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My upbringing is probably best described as mixed. At the age of 4, I went to live in the US. It was always much easier to say that I was there with my family.
That was a simpler and better accepted explanation.
The trouble always comes when I’m asked why I came back to the Philippines at the age of 11. It was 1986, we had just caught the tail end of the EDSA revolution and the optimism it brought provided a much easier and more acceptable explanation than the truth: that I came home to be with my family again.
Growing up in the US
You see, in the US I was raised by 4 aunts (the sisters of my father) and for a while, my grandparents who had deemed it better for my future to be away from the Philippines.
Surrounded by friends of migrant families who all thought that America was the center of the universe, I, like them, thought I was in the best place to be. Growing up, it was an absolute truth that I never questioned.
But after 7 years of not being with my parents, seeing only their pictures and the perfunctory acknowledgement of their existence during holidays through a Christmas card, my mother thought it was best that I come back home.
It was not a thought that I relished and to say that I did not welcome the idea is being polite. At 11, I thought I knew what was best for me and that was to live where I had grown up.
The 1986 visit was supposed to be only a visit. But the US Embassy denied my return visa and I had to stay. The consul was clear : “She has no ties here in the Philippines. If I approve this, she will never come back.”
“But my family is here!” I still remember wailing at the consul even as she stamped my passport as denied. She and I both knew the truth: that was of little consequence to me. I did not want to be in a new place, have to make new friends and try to fit in.
Making a life in the Philippines
In the early days of making a life here in the Philippines, I was introduced to relatives who had never seen me before or no longer recognized me as “the one who grew up in the States.”
It became a moniker and later, a family joke that I was the daughter-by-default of the aunties and lines were drawn between those who raised me and the parents who bore me.
My own reality was I belonged to everyone who wanted to have a say in my upbringing and in my education. It was an ownership that was denied whenever, at my most rebellious, I fought against the many lines of authority that I felt were imposed on me.
I couldn’t seem to fit in with my family and could no longer identify with my adoptive family of aunts. It was an odd tightrope of trying to please everyone knowing that was not possible; of being the outsider in my own family but not really belonging to surrogate parents, my aunts.
To me, I was everyone’s child but no one’s daughter.
I looked for the sense of belonging that eluded me in others which resulted in many mistakes that could not be undone and only learned from.
Belongingness
It was a search that I continuously tried to lay to rest in my 20s and in my 30s, but would occasionally be haunted by as life went on and played out its cycle.
When my father passed last year, I was conflicted by the thought that I never really got to know him. At his death anniversary over the weekend, watching a slide show of his life played out through pictures, I realized that there were pockets of our family’s history that I was not a part of or didn’t know about.
On assignment to interview the Filipino women who work abroad as nannies. I could identify with both sides, the mother torn between economic choices and emotional ties and the children who bore the consequences of those difficult decisions.
I saw their abandonment but mostly felt their confusion about where to place loyalties and where love should be most given or how to love one caregiver and not hurt another.
In the Filipino tradition of extended families, some sociologists say that a care deficit does not really exist because there is always someone ready to care for the children left behind. But I wondered if they somehow felt like me, growing up to everyone’s child but not really anyone’s daughter or son.
Does anyone ever really outgrow that gnawing grating need to belong somewhere or to someone?
Today, to explain my mixed upbringing, I chose to say that I did not have one mother, I had 5. One who bore and four others who raised me.
I had one father who I have lost the chance to get to know but will continue to honor through my writing. Writing has become the one place I have found a sense of rootedness, a place I can always go back to when I find myself once again confused about growing up as everyone’s child, but no one’s daughter. – Rappler.com
Ana P. Santos is a regular contributor for Rappler apart for her DASH of SAS column, which is a spin off of her website. In 2012, Ana was awarded a media grant to write about women who are most affected by the absence of an RH Law. Read the complete story on Rosalie Cabinyan and Laura Jane Duran here. Follow her on Twitter at @iamAnaSantos.
Read the other essays by Ana Santos.
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Father’s Day is on Sunday, June 15. Do you have stories to share about your father?
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