I grew up as an only child. Although I did not experience swanky weekends in the Hamptons or summer vacations in the South of France, I could say I had a luxurious only-child-of-the-family childhood. Until RM arrived.

When my mom told me about the idea of finally adopting a kid, I asked her which part of Africa we are getting the child from. Or Vietnam. Like Brangelina. Or Madonna. She laughed at me and told me we’re getting this 2 year old kid called RM from, well, La Union.

Because I used to stay in Baguio forever and our family home was in the lowlands, I did not get to see RM right away. All I heard were stories from my dad telling me how round her cheeks were and how much food she consumes in a day, as if she came from a starved Mangyan tribe somewhere in Mindoro. Or excited phone calls from mom telling me how many new shoes she bought for her that day, and again how much food she consumed that day. I went home a few weeks after and finally I got to see her.

So you’re the little bitch, I said to myself, when I first saw her, drawing ugly lines at our living room wall, with her crayons. She stared at me with two of the biggest eyes a 2 year old kid can come up with, and came up to me.

Tangna don’t do that, I said, snatching the crayon from her hand.

“Now give your big brother a nice kiss,” I said, and that’s the first thing I ever taught her, how to do the classy beso. Believe it or not guys, she now knows how to do the beso, with matching mwahs (with or without the mwah sound, depending on occasion) and lifting-the-left-foot maneuver.

So RM became the 4^th member of our big family (haha), we bring her everywhere, we buy her all the nice things kids of today love and I teach her all the posh lessons a growing child should learn. But this child is a tiny monster.

One Sunday morning we were left alone at home while everyone went to church. I was cooking crepes and peeling bananas and stuff when RM, came up to me, pointing at her snout.

“Damn are you sniffing cocaine now?”

Of course she’s only 2, the total number of words that come out of her young mouth were around twenty-two, words that refer to food, or two-syllable utterances that has something to do with bathroom activities.

“What is that in your mouth!” I examined her mouth and I saw soap powder, white with tiny bits of blue, as if it was polvoron, all over her mouth and soap dust all over her chest.

Alarmed and didn’t know what to do, I grabbed her in my arms and ran out of the house towards my grandma’s.

Sitting in her wheelchair, my calm grandmother pointed at RM’s mouth.

“Why do you let her eat like that? Punasan natin come here.” She came to us instead.

“Sabon. That’s sabon, she ate sabon, what do I do now?” I said.

“Sabon? Patikim nga,”

My grandma. as if she’s been tasting soap off kids mouths all her life, expertly said, “Ay yeah, sabon nga!” I wanted to celebrate with her latest discovery but quickly I brought RM to their sink and tried to wash her mouth with running water.

“You don’t swallow, the food in your tummy will get clean like clothes,” I warned RM as I cleaned her mouth with my hands and got rid of the remaining soap inside her mouth.

I asked RM to gargle with water and demonstrated it to her, “You do like this o, KLUG KLUG KLUG*, and then you let it out.”

She did what I asked her to do, except the letting-it-out part. RM swallowed everything, practically drinking the soap-solution from her mouth as if it was fresh, hot, breast milk coming off her biological mom’s breast.

Nothing bad happened to her, thank God and we never told our mom about it. When my mom and dad arrived and saw the opened detergent box on the kitchen table, I told her I had to wash something with it.

“Eh bakit matamlay si RM?”

“I don’t know, she ate too much polvoron, that’s why.”