can a "good" daughter ever speak her truth?

unpacking how my immigrant mother’s definition of love has shaped me

To be a child of immigrants is to perpetually oscillate between finding the courage to speak your truth and drowning in the mucky waters of shame and guilt for having spoken your truth by challenging your parents’ traditional values and comfort zones. It is to burden yourself with the belief that you are forever in debt to your parents for them having sacrificed everything in order for you to live a good life. It is to spend much of your adult life questioning whether you even deserve the privilege and happiness that was apparently built for you, because your parents, whether it be direct or passive, have inundated you with the narrative of how you have it so much better than them. To be a child of immigrants is to play a violent game of tug of war with the paradox of emotions—love, hate, and everything in between—that live inside your body; it is to be pulled from all directions because you can never quite figure out whose mental health should come first: yours or your parents’?

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(11 min read)

We were too close for comfort in a small room when the doctor told my parents and I that my dad had prostate cancer. I felt Mom’s devastation immediately. I, per usual, disassociated a bit from overwhelm. And then, seconds later—

“This is really bad timing” Dad said. “We have a deadline at work.” 

His response was completely unexpected, but in hindsight very on brand for an immigrant dad. The absurdity of his statement brought me back into the room just long enough for me to deliver him an incredulous look that he wouldn’t notice.

If you knew my dad personally, you might have asked me if he was kidding. My dad is known for his ever so corny, yet priceless, dad jokes. Always the talk and life of the party, with a laugh that is quite contagious, it’ll cause you to shift from laughing at the lameness of his jokes to laughing with him in an instant. Dad is charming like that. His ultimate superpower is using humor as a way to disguise his pain. Most people rave over this aspect of his personality—people who only experience him one dimensionally. I, on the other hand, find it difficult to navigate and incredibly confusing at times.

I often equate Dad being funny to a sense of safety—as a signal to let me know that everything is in a state of equilibrium. But whenever there is an absence of humor, I usually grow weary, a little uneasy—terrified. Unsure of whether the comedy just took a commercial break and will be continued shortly, or if he is about to explode into one of his dramatic episodes of uncontrollable rage.

Back at the doctor’s office, Dad was not kidding.

But this time, anger wasn’t actually the first emotion I anticipated coming out of him.

He was afraid, and shockingly, I could tell.

The silence during the car ride back home from the doctor’s office was ear-splitting. It took me back to the times in high school when I used to carpool with my parents every weekday up until my senior year; a 20-minute car ride each way, with none of us really saying words, while I went through my daily struggles as a privileged teenaged girl, and my parents went through their own challenges of navigating midlife and raising a child in America as Filipino immigrants. 

When I finally learned how to drive and got a little taste of freedom, I spent every moment I possibly could away from my parents. It was fascinating to experience moments of silence in a car that no longer felt awkward. A kind of silence that felt weird, albeit peaceful. Not the kind that kept gnawing at you to break it, to fix it, to be responsible for it, because every white friend you had seemed to have an actual connection to their parents, but you did not, and you for some reason felt like it was on you to change the entire dynamic of your relationship.

When my parents and I finally arrived back at the house, Dad immediately clocked back into working from home as if news of the “C” word never happened. I sat next to him while he was on his computer and attempted to cultivate some form of intimacy, revealing my tears, hoping we could somehow sit in our fear and pain together.

I felt silly for even trying after he brushed me off.

“It’s not the end of the world,” he uttered coldly.

My parents were brought up during a time when they didn’t have the luxury of being soft. For them, survival—the ability to see their emotions as a mere inconvenience and push it to the side—was considered an exceptional skill. Survivorship was, and has remained, a badge of honor to them. As for me, the privileged one, the one who has been granted all the time and space to feel my pain and immerse myself in a healing journey, couldn’t help but perceive this kind of behavior as a cop out, an outdated defense mechanism, a continuous betrayal to one’s soul.

After my 31st birthday, shortly after Dad was diagnosed with cancer, I moved back in with my parents. A few months into my living there, my mental health began to suffer, and I was in desperate need to find a safe space where I could cool off and take a breather after getting into a monstrous argument with Mom. The fight was born from an incident with a cockroach; it then worsened because both Mom and I suffer from OCD, and oftentimes, our individual perceptions of safety tend to clash. But on a deeper level, I do believe that the root of that argument was connected to the ways in which Mom has burdened herself with playing the role of both mother and father since giving birth to me; marrying a man who spent his entire life in close proximity to us, but almost always checked out.  

I reached out to an older cousin and his wife who lived nearby and briefly explained my situation, asking if I could stay the night. I never considered us close, but I regretfully assumed we were close enough for them to extend a helping hand and provide me with at least one night of support. While my cousin didn’t technically reject me, he managed to avoid providing me with a clear answer and ease in some unsolicited advice.

“Try not to make your parents worry. Sleeping over at another place will not solve your problem, you will feel better if you settle it now.”

I did my best not to take it personally. I understood on some level that he was just thinking of my parents’ health, their old age, and the notion that time is fleeting. But rushing to forgive anyone has never served me, and in all honesty, I was exhausted from believing this always had to be my goal.

I spent much of my adolescent years grappling with the meaning of what it means to be a “good” child. After a year of living back at home and many years of unpacking my childhood, I can vividly see how this idea of “good” has been heavily shaped by a larger system outside of my household. This system of domination that bell hooks often phrased as “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” as they are all connected to one another.

Sure, there is this higher, more enlightened version of me, who understands that there’s much more to the disconnect between my parents and I than just our diverse upbringings. This heightens my compassion for them and allows me a pathway to see into their wholeness. But of course, as any other human, there are also aspects to my nature that are ugly, complicated, messy, and wild.

I’m reminded of this the most when I recognize how much Mom has lost the ability to see and accept this in herself. Mom, who has spent much of her life molding me into a child that could be the perfect extension of her goodness. A “good” daughter who sat like a lady with her legs crossed, spoke only when spoken to, and respected her elders no matter what.

Dad made some major improvements to his health for the year that I was living back at home. But much like my own healing journey, his path has not been linear, and it broke my heart to witness him fall back into old habits. What hurt, maybe even more, was observing both Mom and I exhaust ourselves over trying to pick up all the pieces, falling back into old habits of our own.

When I finally learned to drive my senior year of high school, I soon discovered that with this freedom also came a major responsibility. Since Mom never grew to be a confident driver, it eventually became my job to get us all home safely after the countless family parties Dad ended up too inebriated to drive home from. The way Dad speaks to me in a condescending tone while I’m driving, attempting to control my every move, as he’s in the passenger seat, sober, is unpleasant enough. Put him next to me with five glasses of cognac and a 12-pack of beer in his system and we’ve got ourselves a recurring nightmare that would haunt me for the majority of my adult life.

Repeatedly dragging my father’s cigarette and alcohol scented dead weight body across the driveway, into the house, through the living room, and into bed around 2 A.M. are core memories from over a decade ago that I still have a difficult time shaking. There were times when he would refuse to even let Mom and I carry him, shouting at us, criticizing us, as we cut off our connection to valid emotions of our own rage in order to ensure his safety.

“Pagbigyan” is a word in Tagalog that means “to accommodate,” or “to let,” or “to give a chance.”

I often heard this phrase growing up from my mom, in relation to my dad, whenever I ran out of patience for him.

“Pagbigyan mo siya” or “Just let him… he’s drunk” my mom would say, unconsciously delivering the message to her teenage daughter that to be drunk is a solid excuse for being an asshole.

During a period when I was no longer living with them, Mom insisted on letting Dad take my car to get a smog check—a task she strongly believes should be done by a man. I expressed to her that I could do it myself, especially because my past experiences of being at auto shops with my dad have always reminded me of all the reasons I felt unsafe around him as a child. It was a high-stress environment for him, and I could never manage to stomach watching him create problems out of nothing, experiencing him constantly reject my point of view whenever I took a shot at trying to help him diminish his stress.

Mom agreed we would just complete the errand ourselves, but as soon as I arrived at their house the day of my smog check, I came to find that this was suddenly no longer the plan and that Dad would be taking my car in. He was already in an irritable mood while working from home in the living room, projecting a kind of volatile energy that I had no capacity to be around, and fear immediately took over my body. Feeling betrayed, I stomped into my parents’ empty room, knowing Mom would follow, attempting to calm down the enraged teenaged girl that just woke up inside of me.

After spending most of my 20s running away from home and being too afraid to develop a deeper relationship with my parents, I had finally found the courage to form a bond with them, and live in their home for nearly a year. Throughout the span of that year, I grew to love, understand, and respect my parents more than I could’ve ever imagined. I learned pieces of their story that I always felt were impossible to extract as a child. I finally felt close to them. This meant everything to me.

But in my moment of rage, upon discovering something as seemingly small as a slight change of plans, when I wanted nothing more than to kick, scream, cry and run away out of fear of where my emotions were about to take me, I suddenly felt like all the progress I made with them meant nothing. Like I had failed some kind of test.

The ironic thing about healing, when we’re used to being governed under a corrupt system of capitalism, is how easy it is to connect how much or how fast we are healing to our sense of self-worth. We turn our process and journey—a path that is meant to awaken us to just how whole, complete, and enough we already are—into yet another goal post we work tirelessly to achieve in order to gain some kind of proof that we deserve to exist.

As soon as my mom walked through the door, I released all of my anger onto her. My anger escalated when she began to explain—in a heightened state of anxiety—how stressed my dad had been at work and how concerned she was about his health, completely ignoring the fact that she went against her word and changed our plans without informing me.

He has a “condition” she reminded me—as if the reality of this didn’t already consume me—followed by that dreadful phrase:

“Pagbigyan mo siya. He’s stressed. And I don’t want to fight.”

She looked defeated.

Mom had just gone through eye surgery that week, and rather than spending her days recovering and resting, she had been burdening herself with carrying the weight of my dad’s pain as if it were her own.

Like me, she was on the verge of breaking, in complete survival mode, and the combination of our repressed pain in that room was a disaster waiting to happen.

When I was seven, I remember laying on the bed with Mom, sick with a cold, complaining about the pain I was in. She did this thing where she motioned her hands to energetically grab the sickness from my body.

“Lord, just give it to me. I’ll take it!” she said.

I tried to convince Mom once that she didn’t have to always be self-sacrificing and dismissive of her own desires in order for people to know she loved them. I could tell she had a difficult time even wrapping her head around this idea, but I saw in her eyes how badly a part of her also wanted to believe it.

“That is the best way I know how to love” she cried. “I don’t know any other way.”

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