared to say that the emperor had no clothes.

Santo Nino, the baby Jesus, is a big deal back home. For some reason, he takes up more space on the altar than the crucified Jesus. Sometimes you’d only see the Santo Nino with his long frizzy hair and fair skin, wearing an elaborate robe of red velvet with gold applique, his hand in a gesture of blessing. No Virgin Mary beside him. My mom had a shelf above the master bedroom built specially for the foot-high Santo Nino, but when she became a born-again Christian, she replaced it with a vase…. But that happened much later in our life.

When I went to high school, I discovered vices, and my mother, she discovered dwarves. The magical kind. A celebrity dwarf consultant came to our house and my mother gave him a tour. He said the duendes lived in an anthill behind the house. He was a showbiz sensation, even featured at a talk show, this man who supposedly saw supernatural beings. And for the right price he would tell you who’s haunting your backyard, do an exorcism if the unseen beings were evil, but he told my mom, the duendes were there to protect us. They were white dwarves. Of course. I would hear my mother tell her friends that she heard little feet scurrying about at 3 AM. But it was just me sneaking back into the house after a night of drinking with friends.

My mom laid hands on me in more ways than one. In fact, we had a tiny wooden sculpture of a paddle with the words: Spare the rod, spoil the child beside the bible on the altar.

One time I came home drunk out of my mind and when I turned the key and opened the door, my mother welcomed me with the rubber sole of her furry slippers, the sound on my cheeks like unwanted applause. She chased me around the house with that slipper as I searched for a weapon to fight back until I tripped and fell. Then she looked down at me like a villainess in a soap opera, her slippered hand poised high in the air. She dropped her arm slow-mo-like and said, Yan ang ayaw ko saiyo bata ka. This is what I hate about you, child. Then, under her breath, a justification, Naalala ko ang sarili ko saiyo. You remind me so much of myself.

With no feigned effort to help me up on my feet, she walked to her room, shut the door, and prayed for my salvation.