To those who think that they have heard the last of Kris Aquino now that her brother is no longer President, they can now relieve themselves. She’s back. Not just with plain vengeance, but with a gadget I presume to be a smartphone which she wields like a bludgeon. This is not a woman who believes in the elegance of the clever riposte, if her social media postings are anything to go by, rather, her war strategy is the attack direct. Blunt and straight to the point, a club as opposed to a scalpel, no patient sliced open on the operating table but a victim on the sidewalk beaten to a bloody pulp. Her enemy this time—of everytime—is James Yap.
James Yap will forever go down in the civil registry as the man who married Kris Aquino for some years until their marriage was annulled. The break-up was not good, period. If you thought only husbands and wives can squabble, I am here to tell you, and they are here to show
you, that ex-husbands and ex-wives do, too, and sometimes even more virulently. The ex-Mrs. Yap is on the warpath—sometimes, I wish, for her peace of mind and that of her sons, that she’d tread another, more peaceful trail—all because of an interview that Korina Sanchez did with the ex- Mr. Aquino.
Here is the context: the two K’s share a network history in that they used to host a talk show together; KS is the wife of Mar Roxas, who used to be a prominent Cabinet secretary; KA is the sister of Noynoy Aquino, who used to be the President to whom MR was answerable; MR was NA’s pick to succeed him at Malacañang when the latter’s six-year term ended in 2016; KA campaigned for MR, even getting into some trouble when photographers caught her boarding a government helicopter to attend some political rah-rah for MR. That act, under the law, is
considered an election offense, though KA was never prosecuted for that. Still, MR lost—to Rodrigo Duterte, who is now trying to implicate NA in some controversy involving ineffective vaccines against a tropical fever.
To fully flesh out the context, KA has been going at it solo as mommy to her and JY’s only child. Says KA, JY has been a deadbeat dad, so much so that when KS interviewed JY, and JY would birthday-tweet his son that he missed him sorely, KA took everything as a slap on the
face, mortally offended by what she perceived as hypocrisy and, well, ingratitude.
Oh, and yes, eons ago, KS and NA dated for about five minutes.
As an expert on alliteration once said, if it’s hysterical, it’s historical. Deep-seated anger and unresolved issues can indeed induce otherwise peaceable people to varying states of hysteria, but judging by the tenor of her online rampage, KA seems determined to inflict serious damage on her ex-husband’s rep, never mind his name which at one time KA was proud to take as her own as her legal entitlement. Hers is a scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners, throw-out-the-baby-with-the-bathwater approach to getting even, because if she is really bent on settling scores with her ex-husband, she would not be apologizing for her anti-JY&KS posts, which is what she is doing now. Sort of.
So what exactly is KA trying to accomplish? I am no parent and therefore will not be able to hide behind the Mother Bear card KA has been using as Kevlar, but my thinking goes, can anything good come out of bashing the father of one’s own child? Granted, there are a lot of
deadbeat dads out there, and the nobility of single moms who have to go at it alone does deserve praise, nonetheless, KA’s son Bimby would not be slipping on swimming pool tiles without JY’s contribution of sperm deposited in KA’s private account. Is it healthy for a child to have candled into its ears a steady drip-drip of negativity about its parent? Psychologists and laypeople may disagree, but I believe that a son needs to be able to believe that his father, absentee or no, is
a good person. It cuts both ways: a daughter, I also think, needs to believe that her mother, present or not, is a good person. And, all children need to believe that both of their parents are good people. Isn’t the truth, when it does dawn, best reserved until they are adults, when they are capable of deciding for themselves?
After grinding it, Kris Aquino is evidently intent on throwing the axe at her ex-husband. There used to be a time when ex-conjugal issues were settled discreetly, but social media has ended all that. What this ex-wife thinks is her ace hatchet hopefully isn’t a boomerang that arcs back and buries itself in her son’s developing self-worth. G
