You can’t write about fatherhood without tears welling up your eyes. I consumed 30 rolls of tissue paper before I could even start a word. So here we go.

Last Sunday morning, while all the other fathers in the world woke up feeling important and ready to bask in the limelight, I was challenging my three-month old baby to a fight. The boy accepted the challenge and fought in the best way he knew how, by screaming his baby lungs out. Like the real gentleman that I was, I refused to smack the boy’s face with a pack of diapers and fought him in the best way I knew how under the present circumstances, by screaming my aging lungs out.

So that’s how I and my baby spent our first ever Father’s Day celebration together, by being locked in a shouting match inside our little rented room in Barangay Mambaling, Cebu City.

No, it wasn’t my fault, never. Here’s what happened.

I was in the middle of a dream, a dream that was taking me to places where men gather over beer and talk about art and poetry and philosophy and post-modernism and how Bonifacio is greater than Rizal and how the government sucks and how sometimes they want to kill themselves because nobody understands them, and how the Internet erodes morality while they find it impossible to deactivate their Facebook accounts, stuff like that.

In short, I was dreaming the kind of life I want to live when all of a sudden the dream was interrupted by a shriek, a real mean, ear-piercing shriek only a three-month-old baby is capable of shrieking. It sounded like this: UHAAAUWEEEIIkK@%^#&^%@&!

Parents will agree with me when I say a baby’s scream can shake even the tallest skyscraper within a mile radius. One time, a friend living five blocks from our place texted me in the middle of the night if I could shut my baby up because he was watching Hawaii Five-O reruns and he couldn’t hear a thing.

Anyway, going back, the wife was awakened too. She would tell me later she was also in the middle of a dream, a dream that was taking her to places where girls gather over cheese curls and orange juice and talk about shoes and bags and Johnny Depp and Phil Younghusband and cotton candy and satin sheets, you know, stuff girls post on Facebook, TEHEEE, LMFAO.

Unlike me, the wife welcomed the interruption because she hates those girly things. But I was getting angry. While the wife was laughing, I checked the baby in his bouncer, a two-legged crib that rocks on its own at the slightest movement, so that it works as if the baby is rocking himself to sleep. The bouncer had been doing miracles for the three of us since we bought it days ago. But that early Sunday morning, the miracle crib failed.

I checked the boy’s diaper. It was dry. I checked his ears, his eyes, his nose and other baby orifices if there was something in there, like ants, mosquitoes, bugs or Barney. None. His breastfeeding mom took him from his useless crib and offered him his meal, while I sang “I Have Two Hands.” No, he was not hungry, and he hates my voice.

It was Father’s Day and I was determined to play the role of a father seriously. So I asked the wife to give me the boy, praying the gods of fatherhood would be kinder to me now. I sang again, this time “London Bridge.” UHAAAUWEEEIIkK@%^#&^%@&! Not working.

What’s your problem? I asked Mr. Shriek. You want to fight daddy? Ha? Come, fight daddy! I was screaming now. Mr. Shriek fought back with another UHAAAUWEEEIIkK@%^#&^%@&!

Seeing my desperation, the wife took the boy from me and gently, very gently placed him adjacent to her in bed, effectively eliminating me from the family equation.

Whatever force of nature was at work that time, Mr. Shriek fell silent. I watched as the mother and son lapsed into a deep sleep together, then I went downstairs to check if Hawaii Five-O reruns were still on.

There’s crisis everywhere, earthquakes, tsunamis, Joavan Fernandez. In fact the Lord was almost forced to return for the Second Coming last May 21 because of our wicked ways. We would be remiss in our duty as citizens of the world if we keep making fun of things. So for today, allow me to write about a topic of extreme global importance: the foreskin.

And not just the foreskin but also circumcision, the act of removing this poor little loose fold of skin from its base attachment, the penis. The relevance here is that it’s summer, the time of year when civic organizations and politicians get frantic about cutting foreskins off little boys’ penises in the slums as if it’s Erection Day tomorrow. Yes, I said Election Day, read it again.

I will spare you the trouble of searching for the definition of “foreskin” in the Internet, because when I Googled the word yesterday, an army of penises popped up in my computer screen, throwing me off my seat.

I have never seen so many penises in my life, honestly. If there’s a World Summit of Penises, it would look like it. Every race was represented. There were yellow penises, white penises, black penises, blue, green, red, checkered, etc.

To my officemates who saw the penises, too, now you know it was pure academic research on my part. You may now apologize to me for giving me that look.

So here’s an official definition from one medical website: “In male human anatomy, the foreskin is a generally retractable double-layered fold of skin and mucous membrane that covers the glans penis and protects the urinary meatus when the penis is not erect. It is also described as the prepuce, a technically broader term that also includes the clitoral hood in women, to which the foreskin is embryonically homologous.”

If that sounds too classroom textbook to you, here’s a more practical definition from urbandictionary.com: a foreskin is “an extra portion of skin located at the tip of an uncircumcised penis; increases intercourse tenfold.” You can forget about the intercourse part. It’s important, but there are kids around. Besides, it’s a myth.

Circumcision is the act of removing the foreskin, making the penis, well, a skin shorter. It “dates back to prehistoric times and is one of the oldest surgical operations known to have been performed by people,” the source said. Meaning, there have been circumcisions during prehistoric times that were performed by non-people, like penguins and three-celled amoeba.

Circumcision is said to have religious, cultural and hygiene significance. But unless your father is Moses, circumcision in the country has little to do with performing a religious obligation. I still have to see an Operation Tuli where the boys, the medical staff and members of the community prayed the Rosary and offered the detached foreskins to the Birhen sa Regla for the gift of fertility.

It’s a cultural thing for most of us. As far as we boys were concerned back then, it was about not being made a laughingstock in school. Everybody’s getting sliced, so we might get sliced as well. There’s no experience more embarrassing than graduating from elementary with an extra piece of skin still hanging loose somewhere.

Circumcision made us feel like we were real big men now, ready to take on manly tasks like writing love letters to the prettiest girl in class, or running for the Senate. And how we looked cute in our fathers’ shirts! We would realize the benefits of hygiene much later, when we started to miss the peculiar smell of the uncircumcised loser boy down there.

What about the foreskins? What happened to them? Where did they go? That’s a valid question. Let me Google it right now, while the officemates are not looking.

(SUN.STAR CEBU, MAY 31)

And when I say lousy pre-Jordan seminars, I really mean “lousy” pre-Jordan seminars that ruin most people’s Sundays.

To those who are not familiar with traditional religious practices, a pre-Jordan seminar is a momentous family event that proves true the religious saying that the road to holiness is paved with burden. The way the seminar was handled, it was a really a burden to all of us 130 parents, godparents and infants cramped inside a small room shut tight from the unbaptized world outside. But I will leave it at that.

Our baby is now officially a Christian, and he has to deal with that by himself when he’s old enough to read Aramaic.

“Pre-Jordan” is derived from the root words “pre,” meaning before, and “Jordan,” meaning the Jordan River that was named after a famous basketball player. I’m not making this up. Try googling “pre-Jordan” and that’s what it shows. I don’t know what basketball has to do with baptism but it’s there. But deep inside I have a strong suspicion that “pre-Jordan” has to do with Jesus Christ being baptized by John the Baptist at the River Jordan.

Anyway, some well-meaning friends had warned us not to go for infant baptism, saying parents must wait till their babies are at least 18-years-old (in which case they are already 18-year-old babies) when they can exercise their legal right to decide for themselves which bikini bar to go. They can start their own religion while playing in a metal band, for all we parents care. They are 18 and they are entitled to their own beer. But for now, they have to be baptized.

There was a fierce religious, philosophical and diaper-related debate within the family on this matter. There was the wife and I favoring infant baptism in one corner and in the other corner the infant himself presenting no real intelligible argument other than attacking his mother’s breasts every minute or so.

Wife and I to infant: “Hey dude, you cannot say baptism only applies to adults. Jesus’ teachings about baptism apply to both adults and infants. Matthew 19:14 says, ‘Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.’ By children Jesus means you, infant boy. I learned that in prep school, dude.”

Infant: (Stares blankly at parents, and with a piercing scream that shatters doors and windows launches itself at full speed towards its lunch).

Like in any court of law, a violent reaction always works against the person, especially if the violence is aimed at an innocent pair of milk-manufacturing body parts. Since the infant decided to waive its right to defend itself in a civilized discussion, the family had no other choice but to decide in favor of infant baptism.

And that’s how the three of us and a bunch of godparents ended up inside a multi-purpose room in one of the city’s parishes two Sundays ago, listening to a lay minister spew out fire and brimstone like he founded the Catholic Church 2011 years ago.

Which brings me to my real topic for today: The End of the World on May 21, 2011, which was last Saturday. In fairness to my friend Harold Camping, there were actually several earthquakes that took place last Saturday. But we were too busy laughing at him to notice the world shake.

To quote the person who uses “insoymada” in his Twitter account, “I believe in Harold Camping. It’s just that Jesus doesn’t keep his appointments sometimes.”

I would have wanted to present my own End of the World calculations here, but I only have a little more than 140 characters left, which I will reserve for my email address and other contact info. And I don’t want another diaper-related religious debate with this newly baptized little boy here right beside me.

(SUN.STAR CEBU, MAY 24, 2011)