Welcome to The Beauty Edit’s new series, The Primer. In this special section, we feature celebrated journalists, creative storytellers, and industry veterans who have significantly influenced and redefined their respective fields. These experts, with their wealth of experience and unique perspectives, provide readers with an insider’s view of their industry—highlighting its defining characteristics, authentic experiences, and the profound lessons learned along the way. This column also serves as a platform for their thoughts, untold stories, and personal reflections, offering a deeper understanding of their respective fields and their dynamic nature.
Sarge Lacuesta is a multi-awarded Filipino writer, celebrated for his emotionally resonant short stories, novels, and screenplays. A Palanca Hall of Famer, he serves as president of PEN (Poets, Essayists, Novelists) Philippines, editor-at-large at Esquire Philippines, and publisher at Good Intentions Books. He is married to poet Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta.
If there’s anything I’ve found out about motherhood, having grown up surrounded by mothers of all persuasions and in all manner of relation to me, it’s that—biological parameters notwithstanding—I could never be a mother.
Believe me, I have tried. I’ve asked myself, through all the stages of cooperative parenthood, why I can never work out how to connect our offspring in the way my wife can. Without any thought or forward planning, my wife has somehow internalized our child’s welfare and future so that they have become part of her own sense of self.
Biologists and behaviorists alike, of course, have understood the answer for many years now—even as far as linking learning to the deep and still-mysterious workings of genetics. Mothers, indeed, hold a lineage that draws a harder and thicker connection from generation to generation, strung literally by an umbilical cord.
As a father, I’ve managed to hold some semblance of a line, taking the lead in deciding exactly what kind of cut my son’s circumcision should be, after being shown a menu of helpful illustrations. I’ve taught him to ride a bicycle, shoot a basketball (barely), and play a record. The day will come when I will teach him how to drive a stick shift and, grudgingly but proudly, how to change a flat tire. There may also come a time, earlier or later than that, when I will have to teach him the more delicate facts of life—safer sex, responsible libation, and the kind of male filial tutelage that is the stuff of movies and growing-up stories.
I concede, however, that my wife—someone who has never changed a tire or mixed a stiff cocktail—could learn all that in an afternoon, and actually be better at imparting such masculine knowledge to our child. And it’s not a matter of our child having come from her physical womb, either; I have seen many women respond to children biologically unrelated to them with a kind of instinct and lived empathy that I could never have found in any of my organs.
True enough, scientists have pointed to specific chemicals that play a part in motherhood. Particular hormones such as oxytocin, prolactin, and estrogen, for example, flood a mother’s systems and tip their emotional and behavioral approach toward offspring to favor a nurturing, protective, and caring perspective.
Evolution has baked into our race the importance of creating a safe space for our children to grow and learn while enveloped in such warmth and watchfulness. Through Magnetic Resonance Imaging, it has also been observed that mothers’ brains are wired differently, in such a way that enables them to think for their offspring ahead of themselves.
I had an MRI recently, so I can understand how it can detect all sorts of things invisible to the naked eye. All it seemed to awaken inside me was a sense of panic over who would take care of my watch collection if I suddenly died, since my wife didn’t seem to care about it much; the racket the MRI machine made also made me wonder why it sounded suspiciously like a track off a dubstep setlist—a primarily male-oriented musical genre.
But the overriding thought I had, while my head and upper body were stuck inside that chugging piece of hospital machinery, was where my wife was at that moment. I was alone, with no hand to hold, and no one allowed to hold me. Like my newborn son many years ago, I was swaddled only in a thin blanket, my bare bottom cradled only by the surface of the machine. The medical technician had warned me not to speak or make the slightest movement of my head—otherwise, they would need to repeat all 45 minutes of the grueling procedure. And it was indeed grueling, if only because I felt completely isolated, alone, and silenced, a man in late middle age, whose net worth, corporate position, and accomplishments in life were all silenced and at the mercy of that groaning, churning machine.
It could have been worse, I told myself. It could have been my son in here, and I would have been that guy in the waiting room, pacing and cursing myself. I knew how to change, fix a flat, and put the needle on a record. I knew how to make a good Negroni and how to drink half a dozen of them while keeping a sane conversation. I knew how to put on a condom in just the right way to avoid accidental fatherhood.
I found myself waiting, wanting, and wishing to be human again—to be held and assured.
But I wouldn’t have known how to be a mother. The prescribed 45 minutes felt like days, weeks, months. I felt like I was in the womb again, my fears and my thoughts conceiving themselves, shaping themselves in the brain that the machine had preoccupied itself with. I found myself waiting, wanting, and wishing to be human again—to be held and assured.
“They found something,” she said, making sure I saw her face before she said it. She used that warm, even tone that delivered news of understanding rather than precise knowledge. Well, of course, they did. All that horrible dubstep music for nothing? Over the briefest of moments, I felt a succession of emotions—hope, the sudden loss of it, panic, understanding, acceptance.
And then, relief. I had found something, too, after all. I found her again, my wife, my mother of choice, my mother for life.
