do mosquitoes have souls?

"Mama, do all living things have souls?"

This is the question I have from my daughter at 5am today. We just woke up and technically I am brain-dead until I've had coffee. I could have answered a quick yes, but experience has taught me to be cautious; children's questions have a tendency to crucify people thrice their age.

I said, "Some people say yes; some people say no. It depends on what you believe in." Then I held my breath for the follow-up.

"Well, then, do mosquitoes have souls? What happens when we kill them?"

Oh, God.

Let's start with pets. If your puppy dies, Mama would console you and say that he goes to heaven. Same with rabbits and kittens. I, in my thirty-four-year-old wisdom, offer a quick prayer every time I see dogs and cats run over by cars in the road. It's always "Oh-God-let-the-poor-thing-be-in-doggie-heaven-and-thank-you-that-I-haven't-had-breakfast-yet." We get outraged over videos of little animals being tortured to death, and we have PAWS to defend animal rights.

Then how about the chickens and pigs and cows that we kill for food? We don't feel guilty about that, although as a child I never could eat chicken that my grandfather has slaughtered, because I had seen it flopping headless in the dirt, spraying blood all over the yard. But in India cows are sacred, so does that mean the issue of a cow's soul is in question?

How about crocodiles and snakes? They can kill human beings, so if we kill them, does that negate the question of having a soul?

Let's go to insects. When ants and spiders bite, we swat them. I gleefully spray insecticide on a cockroach while it waves its legs in the air. But I disapprove of children who take joy in pulling off the wings of a fly.

So in our roundabout way, we have established that we perceive an animal has a soul if it exhibits intelligence. When we see that a pet exhibits emotions and can relate to us, we assume that it has the same immortal spirit. When someone refuses to step on a spider, however, we equate it to the Yuck factor rather than the morality of killing animals.

Then, my daughter has concluded, if an animal does not help humans, or it doesn't love us back, it doesn't have a soul. A mosquito brings us dengue, so its life brings us no good. It doesn't have a soul.

I could argue that somewhere in the food chain of little animals, mosquitoes probably provide nutrition, so does that make it 'good?' But I'm exhausted. I am also confused.

Now, at 11am, I'm still contemplating the question. I think I'll go around, pretend I'm ten years old, and ask people the same question.

the lovelife of gohan the cat

Aside from the Siamese, we have another cat who lives in the garage. His name is Gohan, he is gray-and-white, and he has this tough, slightly dirty, kanto boy look typical of stray cats. He is forbidden to enter the house because he offends the tender sensibilities of Chloe the Siamese cat. He is sweet, though, and when someone steps on his tail he would just howl in indignation, unlike the Siamese who will bite, eyes flashing.

Well, life was peaceful until Gohan acquired a girlfriend. It was another tough, slightly dirty feline with a squinty eye who always looked pregnant. Now this girlfriend had taken to spending nights with Gohan in the garage, sharing his dinner of leftovers. And she has been with Gohan so often that my daughter has given her a name, Girlfriend. Gohan and Girlfriend would cuddle on top of the washing machine, or crowd inside the dog house with Andrew the Whippet. (The whippet is another strange dog; he actually sleeps with the cats.)

Girlfriend looks positively ugly to me. I don't know about cats' standards of attractiveness, but she must be hot, because for some reason she got another suitor, a much uglier orange tabby with an evil temperament. We called him Kalaban. This Kalaban is so shameless that he would come at night and actually drive Gohan away from his own food bowl. Sometimes I'd have to watch over the cats as they ate dinner, with a broom in one hand, while Kalaban glares at me from outside the gate.

And then they'd start their courtship. You'd be peacefully dreaming at 2 am when the cats would start to howl in discordant harmony, each one trying to outdo the other in bass, soprano, and falsetto Meeeooowwww. Since they're in our garage, it has become our obligation to go down and disrupt the proceedings.

We'd often find Gohan crouched behind Andrew the dog, howling to his heart's content, while Kalaban does his macho posturing in the middle of the garage. Girlfriend would be watching from the sidelines, purring and grooming herself. Then my husband would try to hit Kalaban with whatever is handy: a plastic chair, a slipper, a dustpan. He always missed, and Kalaban would run away, grinning. As a result of these nocturnal skirmishes, we now have a plastic chair with a broken seat, a long knife with a broken point, a chipped baseball bat, a broken pot. All for the sake of Gohan's lovelife.

Thankfully, the courtship has ended. Gohan, battle-scarred over Girlfriend, is now healing his numerous scratches. He has a sore on his neck that my nanny declares will develop into skin cancer if untreated, so we've resorted to applying Solcoseryl whenever we catch him. Kalaban rarely shows his grinning face, but it still irritates the hell out of us when we see him on the streets.

Girlfriend is, of course, pregnant. She doesn't visit so often now. The nanny has threatened to evict both cats if she gives birth in the garage. My daughter and I are waiting to see if she'd appear one day with the kittens. She'd be welcome in the garage if she comes with little gray-and-white kittens, but not little orange tabby ones.

my daughters' education

A long time ago, I have decided that both of my daughters will attend Ateneo. One is ten; the other is three. And so it turns out that this particular mother is preoccupied with computing how much she has to save in the years before they'd go to university, while she still has Promil Kid in the grocery list and PSP in the Christmas wish list discreetly posted in the cork board by the library.

My older daughter often forgets to do her homework. I can sense my husband's disapproval that I am not strict when it comes to schoolwork, and it translates to my daughter's lack of discipline. Sometimes whole weekends would go by and we have not opened a single book in my daughter's school bag, but we found the time to cook together.

My three-year-old can identify letters in the alphabet, but for some reason refuses to say the letter 'E.' She can count, but she only counts going up and down stair steps. The older relatives say it's too early to send her to school, but if it means she'll learn to share and make friends I'd gladly pay her Nursery tuition for another year, and never mind if she sings the alphabet without the 'E.'

And so it also turns out that I think I will be ready for Ateneo, but my daughters might not be. I sometimes remember that at 10 years old, I was studying alone, and my art projects always got the highest grades. I also won all the Spelling contests, because my grandmother expected nothing less. I was also a stressed-out, grade-conscious, anxious child with chewed-up fingernails, but I cannot tell my daughter that. When I was 10, all I had to amuse myself were old issues of Life magazine and Reader's Digest, and comic books, which were forbidden but which we smuggled in the house anyway. My daughter amuses herself by doing Pizap on Facebook, and she has declared herself bored with Angry Birds. She spends hours practicing the flute, and when we go to the mall she stays in Tom's World while I do the groceries.

I have not asked her what she wants to be when she grows up. I do not want her to be pressured with school, but I realize that she should not grow up in the shadow of my ambitions. When she goes to university and someone asks her, 'Why Ateneo?' do I want her answer to be 'My mother had decided that when I was five years old' ?

And so it has turned out that in contemplating my desire to provide for a good education for my children, I have overlooked the necessity to provide them with a choice. My job, it turns out, is to be there whatever school they may choose, and not freak out when they decide to be deep-sea divers or hairdressers.

Their education is not the four years in Ateneo. Their education is the things I can teach them every day, as they grow up, how to be all that they can be.