🎓 Part I: The Man Who Raised a PhD

The air in the UP Diliman auditorium was thick with the scent of old paper, nervous sweat, and academic gravitas. For me, standing there, the moment felt surreal. I had just successfully defended my doctoral thesis, a culmination of two decades of relentless effort, sacrifice, and an unspoken promise. But the true weight of the moment wasn’t in the title of the dissertation; it was in the back row, where my stepfather sat.

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I was born into an incomplete family. My earliest memories are of my mother, Lorna, taking me back to Nueva Ecija—a poor, rural region of the Philippines, characterized by endless rice fields, harsh sun, relentless wind, and the stifling pressure of local gossip. I cannot clearly remember the face of my biological father, but I knew that my early years lacked many things—both material comforts and the foundational certainty of emotional presence.

When I was four years old, my mother remarried. The man was a construction worker. He came into my mother’s difficult life with absolutely nothing: no house to offer, no savings, no assets—only a thin, perpetually weary back, skin permanently sunburnt, and hands hardened into calloused, cracked tools by decades of mixing cement.

At first, I didn’t like him. His presence was an intrusion on my small world. He left before dawn, came home long after sunset, and his body always smelled profoundly of sweat, construction dust, and the metallic tang of dried lime and mortar.

But Tatay Ben, as he would eventually become known to me, never forced acceptance. He was a man of action, not words. He was the first person who ever managed to fix the rusty, squeaking chain on my old bicycle. He quietly mended the broken straps on my worn sandals without being asked. When I made a colossal mess in the kitchen, earning a fiery scolding from my mother, Tatay Ben didn’t scold me—he simply cleaned it up, patiently and silently, only leaving a damp trace on the floor.

When I was bullied at school—a painful phase where my small stature made me an easy target—my mother would sometimes yell at me, asking why I couldn’t fight back. Tatay Ben never yelled. Instead, he quietly rode his old, sputtering bicycle to the school gate and waited, standing under the mango tree until dismissal time.

On the long, dusty ride home, with me perched precariously on the luggage rack, he only said one sentence—a sentence that rewrote the geography of my heart:

— “I won’t force you to call me father, but know that Tatay will always be behind you if you need him.”

I was silent. I didn’t respond immediately. But from that day on, I called him Tatay.

Throughout the rest of my childhood, my memories of Tatay Ben became a steady montage: the rusty bicycle, the dusty construction uniform draped over a chair, and nights when he came home late with deep, dark circles under his eyes and hands still covered in the white residue of lime and mortar. Yet, no matter how physically exhausted he was, he never forgot to ask the one question that grounded my existence:

— “How was school today?”

He wasn’t a highly educated man. He couldn’t explain the difficult equations that plagued my geometry homework or discuss the complex passages I struggled with in literature class. But he always emphasized one lesson, a principle more valuable than any textbook:

— “You may not be the best in class, but you must study well. Wherever you go, people will look at your knowledge and respect you for it. Your mind is the only tool they cannot take from you.”

Our family survived on little income. My mother was a small-time farmer; my father, a seasonal construction worker. I was a good student, meticulous and focused, but I understood our dire situation and never dared to dream too big. I aimed for a local college, something practical.

Then, I passed the entrance exam to a major university in Manila.

The day the letter arrived, my mother cried, loud, unrestrained sobs of joy and fear. Tatay Ben just sat on the veranda, puffing slowly on a cheap cigarette, his face impassive. I assumed he was calculating the impossible cost.

The next day, without a word, he sold his only motorbike—his sole means of quick transportation to distant job sites. Coupled with my grandmother’s painfully saved cash, he managed to gather enough to send me to the capital for my first year.

The day he brought me to the city, Tatay wore an old, faded baseball cap, a wrinkled, borrowed collared shirt, and his back was already soaked in sweat from the humid city air. Yet, he still carried a massive, heavily taped box of “hometown gifts”: a few kilos of the best local rice, a jar of dried fish that smelled strongly of home, and several sacks of roasted peanuts.

Before leaving the tiny, crowded dormitory room, he looked at me, his eyes tired but clear.

— “Do your best, child. Study well.”

I didn’t cry then. I held it all in, clinging to the rough texture of the peanut sacks. But later, when I opened the packed lunch my mother had wrapped carefully in banana leaves, beneath the food I found a small piece of paper folded in four, covered in his clumsy, labored handwriting:

— “Tatay doesn’t understand what you’re studying, but whatever you study, Tatay will work for it. Don’t worry.”

I studied four years in college, motivated by that single, crumpled note. I graduated at the top of my class. But the work wasn’t done; the dream of a PhD—a dream Tatay had implicitly bought with his motorbike—still beckoned. I moved on to graduate school.

And Tatay kept working. His hands grew rougher, more calloused, his back more permanently bent under the weight of bags of cement. When I returned home for visits, I often found him sitting at the base of a towering bamboo scaffold, panting heavily after hauling loads all day, and my heart broke anew.

I told him to rest, to find lighter work, but he waved his hand, dismissing my pleas with his usual quiet fortitude.

— “Tatay can still manage. When I feel tired, I think: I’m raising a PhD—and I feel proud.”

I smiled then, a tight, forced smile, not daring to tell him that pursuing a PhD meant even more work, even greater effort, and years more of tuition. But he was the sole, immovable foundation beneath my ambition. He was the reason I never gave up.

The day of my PhD thesis defense at UP Diliman finally arrived. The culmination of a quarter-century of Tatay Ben’s sacrifice. I begged him for weeks before he reluctantly agreed to attend. For the ceremony, he borrowed a dark, ill-fitting suit from his cousin, wore a pair of dress shoes one size too small, and bought a new hat from the district market, determined to look presentable for my academic peers.

He sat in the very last row of the auditorium, trying meticulously to sit upright, his eyes never leaving me throughout the presentation. He understood none of the graphs, the theoretical models, or the complex, technical language, but his presence was a loud, silent testament to his investment.

After the successful defense, amidst the applause and the congratulations, Professor Santos—the head of my committee, a brilliant, stern man known for his intimidating intelligence—came to shake my hand and greet my family. He offered my mother his compliments, exchanged pleasantries with my grandmother, and finally, he reached Tatay Ben.

Professor Santos suddenly stopped. He looked past the borrowed suit, past the new hat, and looked closely, intently, at the lines etched by sun and labor on Tatay Ben’s face. His academic, often aloof expression changed instantly, softening into one of profound recognition and respect.

— “You’re Mang Ben, aren’t you?” the professor asked, his voice unexpectedly gentle.

Tatay Ben, unused to the formality and attention, looked flustered. “Ah, yes, sir. I am.”

— “I remember you,” Professor Santos continued, a small, genuine smile forming on his lips. “When I was a child, my family’s house was near the construction site where you worked in Quezon City, almost thirty years ago. I remember one time, there was a terrible accident, and you carried an injured man—a man much bigger than you—down from the third-story scaffold, even though you yourself had fallen and were bleeding badly.”

Before Tatay could stammer a word of denial or modesty, the professor, turning away from the PhD he had just helped create, placed a hand, not on Tatay Ben’s shoulder, but on his calloused, cement-cracked hand, and said something that silenced the entire room…