Last month, it was my paternal grandmother’s 105th birthday. It’s unlikely that we’ll have many more chances to visit her, so my husband, daughters and I visited the Philippines to celebrate – my first trip since February 2020.
Despite being born in the US and having lived here since, I still consider the Philippines home. I’ve made the journey at least a dozen times, and it always feels like I’m visiting another version of me only accessible in these islands. This iteration of me is always surrounded by babies and cousins, eats all the green and yellow mangoes she wants and understands more of her native language with each passing day. I am overjoyed to be there, filled with so much emotion that it leaks out of my eyeballs constantly.
Growing up, I was painfully aware of how different I was from everyone else – my brothers’ only sister, my family’s overly sensitive crier, the only Filipina in my elementary school class. By contrast, when I went to the Philippines, I felt absorbed into the larger body of the family, disappearing blissfully into a bigger picture. There were tender first meetings, tearful reunions, awkward reintroductions. It was wholeness and pleasure to blend into a sea of cousins, almost indistinguishable from one another: playing card games, swimming for hours, drinking soda that street vendors decanted into plastic bags.
As for my grandmother, I grew up equally loving and being intimidated by her. She was sharp-tongued and funny, generous with gifts and kisses. Her physical presence conveyed authority, as did her hugs. Seven days a week, she sat behind her desk at the supermarket she and my grandfather opened 53 years ago, which she ran solo for three decades after his death. But now that formidable woman is gone, her mind captive to dementia. Her life is more like a child’s, dependent on caregivers and family.
The morning we arrived, we had breakfast together. She had slept poorly the night before; between tiny servings of rice spooned into her mouth, she would close her eyes and doze off. Now, she has no place to rush off to, and I am happy to sit with her for hours, watching her fall asleep. She looms large in my life, but because of the distance, I have spent so little time with her. And we have so little time left.
Much had changed in five years since my last trip. I am now 47, my brain and body rewired by hormones and age, the physical and psychic reckonings of years of isolation, an inability to outrun seismic events that shaped my life: traumatic childhood experiences, coping mechanisms honed at a young age, mental health crises. In 2020, my children were babies, unable to retain any memories. Now 10 and seven, they will remember everything.
At my grandmother’s birthday party, my girls met about 50 relatives in under an hour. They were overwhelmed and dubious that these people were all family. But then both were consumed into the teeming, amorphous ecosystem, becoming part of the filial landscape just like I had. My 10-year-old ran off with cousins and ignored us for hours, then days.
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There is a photo of me and my dad in the Philippines from 1987, when I was the same age as my oldest daughter. My skin is as dark as it gets, my hair unwashed, wild and wavy. I remember wanting nothing more than to sit in his lap, while also itching to squirm out of his grasp, back to my cousins. My dad is young, handsome and happy – only a few gray hairs, his cheeks full and round, no evidence of gravity.
Growing up between two countries, I was plagued by diasporic longing, forever wondering what life would be like – what I would be like – if my parents had never emigrated to the US. My life was determined by being born in one place, not the other.
I had expected to cry every day I was on this trip. I had tissues at the ready in my purse. But to my surprise, I didn’t need them. Instead I felt an existential calm. Midlife has pushed me to grow and learn in ways that allow me to be a better, more fully realized version of myself – a person I didn’t realize I had become until I met her in the Philippines. The tension between my two selves has softened. I am whole, finally able to accept the life I was born into.
Seeing my children go through the same experiences that I did helped. Now, on my phone there’s a picture of my daughters, my cousin and me – all wearing matching friendship bracelets to help us remember our time together. One child is beaming, thrilled to be part of the shot; the other is pouting, wanting to get it over with and run back to the beach. I recognize that push and pull in them, and I see my father’s ease in myself. Somehow I have become the adult in the photograph.
