(Note: This also appears in the new online literary journal, The New Dentists.)
A school program required my mother, an assistant principal in a private college in Manila, to bring a baby picture of herself. She didn’t spend much time deciding which to bring; she only has one. It is studio-shot and kept at the back page of her wedding album, occupying the whole space with an 8x10” size. I don’t say it is in black and white, which is the usual description I use for vintage photographs. It is more of gray and brown, the photo color palette of the ‘60s, which radiates with more poignancy than nostalgia. I have seen it several times as a kid and a few times as an adult, and I can’t remember if I ever questioned why she only has one baby picture and none with her parents.
I know the story of my mother. From the time I was learning to write ABC up to the time I am writing for a living, I have always picked from here and there various tidbits of my mother’s history. Mama is an only child, and the people I call aunt and uncles are in fact her half-siblings. I don’t know how I came to know this or who told me this fragment of truth about the family. This, after all, is not the kind of thing that is easily explained to kids and so is usually left unsaid for the younger family members to discover in the course of time. My family is different, and I grew up taking this story as part of the normalcy of life. As if it happened in every family.
In my thought, I tried a few times alienating my mother from her half-siblings. See her as a different individual from them, some stranger, some outsider. I failed, I have to say, because in the same thought, every reason said my mother was inseparable from them. Although she didn’t share with them the same father, she shared with them the same mother, the same childhood, the same house, and the same domestic turmoil. In the same thought, my mother was tied to them, who was pulled back as fast as she was pulled away.
To some degree, my mother is generous sharing with me and my sister her story. So most of what I know came from her own mouth, and the rest I observed from her relationship with her mother and siblings. There was one thing, however, that she didn’t bluntly tell us, but which I knew of instinctively: She didn’t meet her father. Although my mother knew his name and some familial details, the entirety of his person was unknown to her. I knew of this because I didn’t have a grandfather, which meant I had no old man to call Lolo, a bespectacled, gray-haired, pampering grandfather who, to this day, I wish having. To my mother, this meant a part of her was lost.
Mama’s parents had a short-lived romance. While I wish I knew how exactly it ended, my mother sure had wished it didn’t end. Her father left even before she was born, at a time when she was insulated and oblivious to the rest of the world, and so when my mother said she looked like her father, I didn’t know where she got the idea. The fact that she shared many semblances with my grandmother didn’t support her theory. Maybe she was trying to build linkages to her father, to find him in her, and to personify his existence in her own. And perhaps, she justified parts of her being as something she inherited from her father when she couldn’t find explanations elsewhere.
What does it mean growing without a father? I should know, having to spend most of my childhood years with my father working abroad. But in many ways, I couldn’t and would probably never understand the void in Mama’s heart because she and I were in different boats. I knew my father was somewhere and was coming back; Mama knew her father was somewhere but was not ever coming back. I had glimpses of my father; Mama had none. I knew what a father’s love meant; Mama did not. I was secure; she was not. This made a huge difference. But I never was completely aware of this until recently, when Mama met her aunt, one of the few living siblings of her father and her only link to him.
Mama always wanted to meet her father, but she had long ago given up finding him. The last time she attempted was in the ‘70s, when she stayed with another aunt, hoping that she could lead Mama to her father. She never did, which was logical because Mama’s father already had another family. Mama soon left, but failed to banish the deep-seated longing that hounded her every time she witnessed father-and-daughter reunions. She wanted to have a reunion of her own so much so that after knowing a friend has recently found her absentee father, Mama immediately looked up in the yellow pages and, with boldness natural to her, tried to contact the first person with her father’s surname.
What she found was her father’s cousin, who in turn led Mama to his sister, a woman in her 70s who had memory difficulties and enjoyed talking about the recent past but not the distant past that could probably include Mama’s father. She just told Mama, flatly, that her brother died many years ago. Mama’s half-sister, the youngest of her late father’s three children and whom she phoned by her aunt’s suggestion, said it was in fact in 2003. Depression, her sister said. He died of depression two years after her mother’s demise.
The irony was that in 2003, Mama had lingering thoughts about her father and had strong desires to look for him, but she postponed every plan for fear of being the proverbial illegitimate child destroying a family’s peaceful existence. Mama has always been like that. Self-sacrificial. She’d rather suffer than see people special to her hurting. And, even without personally knowing him, these included her father.
I suppose I expected to see Mama cry when she told us of her father’s death. Or at least close to crying. Mama, after all, easily gets very emotional. This time, however, she never did. She was strong as ever. And after, I think, three nights of talking about it, it never formed part of any of our family’s discussions again. It slipped away. Like a sickeningly poor-plotted movie.
Mama has probably gotten over it quicker than I expected. Had she perhaps foreseen that this was how it would end? That when she was dialing to contact relatives of her father, she had actually felt he was long dead? That after all those years, she had in fact grown hopeless? I don’t know. I could never bring myself to ask her, thinking it was beside the point. But I never could actually believe that she has forgotten him entirely. Because although she is trying to make things appear easy, it could be that Mama still silently longs to see her father, who, she was later told by her mother, looked for her when she was about nine, but knows that it is now entirely impossible, because real-life stories’ endings are always unalterable.