The love and forgiveness that was ‘sopas’

I had an initial thought back then that receiving the sacramental bread—to eat the consecrated wafer with my filthy hands—could somehow mean being absolved of my sins.

But in the home where I grew up, I had always known that food—to cook and to eat—was an act of love. Mama cooking “sopas” even when the weather’s fine is her culminating act of forgiveness: of forgiving and being forgiven in return.

In our home, to be offered food is an indirect way of being told, “I’m sorry, eat well.” To eat the food, cooked by the very hands you thought could hurt you but actually loved you in ways more than one, means accepting the apology. To let the chewing do all the talking, to let the warm food make its way through the stone-cold hearts, and hearten it again.

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I had the biggest fight with my Mama during my teenage years. I’m not sure what they were about anymore. Perhaps that is the thing with arguments. One cannot remember the reason vividly, but only the unforgiving words blurred by the tears. Yet how could I not let go of all the resentment? If every time I tuck myself into my bed, ugly crying, she’d knock at the door and say, “Anak, kain ka na.”

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I would pretend to be asleep as my under eyes swell from the tears. Mama would never wipe them, but there would be a spoonful of warm sopas right across my face. Her face would soften into a pensive form and I would know that “kain ka na” means “tahan na,” along with its other variations of “mahal pa rin kita.” She will never say them out loud, though.

She will blow off the warm sopas by the very lips that house a sharp tongue, the very lips that would then kiss me to sleep. The sopas, with its macaroni, carrots, cabbage, and meat drenched in the milky soup, would warm my body, and for one night, it is enough. She molds the softness out of a sopas, from the fragile macaroni that once could break to tiny shattered crumbs, as it melts into my mouth and I feel as though nothing could break me more.

Undeniably, there were dinners when my stomach ran empty and my heart simmered in rage. But mostly, we leave a fight unresolved and act cool about it, just so the food would not get cold. Mama would be angrier if I skipped a meal than if I talked back to her. Mothers and daughters love each other so much that it hurts. Who is at fault? Who forgives? Maybe we were both hurt, or maybe we just needed each other. I had never understood how my mother loved me. She loves in this love that makes me want to know how she had been as a girl to be the mother that she is now. Has the world peeled her skin so much that she does not even cry when slicing onions?

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From this, I’ve often shared lunch and snacks with my friends and thought that a biscuit sliced in halves and a large chip offered across the classroom meant love that feels better when shared. I have fought with my sisters from time to time, too, but a shared meal will always fix it when we sit across the dinner table and swallow each other’s pride. We’ve gone past juice evenly portioned in glasses and four packs of pancit canton cooked in one pan that we meticulously watch to ensure fair divides. What is forgiveness? What is love? The two had blurred the lines: We forgive who we love.

Food became more than just a peace offering. It has developed into a genre of literature and some kind of love language of its own. The sacred act of cooking and eating allows us to carve love in the mundane of every day. Inevitably, when we love people, we pay attention to the daintiest things about them. And the same goes when we cook, as we pay attention to the precise details about our sisters’ tolerance for spice, or our parents’ dietary restriction on salt, or when we eat as we check if our loved ones are eating well, too, by looking at their plates. And if they aren’t, we offer them their favorite portion of chicken or the last tender piece of adobong baboy.

I did not fully understand before when they say that the kitchen is a sacred part of the house—where food is prepared, where love is garnished before it is served. But I know that it was in the kitchen where Mama packed me a school meal so that I could share it with my friends for lunch. It was in the kitchen when Papa peeled guyabano and mangga, put them in a bowl, and told me to eat—because to die for someone is one noble thing, yet to eat healthily to live for someone is another. It was in the kitchen where the food is always warm.

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In college, I will live on my own. I would be alone to eat. But every time I eat sopas, I know I will always be my mother’s daughter. Even when the truth is I’m alone at the dinner table, and I wish I could fight with my Mama for the taste of her sopas again. Even when it’s just my empty plate, my full stomach, and my still craving heart against the world.

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Yen Valencia, 19, is a sophomore at the University of the Philippines Diliman. She studies community nutrition and is learning how to pick up the pen again.