When the defense ended, Professor Santos came to shake hands with me and my family. When it was Tatay Ben’s turn, he suddenly stopped, looked at him carefully, and then his expression changed in a way I would never forget.
But to understand that moment—to truly grasp the weight of recognition passing between two men in a crowded auditorium at the University of the Philippines—you need to understand where we began. You need to know about the rice fields of Nueva Ecija, about calloused hands and broken bicycles, about a man who built futures instead of houses.
I was born into what people politely called an “incomplete family,” though I learned early that completeness has nothing to do with the number of parents and everything to do with the quality of love. My earliest memories are fragments, pieces of a puzzle I’ve spent my whole life trying to assemble: my mother’s young face creased with worry, the sound of arguments echoing through thin walls, the smell of rice cooking over a small fire, and the absence of a man I was told to call Papa but who disappeared before I could form lasting memories of his face.
As soon as I learned to walk—or so my mother, Nanay Lorna, tells the story—my biological father walked out of our lives. The divorce was quick and brutal in the way such things were in the Philippines in the early nineties, leaving my mother with a toddler, no money, and a family back in Nueva Ecija who said “I told you so” without speaking the words aloud. She took me back to the province, to the barangay where she’d grown up, where everyone knew everyone else’s business and poverty was as common as the rain that fed the rice paddies.
Nueva Ecija in those days was a place of extremes—lush green during the wet season, parched brown during summer, always beautiful in that way rural poverty can be when you don’t have to live it. The landscape was rice fields stretching to the horizon, carabao pulling wooden plows, children playing barefoot in irrigation ditches, and women gathering to gossip while washing clothes in the communal well. We lived in my grandmother’s small house, a bahay kubo with walls made of woven bamboo and a roof of rusted corrugated metal that sang when the rain fell.
I don’t remember my biological father’s face clearly. Sometimes I think I do—a flash of dark eyes, a certain way of laughing—but I suspect these are constructed memories, stories I’ve told myself based on photographs my mother hid in a shoebox at the bottom of her trunk. What I do remember clearly is the absence, the empty space where a father should have been. I remember my mother working in the rice fields, bent double in the sun, her hands stained with mud and her face hidden beneath a wide straw hat. I remember being hungry more often than not, eating rice flavored with fish sauce and calling it a meal, wearing hand-me-down clothes from cousins I barely knew.
When I was four years old, everything changed. My mother remarried, and a man named Benedicto Cruz entered our lives. Everyone called him Ben, but to me he would become Tatay—the Tagalog word for father that carries more weight than any English translation can capture.
I remember the first time I saw him. He came to our house on a Sunday afternoon, riding an old bicycle that squeaked with every rotation of the pedals, wearing clean but faded jeans and a shirt that had been washed so many times the original color was just a memory. He was a construction worker, Nanay told me, a good man who worked hard and didn’t drink too much and wanted to take care of us. He came to my mother with nothing material to offer—no house, no savings account, no college degree or family connections. Just a thin but strong back, skin tanned dark by years of working under the Manila sun, and hands so calloused they felt like leather when he shook my small palm in greeting.
“Kumusta, hijo,” he said, squatting down to my eye level. “Your nanay says you’re a smart boy.”
I didn’t answer. I was four years old and suspicious of this stranger who was suddenly in my mother’s life, in our small house, sitting at our table and eating our rice.
At first, I actively disliked him. He was strange, this man who left for Manila before dawn, returning only on weekends or sometimes not for weeks when a construction project demanded it. When he was home, he woke too early, moved too quietly, and his body always carried the smell of sweat mixed with concrete dust and diesel fuel. He didn’t try to force affection or demand respect. He simply existed in our space, helping my mother with chores, fixing things around the house that had been broken for months, and watching me with patient eyes that never demanded anything in return.
The first crack in my resistance came when he fixed my bicycle. It was a small, rusty thing that my mother had bought secondhand from a neighbor, already ancient when it came to me. The chain had come off and I’d been unable to fix it, sitting in the dirt beside it and crying tears of frustration while my mother worked in the fields. Tatay Ben found me there. He didn’t say anything, just squatted beside the bicycle, examined the chain, and with patient movements I would later recognize as characteristic of everything he did, worked the chain back onto the sprocket. His hands were so much larger than mine, scarred and rough, but they moved with surprising gentleness. When he finished, he stood, wiped his hands on his jeans, and simply nodded at me before walking away.
After that, I paid more attention. I noticed how he mended my broken sandals without being asked, using wire and glue he bought with his own money. I saw how he cleaned up my messes without scolding—the spilled rice, the tracked mud, the torn school papers. When other children at the barangay school mocked me for having no father, he was the one who came to pick me up on his old bicycle, saying nothing about my tears or the bruise darkening my cheek. On the ride home, his words were simple and perfect: “Tatay doesn’t force you to call me dad, but Tatay will always be behind you if you need him.”
I was silent, gripping the metal frame of his bicycle, feeling the rumble of the dirt road through the handlebars. But something shifted in my chest that day. From then on, without ceremony or announcement, I started calling him Tatay.
Throughout my childhood, my memories of Tatay Ben are constructed from small, repeated moments rather than grand gestures. I remember the bicycle—always that same squeaking bicycle because he could never afford to replace it—and the way he looked riding home from the construction sites in Manila, his thin frame bent over the handlebars, his clothes dusty and sweat-stained even after the long journey. I remember the construction uniform hanging in our small bathroom, the khaki pants and long-sleeved shirt that were supposed to be tan but had faded to a color that wasn’t quite any color at all. I remember the nights when he came home late from overtime shifts, dark circles carved beneath his eyes like bruises, his hands still marked with lime and mortar that wouldn’t quite wash off no matter how hard he scrubbed.
No matter how late he arrived, no matter how exhausted, he never forgot to find me before he slept and ask the same question: “How was school today?”
He was not an educated man. He’d finished only fourth grade before his own father had pulled him from school to work in the rice fields, and later he’d taught himself to read and do basic mathematics well enough to function on construction sites. He couldn’t help me with algebra or explain the subjunctive mood in English grammar. But he understood something more fundamental than any subject in my textbooks. Every night, after asking about my day, he would say in his careful way: “You may not be the best student in your class, but you must study properly. Wherever you go in life, people will look at your knowledge and respect you for what you know, not who your family is.”
My mother was a farmer who worked other people’s land for wages that barely covered our rice and dried fish. Tatay Ben was a construction worker who sent most of his salary home to Nueva Ecija while sleeping in crowded quarters with other laborers in Manila. Our family lived on a budget so tight that the word “savings” was almost a joke. I was a good student—my teachers told me so, and my report cards confirmed it—but I understood our situation. I didn’t allow myself to dream beyond finishing high school and maybe getting work in Manila like Tatay, maybe learning a trade that would let me send money home to my mother.
When I passed the entrance examination for the University of the Philippines at seventeen, earning a spot in their College of Social Sciences, my mother cried. She sat on our porch and wept into her apron while neighbors came to congratulate us and I stood there feeling proud and terrified in equal measure. Tatay Ben didn’t cry. He just sat on the bamboo bench, smoking one of the cheap cigarettes he allowed himself as his only vice, staring out at the rice fields as the sun went down. He didn’t speak, and I didn’t know what to say.
The next morning, I woke to find Tatay’s motorcycle—a secondhand Honda that had been his pride, his only possession of real value, the thing that allowed him to visit us on weekends instead of waiting for the irregular buses—was gone. My mother wouldn’t meet my eyes at breakfast. When I asked, Tatay said simply, “I sold it. We needed money for your tuition and your dormitory in Manila.”
“But Tatay, how will you come home now?” I asked, understanding for the first time the magnitude of what he’d done.
He shrugged. “The bus works fine. What matters is that you go to university.”
He’d combined the money from selling his motorcycle with my mother’s savings—money she’d been setting aside peso by peso for three years, hiding it in a tin can buried beneath the kamunggay tree—to send me to Manila. To give me the chance he’d never had.
The day Tatay Ben took me to the city, I was seventeen years old and had never been farther from Nueva Ecija than the neighboring town’s market. He wore an old baseball cap to shade his face, a wrinkled shirt that had been pressed as well as our small charcoal iron could manage, and he carried a large woven bag filled with what he called “hometown gifts”: several kilos of rice from the recent harvest, a jar of tuyo and tinapa—dried and smoked fish that would keep without refrigeration—and several bags of roasted peanuts my mother had prepared. We took the bus to Manila, sitting in the back where the diesel fumes were strongest, and Tatay’s back was drenched with sweat by the time we arrived, but he never complained.
At the dormitory—a crowded building near the university where I would share a small room with three other provincial scholars—he helped me carry my belongings up three flights of stairs. Before he left, he looked at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read, something between pride and sadness and determination.
“Try your best, hijo,” he said. “Study properly. Make your mother proud. Make yourself proud.”
I nodded, my throat too tight for words. I watched him walk down the stairs, his footsteps echoing in the concrete stairwell, and I didn’t cry. But that night, when I opened the lunch box my mother had wrapped in banana leaves—rice and fried fish and vegetables that smelled like home—I found a piece of paper folded into quarters, tucked beneath the food. The handwriting was careful, each letter formed slowly by someone who didn’t write often:
“Tatay doesn’t know what you’re studying, but whatever you study, Tatay will support. Don’t worry about money. Don’t worry about us. Just study. We will manage.”
I kept that note. I keep it still, pressed between the pages of my doctoral dissertation, yellowed now but still legible, still carrying the weight of everything it meant.
University was harder than I’d imagined. Not just the coursework, though that was challenging enough—suddenly I was competing with students from private schools in Manila, kids who’d grown up with computers and libraries and tutors, while I was trying to catch up with only my provincial public school education to build on. But the real difficulty was the guilt. I knew what my education cost. Every time I bought a textbook or paid for a group project or needed money for transportation to an off-campus lecture, I was spending money that Tatay Ben had earned by carrying bags of cement, by climbing scaffolding in the dangerous heat, by working overtime shifts that left him so exhausted he could barely eat before falling asleep.
During my four years of undergraduate study, Tatay continued working construction in Manila. I would sometimes see him on weekends—he’d find whatever project he was on and we’d meet for merienda at a cheap carinderia, eating pork adobo and rice while he asked about my classes and I tried to explain concepts that had no translation into his world. His hands grew rougher, more scarred. His back developed a permanent curve from years of carrying heavy loads. When I came home to Nueva Ecija during semester breaks, I’d find him sitting at the base of whatever building he was helping construct, breathing hard from climbing scaffolding all day, his face dark with sun and construction dust.
“Tatay, you should rest,” I’d tell him. “You’re not young anymore. This work is too hard.”
He’d wave away my concerns. “Tatay can still do it. When I’m tired, I think about something and I feel proud—I’m raising a college graduate. Soon, a university graduate. That gives me strength.”
I’d smile and change the subject, not daring to tell him that I’d decided to pursue graduate studies, that a four-year degree wasn’t enough, that I wanted to continue for a master’s degree and possibly beyond. Not daring to tell him that this would mean more years of tuition, more years of him working himself into the ground to support my ambitions.
But of course he found out. My mother couldn’t keep secrets from him, and when I was accepted into the graduate program for sociology at UP Diliman, she told him immediately. I called home, nervous, expecting him to tell me it was enough, that I needed to get a job and start contributing to the family instead of continuing to drain our resources.
“That’s wonderful news, hijo,” he said instead, his voice crackling through the cheap cell phone connection. “Your nanay is very proud. Tatay is very proud too.”
“But Tatay, it’s two more years of study. Two more years of expenses. Maybe I should—”
“You should study,” he interrupted firmly. “You think Tatay has worked this hard to stop now? You study properly. Get your master’s degree. Don’t worry about anything else.”
I got my master’s degree in two years, writing a thesis about rural poverty and migration patterns in Central Luzon, using everything I’d observed growing up in Nueva Ecija and everything Tatay Ben had taught me through his example about the lives of working people. At my graduation, Tatay sat in the audience wearing the same borrowed suit he’d worn to my undergraduate graduation, beaming with pride, his calloused hands clapping so hard I could hear them from the stage.
After I received my master’s degree, I was offered a teaching position at a small college in Manila—not UP, but a respectable private university that paid a modest but stable salary. For the first time in my life, I had money to send home. I could pay for my mother’s medicines, for repairs to their house, for small luxuries like a real refrigerator instead of the ice box they’d been using. But I could also see Tatay Ben aging in fast-forward, his body wearing out from decades of labor. He was in his early fifties but looked a decade older, moving with the careful stiffness of someone whose back hurt constantly, whose knees complained on stairs, whose hands ached in the mornings.
“You should retire, Tatay,” I told him during one of my visits home. “I’m working now. I can support you and Nanay. You’ve done enough.”
“Maybe soon,” he’d say. “But not yet. Tatay still has strength.”
What I didn’t tell him was that I’d applied for doctoral programs. What I didn’t tell him was that I’d been accepted into UP’s PhD program in sociology, one of only five students selected that year from hundreds of applicants. What I didn’t tell him was that despite my teaching salary, pursuing a doctorate would require more money—for research, for books, for the reduced teaching load I’d need to focus on my studies.
When I finally told my parents, it was over a dinner of fried bangus and rice, the same meal we’d eaten countless times when I was growing up. My mother looked worried. Tatay Ben looked thoughtful.
“A PhD,” he said slowly, testing the unfamiliar English letters in his mouth. “That’s the highest degree? The highest you can go?”
“Yes, Tatay. The highest degree in academics.”
He nodded, considering. “Then you must do it. How can Tatay’s son stop before he reaches the top?”
“But Tatay, it’s three or four more years of study. I’ll have to reduce my teaching load, which means less money to send home. And there are expenses—”
“We will manage,” he said firmly. “Your nanay and I, we managed when you were in high school, when you were in college, when you were getting your master’s degree. We will manage now. You don’t worry about us. You worry about your studies.”
So I entered the doctoral program at the age of twenty-eight, older than most of my cohort, acutely aware that while my classmates worried about their dissertation proposals, I was worrying about whether I was sending enough money home for my parents to live on. I took on extra teaching hours when I could, tutored students privately, edited academic papers for professors who needed the help. I slept four or five hours a night and drank too much instant coffee and sometimes wondered if I was being selfish, if pursuing the highest degree was just my own vanity while my parents scraped by in Nueva Ecija.
But whenever doubt crept in, I’d remember Tatay Ben’s words: “You don’t worry about us. You worry about your studies.” Or I’d remember the note he’d written all those years ago: “Whatever you study, Tatay will support.”
He kept working through my doctoral studies. Even though his body was breaking down, even though the construction company had moved him to lighter duties because he could no longer handle the physical demands of regular labor, even though I was sending money home and begging him to rest, he kept working. When I asked why, his answer was always the same: “Tatay is not ready to just sit yet. Tatay likes to work.”
But I knew the real reason. He was proud. Too proud to fully depend on his stepson’s income, too proud to stop being useful, too proud to admit that decades of hard labor had worn his body down to something that could barely climb stairs without pain.
The years of doctoral study were the hardest of my life. Not because the work was intellectually challenging, though it was. Not because I had to teach while conducting research and writing my dissertation, though that was exhausting. The hardest part was watching Tatay Ben age, watching his back curve further, watching him move slower and slower, watching the light in his eyes dim with fatigue, and knowing that he was still working—still sacrificing—so that I could sit in libraries and write about social theory and economic inequality.
My dissertation took three and a half years to complete. It was a comprehensive study of intergenerational poverty and educational mobility in rural Philippines, focusing particularly on families like mine, on men like Tatay Ben who broke their backs building cities they could never afford to live in, raising children who would transcend the circumstances that had trapped their parents. My dissertation committee said it was some of the most important sociological work to come out of UP in years. They said it would certainly be published, might even win awards. They said I had a bright academic future ahead of me.
All I could think about was getting it done so Tatay could finally rest.
The date for my doctoral defense was set for a Tuesday in October, just before the semester break. A defense at UP Diliman is a formal affair—the candidate presents their dissertation to a panel of professors, answers questions about methodology and conclusions, and if successful, is recommended for the doctoral degree. The defense is open to the public, held in a small auditorium, and family members are typically invited to attend.
I didn’t want to invite Tatay Ben. Not because I was ashamed, never that, but because I knew it would be difficult for him. He’d have to take a day off work, which meant lost wages. He’d have to travel from Nueva Ecija to Manila, which was expensive. He’d have to sit through hours of academic discussion that would be completely incomprehensible to him. It seemed cruel to ask him to endure all that just to watch something he wouldn’t understand.
But when I visited home two weeks before the defense, my mother pulled me aside.
“Your tatay wants to attend,” she told me. “He hasn’t said it directly, but I can tell. He’s been asking about the date, about the time, about what happens at a defense.”
“It will be boring for him, Nanay. All academic talk, all in English. He won’t understand any of it.”
“He doesn’t need to understand the words,” my mother said gently. “He needs to see his son succeed at the highest level. He needs to see what all these years of work have built. You must invite him properly.”
So I did. I sat with Tatay on the porch of their small house, the same porch where he’d sat silently the night I’d been accepted to UP twelve years earlier, and I invited him to my doctoral defense.
“You don’t have to come, Tatay,” I said. “I know it’s far, and it will be long and boring. But if you want to be there, I would like that very much.”
His face broke into a smile that made him look decades younger. “Of course Tatay will come. How can I miss my son becoming a doctor?”
“Not a medical doctor, Tatay. A PhD. It’s different.”
“Still a doctor,” he said proudly. “Still the highest degree. Of course I will come.”
The morning of the defense, I woke at five to review my presentation one final time, my stomach tight with anxiety that had nothing to do with the academic panel and everything to do with wanting Tatay Ben to be proud of what he’d sacrificed so much to make possible. I’d arranged for my parents to stay with a cousin in Manila the night before, so they wouldn’t have to travel the morning of the defense.
When I arrived at the auditorium at the UP Diliman campus at eight in the morning, my parents were already there. My mother wore her best dress, the one she usually saved for weddings and important fiestas. And Tatay Ben—I almost didn’t recognize him. He’d borrowed a suit from a cousin, a dark blue suit that was slightly too large in the shoulders and too short in the arms. He wore shoes that were clearly uncomfortable, probably one size too small, and a new hat he’d bought at the district market in Nueva Ecija. His hands were scrubbed cleaner than I’d ever seen them, though the construction stains never quite washed away entirely, leaving shadows under his nails and in the creases of his palms.
“You look very handsome, Tatay,” I told him, embracing him carefully, aware of his back pain.
“This son of mine is defending his doctorate today,” he said to anyone who would listen—to my friends, to other students, to strangers in the hallway. “My son is becoming Dr. Santos today.”
My last name is actually Cruz, same as Tatay Ben’s, though I still carried my biological father’s surname on my birth certificate. But Tatay never made that distinction. To him, I was his son, completely and without qualification.
The auditorium slowly filled with people—faculty members, students, curious academics who’d read my dissertation proposal, and my small group of supporters. Tatay Ben sat in the back row, trying to sit up straight despite his aching back, his eyes never leaving me as I set up my presentation at the front of the room.
The defense itself was a blur. I presented my research, answered questions from the panel, defended my methodology and conclusions, engaged in theoretical debates about social mobility and economic determinism. The whole process took nearly three hours. Through it all, I was acutely aware of Tatay sitting in the back, understanding perhaps one word in ten, but watching me with an intensity that made my chest tight.
When the panel dismissed me so they could deliberate in private, I stepped into the hallway where my supporters waited. Twenty minutes later—twenty minutes that felt like hours—the door opened and Professor Santos, the chair of my dissertation committee, invited everyone back inside.
“Mr. Josef Cruz,” he said formally, using my full legal name, “your committee has reviewed your dissertation and your defense. It is our unanimous decision to recommend you for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology, with distinction.”
The room erupted in applause. My mother was crying. My friends were congratulating me. But all I could see was Tatay Ben in the back row, standing now, clapping his rough hands together, his face split in a smile so wide it looked like it might break him in half.
After the formal announcement, as the audience filtered out, Professor Santos made his way around the room, shaking hands with my family and supporters. He was a distinguished scholar, one of the most respected sociologists in the Philippines, author of numerous books, advisor to government officials. I’d been nervous about having him as my dissertation chair, worried that my provincial background and my research on poverty would seem unsophisticated to someone of his stature.
He shook my mother’s hand, congratulating her on raising such a dedicated scholar. He talked with my friends about future research possibilities. Then he came to Tatay Ben.
Tatay stood up straight, extending his hand formally, trying to hide how much his back hurt from sitting for three hours. Professor Santos took his hand, began the perfunctory congratulations, and then suddenly stopped. He looked at Tatay’s face more carefully, his expression shifting from polite formality to genuine surprise.
“Wait,” Professor Santos said slowly, still holding Tatay’s hand. “You are… you’re Mang Ben, aren’t you? Benedicto Cruz?”
Tatay looked confused. “Yes, sir. I am Ben Cruz.”
Professor Santos’s face broke into a smile of amazement and delight. “I thought I recognized you, but I couldn’t place you at first. Mang Ben, do you remember a construction site you worked on in Quezon City? This would have been maybe twenty, twenty-five years ago. A residential building near Scout Borromeo?”
Tatay’s confusion deepened. “I worked many sites in Quezon City, sir. I’m sorry, I don’t remember specifically—”
“You carried an injured worker down five floors of scaffolding,” Professor Santos continued, his voice rising with excitement. “There’d been an accident, something fell, and one of the workers was badly hurt. Everyone else was panicking, but you—you climbed up even though you’d been injured yourself in the same accident. You carried that man down on your back, five stories of rickety scaffolding, and probably saved his life.”
I watched Tatay’s face as memory flickered across it. “There was an accident,” he said slowly. “A long time ago. A cable snapped. I remember… but sir, how do you know about this?”
“Because I saw it,” Professor Santos said, his voice thick with emotion now. “I was a teenager then, living in that neighborhood with my parents. My bedroom window overlooked that construction site. I watched the whole thing happen. I watched you risk your life to save your colleague. I’ve never forgotten it—in fact, I’ve told that story many times over the years, about the selfless construction worker who showed more courage and humanity than most people ever demonstrate in their entire lives.”
The auditorium had gone quiet. Everyone was listening now, watching this unexpected reunion between my stepfather and my dissertation chair.
“And now,” Professor Santos continued, his eyes bright, “now I find out that the same man is here today as the father of one of my brightest doctoral students. Mang Ben, do you understand what an incredible thing this is? What an honor it is for me to have met you all those years ago, and to meet you again today in this context?”
Tatay’s eyes were filling with tears. He tried to speak, but his voice caught. Finally, he managed: “Sir, I was just doing what anyone would do. That worker, he had a family. I couldn’t leave him.”
“Not anyone,” Professor Santos said firmly. “Not everyone. You did something extraordinary that day, Mang Ben. And clearly, you’ve been doing extraordinary things ever since.” He turned to me. “Josef, you wrote in your dissertation acknowledgments that everything you’ve achieved is built on the sacrifice of your stepfather. I thought it was the usual polite acknowledgment. But knowing who your father is, knowing what kind of man raised you—I understand now. Your success isn’t despite your background, it’s because of it. Your father taught you something no university ever could.”
I turned to look at Tatay Ben, and what I saw on his face made my own eyes burn with tears I’d been holding back all morning. He was smiling—that same gentle smile I’d seen a thousand times—but his eyes were red and wet, and for the first time in all the years I’d known him, he looked like he was struggling to contain emotion too big for his body to hold.
At that moment, standing in that auditorium at the University of the Philippines, I understood something I’d always known but never fully articulated: Tatay Ben had never asked me to repay him. Not once in twenty-five years had he demanded gratitude or acknowledgment or even recognition. He’d given everything—his motorcycle, his health, his comfort, his dreams—and asked for nothing in return except that I study properly.
Today, he was being recognized. Not because of me, not because I’d become Dr. Josef Cruz. But because of who he was, because of what he’d always been: a man who built things. Not just buildings, not just houses, but people. He’d built me, brick by brick, sacrifice by sacrifice, from a scared four-year-old who’d lost his father into a man who could stand in front of distinguished professors and defend ideas about how to make the world better.
Professor Santos kept talking, asking Tatay about his work, about how he’d managed to support a doctoral student on a construction worker’s salary, about what advice he’d given me over the years. Tatay answered modestly, deflecting praise, but I could see something in his face I’d never quite seen before: recognition that what he’d done mattered, that his life of hard labor had meaning beyond just survival, that he’d created something that would last long after the buildings he’d helped construct had crumbled into dust.
The gathering slowly broke up, people moving toward the exits, making plans for celebration. My mother held my arm, crying happy tears. My friends were already planning where we’d go to celebrate. But I stood with Tatay Ben, just the two of us for a moment in the emptying auditorium.
“I’m so proud of you, hijo,” he said quietly. “Dr. Cruz. It sounds good.”
“Tatay,” I said, my voice thick, “everything I am, everything I’ve achieved—it’s all because of you. You know that, right? You understand what you’ve done?”
He smiled and patted my shoulder with one of those rough, scarred hands. “Tatay just worked hard and tried to be a good father. You did the difficult part. You studied, you persevered, you made something of yourself.”
“No, Tatay. We did it together. You built this. You built me.”
Years have passed since that October morning. I’m thirty-five now, a university lecturer in Manila with a small family of my own—a wife I met during my doctoral studies, a son who’s seven years old, a daughter who’s four. I’ve published my dissertation as a book that’s used in sociology courses across the Philippines. I’ve won some academic awards. I’ve been invited to speak at conferences, to consult on policy recommendations about education and poverty reduction.
But the achievement I’m most proud of is this: I convinced Tatay Ben to finally retire.
He lives now in Nueva Ecija with my mother, in a better house than the one I grew up in—a real house with concrete walls and a solid roof and running water and electricity that doesn’t cut out every time it rains. He no longer builds with cement and steel. Instead, he tends a vegetable garden behind the house, keeps chickens that provide more eggs than he and Nanay could ever eat, reads the newspaper every morning now that his eyesight is failing, and rides a new bicycle—one I bought him, one that doesn’t squeak—around the barangay every afternoon, stopping to chat with neighbors and brag about his son the doctor.
Every Sunday, we video call. Tatay loves this technology, loves that he can see his grandchildren even though they live in Manila. He shows them his vegetable beds, the fat tomatoes and long sitaw beans, the eggplants he grows that are bigger than my son’s head. He tells my children stories about when their father was small, embarrassing stories that make my wife laugh and my kids giggle. And at the end of every call, before we disconnect, he asks my son: “Are you studying properly? Are you doing well in school?”
Last Sunday, after the kids had run off to play and it was just Tatay and me on the screen, I asked him a question I’d been holding for years:
“Tatay, do you ever feel regret? All those years of working so hard, breaking your body, sacrificing everything—do you ever wish you’d kept the money for yourself? That you’d had an easier life?”
He laughed, that same quiet laugh I’d heard a thousand times. “Regret? No, hijo. No regrets. Tatay has worked all his life, worked hard, worked until my back bent and my hands became like this”—he held up his gnarled, scarred hands to the camera—”but the thing Tatay is most proud of in his whole life is not any building I helped construct, not any wall I built or floor I laid. The thing I’m most proud of is building a son like you.”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t answer. I just watched his hands on the screen—those hands that had fixed my bicycle when I was four, that had mended my sandals and cleaned my messes and carried cement bags and climbed dangerous scaffolding and saved a man’s life and never, not once, raised themselves in anger against me. Those hands that had carried my future.
I am Dr. Josef Cruz, PhD in Sociology, university lecturer, published author, husband and father. But before all of that, I am Tatay Ben’s son.
He didn’t build a house for me, though he built thousands of houses for other people. He didn’t leave me an inheritance of money or land or property. What he left me—what he’s leaving me still, with every phone call, every proud smile, every story he tells my children about working hard and being kind—is something more valuable than any material wealth.
Tatay Ben built a person. He built integrity and perseverance and gratitude and compassion. He built a man who understands that education is precious because it was purchased with someone else’s pain, that knowledge is a responsibility because it was won through someone else’s sacrifice, that success is hollow unless you remember and honor the people who made it possible.
He built me from nothing but love and labor, from calloused hands and a bent back, from early mornings and late nights, from sacrifice so complete it never even occurred to him to call it sacrifice.
I am a PhD. Tatay Ben is a construction worker. In the world’s eyes, I am the success story, the one who rose from poverty, the one who made it.
But I know the truth: Tatay Ben is the success story. The true builder, the true architect, the true engineer of something that will outlast any structure made of concrete and steel.
He built a son who will build a better world. And in doing so, he built something immortal.
Every time I teach a class, every time I speak at a conference, every time I write an article or advise a policy maker or mentor a student from a poor province who reminds me of myself, I am building with tools Tatay Ben gave me. I am constructing meaning from materials he provided. I am the house he built, and I am still standing, still solid, still sheltering others in the tradition he taught me.
This is his legacy. This is what a construction worker with a fourth-grade education and calloused hands accomplished. This is what love builds when it’s patient and selfless and never gives up.
This is what it means to be Tatay Ben’s son.
And I am so grateful, so impossibly grateful, that a stranger on a squeaking bicycle rode into our lives when I was four years old and decided that a boy who wasn’t his blood would be his son anyway. That he looked at a poor single mother and her child and said, without words but with everything he did afterward: I will build you both a future.
He did. And it’s beautiful. And it will last forever.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
Sophia holds a degree in Journalism from the University of Toronto, where she developed her skills in news reporting, media ethics, and digital journalism. Her expertise lies in identifying key stories, crafting compelling narratives, and ensuring journalistic integrity in every piece she edits.
Known for her precision and dedication to the truth, Sophia thrives in the fast-paced world of news editing. At TheArchivists, she focuses on producing high-quality news content that keeps readers informed while maintaining a balanced and insightful perspective.
With a commitment to delivering impactful journalism, Sophia is passionate about bringing clarity to complex issues and amplifying voices that matter. Her work reflects her belief in the power of news to shape conversations and inspire change.