A Family That Sticks Together

The first sound of morning wasn’t the crow of a rooster—it was the sigh of steaming coconut milk.

At 4 A.M., the house still breathed in sleep—my brother tangled in dreams, Papa overseas, me half-awake—but Mama was already at work. The hiss of the gas stove lit her face, her hands steady as she stirred the kawali with a wooden ladle.

“Ma, ano na siya?” I asked, a first grader rubbing sleep from my eyes.

“Sapin-sapin, ah,” she said, never looking up—her voice already thick with coconut milk and patience.

On the table lay bowls of color—violet, gold, white, and pink—each waiting its turn to be poured and steamed. It looked like a sunrise divided into bowls. Mama poured the first layer, then the next, and the next. Steam curled around her face, softening her expression.

Watching her, I thought she wasn’t just making dessert—she was taming chaos. The batter wanted to run wild; the colors wanted to bleed. But she coaxed them to stay in place, whispering, “Hinay-hinayon lang. Maghulat ta.”

She said it the way rain talks to soil: slow, steady, certain.

When the dessert cooled, she sliced it with a greased knife. The cross-section gleamed—violet for ube, gold for langka, white for vanilla, pink for sweetness. Unlike the ones in town that borrowed beauty from bottles of dye, Mama’s layers were alive with flavor: the deep earthiness of ube, the mellow fruit of langka, the soft sweetness of vanilla that lingered on the tongue.

Mama wasn’t one to always follow rules. Some mornings, the layers came out different—a gentle green from pandan, or a swirl of brown from leftover coconut sugar she refused to waste. “Mas nami kung sari-sari,” she’d say, laughing as she poured the next layer. To her, a bit of chaos was good—it made the whole sweeter.

And always, she crowned it with latik—but not just one kind.

Mama believed there were two kinds of latik, and both belonged on her sapin-sapin. The first—the Visayan kind Papa always asked for, being Bisaya himself—was thick and golden-brown, a syrupy coconut caramel that clung to the layers like liquid sunshine. The second, the Tagalog version she learned from her late mother, who was from Luzon, was made of crisp coconut curds—tiny brown bits fried until they popped and glistened. Sometimes she’d drizzle the Visayan latik first, then scatter the Tagalog kind on top for crunch, as if letting two worlds meet on one plate.

Neighbors swore her sapin-sapin was softer, creamier, somehow alive. They said her colors never bled into one another. She laughed it off, saying it was all in the steaming time. 

But I knew better.

Her secret wasn’t in the ingredients—it was in her rhythm. The way she mixed the batter by hand, tracing circles as if stirring memory into it. The way she hummed random tunes under her breath, as though the coconut milk needed a lullaby.

Every Christmas, her sapin-sapin sat at the center of the table, latik glistening like gold dust under the parol light. My cousins dug through the layers, giggling. Her siblings chewed slowly, remembering fiestas long past. Mama smiled quietly, her hands still smelling of coconut.

The table buzzed with chatter, but I noticed the silence between her breaths—the way she watched people eat, as if measuring not their praise but their happiness.

When I left for college, the mornings changed. No more hiss of milk thickening, no more bowls of color. In Davao, I bought sapin-sapin wrapped in plastic, each piece uniform, each sweetness the same. But as I bit through it, something hollow opened—It looked like Mama’s. It tasted almost right. But it didn’t feel like home.

There was no early dawn, no chill of tile against my soles, no soft command carried by steam—“Hinay-hinay lang.” Back then, it meant stir slower. Now, it seemed to mean everything that takes time to be whole.

The market sapin-sapin filled my stomach but left my memory hungry.

Sometimes, I think her sapin-sapin remembers—not just flavors, but hands. The way a touch learns to fold, to wait, to layer. When Mama made it, each slice carried more than taste. It held our noise, our laughter, our small failures. It bore the silence when she missed Papa, the fatigue she never admitted, the pride she poured into every colored layer.

Maybe that’s why it glistened the way it did—because it was holding so much.

Once, when I tried making sapin-sapin myself in a cramped apartment kitchen, I failed miserably. The colors bled; the texture turned rubbery; the layers refused to stay. I almost gave up.

But as I scraped the burnt bottom of the pan, I caught the faint smell of coconut and sugar. And for a moment, the air thickened with memory—Mama’s hum, her steam, her gentle, “Hulata lang.”

She wasn’t talking about cooking anymore.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was enough to remind me that patience could be tasted, that time could be layered, that love could steam quietly before dawn.

If Mama’s sapin-sapin could speak, it wouldn’t boast about tradition or survival. It would whisper, “Maghulat lang. Pabay-e nga maghupâ.” She never meant only the mixture. She meant everything that hurt, everything that waited to heal.

Then softer, almost fading into the steam: “Makita mo lang ina sa mga kahibalo maghulat.” She never spoke it as wisdom, only lived it—the patience in her stirring, the stillness in her hands, the faith that time would do what it must.

Now, every time I see those colorful layers, I see my family in a cross-section: messy but whole, pressed together not by perfection but by persistence.

Because in the end, it isn’t sugar that sweetens us nor coconut that binds us—it’s the way we keep holding together, even when the heat rises, even when life wants to pull us apart.

Like its layers, we are—and have always been—a family that sticks together.