S1L44 – “Legitimization through adoption” The debut of Miss Grippa Baligtaran
I’ve been thinking—it’s almost midterm and I still have only called about eight people to recite. The rest have been able to “escape”—but not for long!
I looked for the classcards of those eight people and put them in the bottom of the classcard pile. At the very end of the stack was Miss Deema Niwala’s classcard and the thought crossed my mind, this smartass girl butts in anytime she wants anyway, I might as well take her classcard out of the rotation.
But, wait—what if NOBODY can answer? I hate silent awkward voids when everybody is trying to avoid eye contact with me. Sometimes it pays to have a smartass in class, too. So I dog-eared Deema’s classcard in case I needed to find it fast.
Then I pulled out a ‘virginal’ new classcard—never been touched by human hands before, and I read the name slowly and deliberately.
“Miss…GRACE…PIE…B? what kind of name is that??” I said.
A girl with roundish face and hectic-looking eyes—like they’ve been open for 24 hours—stood up. She had a well-chiseled look, narrow chin, a high-bridged nose and very lush eyebrows. She looked almost half-European I thought.
“Yes, sir…I’m inside the classroom.”
“Good. I’d hate to find out you were just an avatar. So what’s with the quaint name, Miss….?”
“Grippa, sir.”
“Gripo?? As in faucet?” I said, askance at such a peculiar name, “Is that short for Grace Pie, which must be a variant of Grace Poe? Did your grandmother have an illicit affair with Da King?”
“It’s Grippa, sir, not Grippo. It’s a long story, sir.”
“We have ONE HOUR.”
“Okey…my full name is Grace Pie Baligtaran, sir. Grippa for short. My grandmother had a whirlwind romance with a French violinist in the 1940’s when she worked as a concierge at the Hotel du Champs D’Elysees in Paris. But she had to come home quickly before the war fully broke out in 1941. It was only in the Philippines when she found out she was pregnant with my mother. But she was determined that my mother would keep her part-French blood and old European Heritage so she made my mother take to my grandfather’s surname.” Miss Grippa explained.
“I see…well I have bad news for you, ‘Pie’ is not exactly a French name, although it could be a French pastry,” I said.
“Oh, no, sir. That’s not my grandfather’s whole surname. It could have been Piedmont, or Pietersen, or Pierette, my grandmother couldn’t remember exactly cause she was in a hurry! So she wrote down ‘Pie’ on my mother’s birth certificate, thinking the rest of it to follow na lang when she remembers it.”
“She was in a hurry? How exactly do you make a baby in a hurry, Miss Grippa?” I asked.
“Well, she and my grandfather took their time, I’m sure. But the war, sir.. the war…uh..the Second World War was almost upon them, sir”
“The war lasted six years, Miss Grippa”
“She was also drunk that night, sir.”
“Oh…well…” I paused, rather taken aback by the extraordinary lifestory of this girl, “I guess that would explain it. But my, was she close. Just one or two more syllables, perhaps. Do you intend to find out what the rest of the ‘Pie’ is, Miss Grippa?”
“Yes, sir. I’m surfing ‘Genealogy.com‘ every night, tracing my mother’s roots, I think I’m almost there, sir.” Miss Grippa said proudly.
“And your surname is Baligtaran? All you wrote in your classcard is the letter ‘B’—let me guess, you were in a hurry too?”
“Hihihi, no sir. My ballpen ran out of ink so I thought, ‘never mind, I’m sure the professor would ask for the rest of it and he’ll be the one to write it down completely.”
“From where are the Baligtarans, Miss Grippa? I’m sure your father is not French….” I always want to know where my students come from. That way when I use the idiomatic expression ‘I know where you’re coming from’ I mean it literally.
“My father is a farmer from Natubleng, Montreal, sir.”
“Montreal?? In Canada??” I said.
“No, sir—Montreal, as in ‘Mountain Trail’ which was the old name of the Halsema Highway that runs through Natubleng, Benguet where my father owns a farm. He grows Arabica and Robusta coffee for export, sir.”
“Your father grows coffee!! That explains the eyes…hehehe” I mused.
“Yes, sir,” Miss Grippa chuckled along with me, “I like to patronize my father’s product, sir. So I drink a lot of coffee. It tends to keep me awake much but it’s all worth it seeing the joy in my father’s face!”
Great, another daddy’s girl, I thought. I already have Miss Palindrome Hannah Maala from neighboring Buguias, who also thinks her father walks on water. Now I have a Miss Baligtaran—not quite a palindrome, but not too far from the idea, either. And this girl thinks she’s doing her father a favor by consuming large quantities of his farm produce.
“You realize, of course, that you’re actually eating into your father’s profits by drinking so much of his coffee, don’t you?” I said, “but never mind. Don’t answer that.”
This has been the longest intro to a lesson, I thought. All I wanted to discuss was domestic adoption, as a shortcut to legitimize your own illegitimate child.
“Now, Miss Grippa, I’m sure by now that you’re a junior law student, you realize your mother is illegitimate, because she was born outside of wedlocks. Your grandmother left France in such a hurry, I’m sure she didn’t have time to marry Napoleon Bonaparte—”
“Piedmont, sir…or maybe Pietersen, or—”
“Whatever. The point is, lucky for you illegitimacy doesn’t cross generations. So your mother’s illegitimacy has no effect on you,” I’m working my way into the lesson, so I need to start from the normal, or ‘default’ assumption, which is legitimacy. Miss Grippa was listening very closely. Too closely. I continued.
“And the reason you are unaffected by your mother’s illegitimacy, Miss Grippa, is because unlike her YOU were conceived and born AFTER your parents got MARRIED, right?”
“Uhhh …..”
“Oooh, nooo…!” I thought. There goes my lecture.
“My parents were not yet married when I was conceived sir,” Miss Grippa explained, “it was a very cold night in Natubleng and my grandmother caught them in the storeroom by surprise, and my father was doing some grinding but not with coffee, sir!” the whole class just exploded in laughter, sending Deema into her feet-stomping routine again.
“But, sir, in my parents’ defense, they really loved each other so much that they never even resisted one bit as my grandmother dragged them both over to the neighbor’s house, who was a mambunong, a native priest, and they were married that same night—sort of. They were both shaking and trembling the whole time “
“Because it was a really cold evening, it was THAT cold that’s why they were shaking?”
“No, sir, it was because my grandmother was holding an M1 Garand rifle, sir. A souvenir from World War 2.”
Kata was rolling on the floor.
“Well…Miss Grippa, we have not solved your problem because..uh..the thing is, even a marriage celebrated by a traditional mambunong will not retroact to the time your father was grinding something other than coffee, so you would still be illegitimate. Because the time of conception still preceded the marriage.”
With my lecture in shambles, I remembered to reach for that dog-eared classcard. “Miss Deema, what is the remedy of Miss Grippo’s parents under these circumstances?”
“Well, actually sir, even if the wedding before the mambunong happened before the grinding—”
I banged the blackboard, “let’s all STOP using the word ‘grinding’ shall we?!” instead of silencing the class, it sent them even more into fits of guffaw.
Deema continued, “the wedding by the mambunong would still have no legal effect, so the first step would be to contract legal marriage, no matter how belated already sir.”
“Actually, my parents did contract legal marriage later anyway, sir, around six months after the grind—I mean—since that eventful evening.” Miss Grippa interjected.
“There you go,” I said, relieved that Deema’s contribution created a new opening to salvage my lecture. “Now we have a valid marriage, and a full-blooded biological offspring, but one who is illegitimate. There’s no way to turn back the hands of time, so we have to resort to using legal fiction in order to elevate Miss Grippa from the status of illegitimate to fully-legitimate, by what process, Miss Deema?”
“Special domestic adoption proceedings to confer legitimacy, supported strongly by unchallenged filiation, sir.”
See? I told you it pays to have a class smartass.
“That’s right class. As unseemly as it may sound, if a child is illegitimate through no fault of his, and there is no impediment to marry between the parents at the time of…of…uh…the…uh—”
“GRINDING!!” the whole class shouted.
“at the time of CONCEPTION,” I insisted, “then the parents by subsequent valid marriage may, in the same, occasion or upon the same ground also adopt their own illegitimate child, elevating him to full legitimate status.”
That satisfied the class and they were all happy when I dismissed them.
“I can’t believe your mother wasn’t more careful, Miss Grippa,” I joked to Grippa during the after class banter walking along the hallway.
“Well, she IS part-French, sir” she chuckled.
“Yeah, right, I forgot,” I said. Just then Deema caught up with us.
“Still talking about the ‘grinding’ sir?”
“No, Deema, I was telling Grippa here that I thought her mother and father could have been more careful. It could have spared them one adoption petition to file. And Miss Grippa was saying her mother was half-French and therefore fully-romantic to a fault. That’s why they got so careless. And Grippa’s grandmother was still awake at…what time did she catch them??”
“I think it was a little past 2AM, sir.” Grippa said.
“How could an old woman still be awake at that ungodly hour??” I wondered aloud.
Deema said, “The coffee, sir! DEFINITELY the coffee!!!”
About the Author
The author is a writer and lawyer based in Baguio City, Philippines. Former editor of the Gold Ore and Baguio City Digest, professor of journalism, political science and law at Baguio Colleges Foundation (BCF). He is a photographer and video documentarist. He has a YouTube channel called “Parables and Reason”
About Images: Some of the images used in the articles are from the posts in Atty. Joel Rodriguez Dizon’s Facebook account, and/or Facebook groups and pages he manages or/and member of.