Coming home, the Holidays, and Family Dysfunctions
A personal story on coming home to my parents for the Holidays.
It’s Holiday season: that time of the year of travel plans, cozying up as winter begins, shopping for Christmas gifts, and quality time with loved ones. I always imagine the perfect ways of celebrating Christmas with my family which often included family games, cooking meals together, and the classic Filipino karaoke. But families can be dysfunctional, things don’t turn out the way you want them to, and Christmas is never perfect. And that’s okay.
Living in New York City, amongst the hustle and bustle and non-stop honking of cars and ambulances, the constant movement that never stops - sometimes, you just want to get away somewhere where you can find peace, somewhere with open space that’s opposite the confined streets of skyscrapers and concrete buildings, where you can see the stars in the sky at night instead of the artificial lights that pollute the sky above a city that never sleeps. For me, that somewhere is Florida in my parent’s house and the first place I lived when I moved to the US. In the quiet and warm suburban town outside Orlando where sunsets are like pink cotton candy. I expected to come home to peace and relaxation after living stressfully in the city, but I should’ve known that that’s never the case.
Dealing with families, especially a Filipino or immigrant family, is not always easy. We’re faced with constant disagreements and cultural barriers, sometimes language barriers, and feel constant tension as a result of intergenerational trauma (a conversation we can get into another time). My parents have high expectations from me as the first daughter to have graduated college after my older sister took a more unconventional path, pressuring me to not let years of hard work and an accumulation of student debt go to waste and reach a level of success that will make my life comfortable - a life my parents never had. I hated this pressure, and tension grew between my parents and I. But as I grow older, as I learn more and experience more, I’ve come to understand them (to some extent).
Living in New York, on my own, working to build the life I want, is truly humbling. A little taste of life allowed me to see some of the experiences my parents went through: giving up your home to live somewhere you’ve never lived before to chase your dreams. Of course it’s not the same, as my parents also had three additional mouths to feed and didn’t speak the common tongue, but it’s enough to make me appreciate my parents more for what they did - something I didn’t see growing up.
I had a fight with my sister on Christmas day, because I wanted her to see that also. I didn’t want her to stay stuck in a bubble as I did, lacking gratitude, lacking recognition, lacking the ability to see how much our parents love and care for us. Families are fragile and the journey in navigating family is challenging: there are so many nuances of our characters and our relationships with one another, where all of us have taken different paths or had different upbringings. Having these conversations, listening to one another, learning from each other’s experiences evolves our relationship with our family.
My dad sat my younger sister and I after we fought and told us stories of his life before we moved out west, when we were still living in the Philippines. He told us about his experience working in construction before my younger sister and I were born, and told us he would spend weeks to months in the construction site in Manila away from my mother and older sister. He worked as an accountant who kept track of everyone’s hours and handed the salaries to the employees. One of his colleagues complained his hours were wrong and confronted my dad, demanding his money. My dad showed us what he looked like and put his finger under his shirt, pointing it towards us to show that this man had a knife in his pocket. He gave him his money and walked away. A few weeks after, my dad quit and decided to work towards the nursing career he has today.
This is the first of the few stories my dad told us about life in the Philippines. He emphasized how life there was terrible and that he will never move back. That his goal was to travel the world, expose us to it, and give us a better life than the one they had growing up in the small island of Mindoro. I don’t truly know what life was like in the Philippines - my parents rarely talked about it and I haven’t truly experienced life there. But from stories like the one my dad told me, I am beginning to see the difficult choices my parents had to make for their daughters. I may not truly experience their hardships but maybe one day, when I go back to the Philippines, I’ll understand.
I had expectations of a perfect reunion and perfect ways of spending time with my family with many things I wanted to plan with them, including to explore Disney World together and play fun games at home. The perfect image of a perfect family, something that’s so rare to me now that I’ve flown from the nest to be on my own. But there’s no such thing as a perfect family. No such thing as the perfect way of spending time with each other - just as long as we’re together and have each other. I tried so hard to believe in this image I had, but families will always be messy, dysfunctional, and imperfect. But, as Jin from Pixar’s “Turning Red” once said to Meilin in a heartfelt father-daughter moment, “People Have All Kinds Of Sides To Them, Mei, And Some Sides Are Messy. The Point Isn't To Push The Bad Stuff Away, It's To Make Room For It, Live With It.”