Welcome to this self-help guide for mothers reuniting with their teenage daughters!
My name is Ginette, and as a sixteen-year-old daughter of a Filipina caregiver in Canada, I’m definitely an expert in this subject. When I was three, Ma left me in Malolos, Bulacan and worked in Hong Kong and Taiwan before ending up in Waterloo, Ontario, where she finally sponsored me to be with her.
If you’re wondering what to do when you finally reunite with your teenage daughter after thirteen years apart, let me show you in seven easy steps. There are multiple choice exercises in each section to test your knowledge. Don’t forget to check your answers at the end!
When you met me in the airport, I was about to hug you for the first time in thirteen years, but you held me at arm’s length and looked me up and down. “Oh my gulay! What happened?” you exclaimed, pinching my belly. “You’re so fat!”
I could have said many things back: Why did you dye your hair an unnatural shade of black? Why do your eyebrows look like they were drawn on with cheap markers? Why are your lips so wrinkled and thin?
But instead, I just looked away with tears in my eyes as you led me toward the airport exit, shaking your head in disappointment.
Please select something else that you could have said to welcome me:
After we got to your little house with the cupboards stocked with weird Canadian things like kale chips (chips made of salad?!?) and gluten-free cookies (what the heck is gluten?!?), I excitedly unzipped my carry-on to show you that I’d filled an entire suitcase with my favourite snack: boxes and boxes of Hello Panda.
“Look, Ma!” I exclaimed. “I brought the whole sari-sari store with me!”
You looked horrified. Zipping up my suitcase, you declared, “If I let you eat this Filipino junk, you’ll get even fatter.”
“I wasn’t going to eat them all at once,” I protested. “I didn’t know if they sold Hello Panda in Canada and I —”
You shoved my suitcase into your closet. “No more snacks,” you said, narrowing your eyes. I could feel you judging everything about me, from my thin black hair to my greasy brown face to my zit-covered cheeks to my soft stomach that spilled over my leggings. “Since you like this Hello Panda junk so much, you know what I’ll call you? Panda.”
My eyes filled with tears, and I wanted to argue that you could call me Ginette or Ginnie or Gin-Gin or Gigi but never-not-ever Panda, but before I could say anything, you pulled out your phone and video-called Mama-Lola in Bulacan.
Mama-Lola’s old face filled up the screen and crinkled into a smile. “Is Gin-Gin there? How was her flight?”
I jostled for the camera. “Mama-Lola! It was so long and scary and —”
“Baby ko! How are you?”
“Ohmygosh, February in Canada is sooo cold and —”
You pushed me aside. “What did you do to my little girl? She’s so much fatter than I was at her age!”
Mama-Lola laughed, showing the gaps in her teeth. “Hay naku, Gina! You were probably malnourished from your tired yayas. Remember how all of your nannies hated you? They said you were so maarte. I remember when the last one quit, she yelled, ‘That Gina is the most dramatic girl I’ve ever seen!’”
“I wasn’t maarte — I was opinionated!”
“That’s the same thing, no?”
I tried to grab the phone but you held me back.
“Mama, I can’t believe you let Ginette get this fat. You spoiled her!”
Before I could tell Mama-Lola how much I missed her, you hung up the phone.
I was used to the kind of parent who always told me that I was special. Mama-Lola filled my world with a warm, unconditional love.
You were the exact opposite.
“Aren’t you going to give me a house tour?” I asked, trying to lighten the mood.
“Don’t fall down the stairs,” you replied flatly. “You can’t break any bones because you don’t have your health card yet.”
I thought you were joking, so I tried to hug you. “I love you too, Ma.”
You backed away. “You smell like airplane. Go shower.”
You went upstairs to your room and left me standing in the hallway alone. I didn’t know where the shower was.
At this moment, there are so many other things you could have said. Please pick the best one:
After you left to work abroad, Mama-Lola put your graduation picture up in our bedroom and told me that I could talk to you whenever I wanted. But since I was just a three-year-old, that didn’t make any sense to me. Why would I want to talk to a piece of paper when I could just turn around and talk to Mama-Lola instead?
We shared a bed up until the morning I left for Canada.
In Waterloo, as I lay in my strange new bedroom, I missed her body next to me, the smell of freshly cooked rice on her clothes, her warm breath in my hair as she snored. I missed how she would let me wear her loose cotton dusters to bed after I had a growth spurt and none of my clothes fit me anymore. I missed the way she made me a bedtime glass of Milo mixed with filtered hot water and extra powdered milk, just the way I liked it.
I missed everything about her.
She was my mother and grandmother rolled into one: Mama and Lola.
You were just a stranger.
During our first days together, you yelled at me all of the time. I left my clothes on the floor, my hair in the bathtub, my dishes in the sink, my bed unmade. At Mama-Lola’s house, we always had maids to clean up after me. I never realized how messy I could be. “Linis, linis, linis! Clean up, clean up, clean up!” you’d yell.
I tried to make my bed, but since your Canadian blankets were so unbelievably thick, I had the hardest time folding them properly. Mama-Lola only used a cotton blanket that was so thin that it was practically tissue paper — nothing compared to these huge, heavy quilts that you bought at some local Mennonite market. Maybe you forgot. But you didn’t have to yell at me and say, “Even a Mennonite baby could fold this better than you!”
“I don’t even know what a Mennonite is!” I cried.
I could feel myself getting sad, and so I thought of one place that could cheer me up. “Can we go to the mall?” I suggested.
You kept doing the dishes. “Too busy. Working double shifts today.”
I didn’t want to stay alone in your freezing, empty house. “Can I come?” I asked.
You kissed your teeth. “While I’m gone, you can clean. Clean your room, the bathroom, and the kitchen. And when you’re done, do it all over again because you didn’t do it right the first time.”
“But I don’t know how to clean,” I protested.
You angrily dropped a pan into the sink, splashing cooking oil and soapy water everywhere. “I just bought you the latest iPhone, didn’t I? Look it up on YouTube!”
I wanted to make you proud of me, but I was so jet-lagged that, the minute you left, I fell asleep on the couch. I didn’t wake up until you came home fifteen hours later.
You were so mad.
“Anak ng demonyo! Ang tamad mo! Hayop ka!”
“Ma?” I asked, rubbing my eyes. “You’re home already?”
“It’s already ten thirty!” you yelled, throwing your cracked imitation Louis Vuitton purse onto the floor. “You slept all day while I worked back-to-back caregiving and cleaning shifts so I can support you? You’re so lazy! You really are a panda!”
“But Ma, I’m still jet-lagged, and my head really hurts, and —”
“Your head hurts? You didn’t do anything but sleep all day and you’re complaining that your head hurts?”
There are a few things you could have said instead of yelling at me. Please select the best option:
Ma, I really wanted to tell you about my boyfriend because I was feeling lost without him. All I could think about was how, on the day I was leaving, Janno showed up right as the driver loaded my suitcases into the van. He held my hand up until the last minute, saying, “Promise, Ginette! Promise you’ll sponsor me so we can be together forever!” I sobbed so loudly that the annoyed driver yelled at Janno to go away before he ran him over.
I felt like half of my heart was missing and my entire world was falling apart.
I wished I could’ve talked to you about finding my one true love and feeling lost without him. But instead, you pulled me off the couch and made me scrub your bathtub with a dented box of Arm & Hammer baking soda and your dirty old toothbrush.
It was a cold February morning when you brought me to school for the first time. I was shaking uncontrollably, but you thought it was because it was cold.
“It’s only minus eight, Panda! Don’t be so maarte!” you said, propelling me up the school steps.
You didn’t even realize that I was shaking because I was so nervous for the English and math assessment — the most important test I had ever taken in my life.
When it was over, the guidance counsellor told us that I would be placed in grade ten.
My eyes welled up as I realized that I wouldn’t be in grade eleven like I was back home. “Sir, are you sure?” I asked, watching him stuff my results into an envelope as you took the package with a strange look in your eyes.
I thought you were going to stand up for me, but instead, you just left the room, storming out into the empty hallway. “All of those years of private school, and this is the best you could do?” you demanded, your brown face turning bright red. “Ang tamad mo talaga, Panda! So lazy!”
When you saw that I was about to cry, you told me that you were late for work and left me standing in the hallway.
My first class was physical education. I was stunned when I looked at my batchmates: all long hair and long legs and long arms and perfect white skin and perfect white teeth. They looked like models while I looked like the short Filipino janitor mopping up sweat outside the change room who muttered to me, “Hoy Ineng — your batchmates are six-foot Russian and Ukrainian girls. Ehh, you’ll be lucky if they even let you play.” I stood at the far edge of the volleyball court and tried to be invisible.
But when the ball sailed across the gymnasium and came right toward me, one of the gorgeous blondes went rushing for it with her arm outstretched. She crashed into me, scraping the floor. “Oww, my elbow! OhmyGodwhatthehell!” Her hair was the colour of gold, and her skin was so pale it looked like she had never seen the sun. I had never been touched by someone so beautiful.
The gym teacher ran over. “Speak up when you’re going for the ball!” he yelled at me. “Ya gotta call it! Say ‘mine’! You can do that, can’t you?”
“Sir, the new girl can’t even speak English!” the blonde cried, rubbing her elbow.
I wanted to shout, “Yes I can!” but the words were frozen in my mouth. Back in Malolos, the teachers used to tell me I was good at English. But here in Waterloo, where I was already ugly and fat, suddenly, I was stupid, too.
I darted out of the gym and texted the only person I knew in this whole country:
Ma, I don’t like my new school.
I didn’t have to wait long for a reply.
Just study hard and don’t be a crybaby, Panda.
I grabbed my things, threw myself through the school doors, and ran back to your house. When you finally came home, instead of asking, “How was your first day?” you saw me playing on my phone and demanded, “Why aren’t you doing your homework?”
“I don’t have any,” I said, glad that I wasn’t lying.
You snatched a slipper off the floor and threw it in my direction, narrowly missing my thigh. “Wow, Panda, you really are the most useless girl in all of Waterloo! Of course you have homework — you just started school!”
“I promise, I don’t have any!” I cried.
Your face softened for a minute before it reverted back to its usual pinched state. “Then clean the bathtub again. You did a bad job earlier.” You turned to tackle the pile of dishes that I had left all over the counter so that you could have the space to angrily chop a mountain of vegetables for pinakbet.
As I squatted barefoot in the tub with that soggy box of baking soda and your disgusting old toothbrush again, I thought of the text messages that you could have sent to me when I wrote, “Ma, I don’t like my new school.”
Here are some options for you to pick from:
The next morning, I woke up as you came into my room to put my laundry away. Wrapped up in my thick Mennonite blankets, I confessed, “Ma, I feel sad all of the time. I don’t want to go to school. I miss being back home. I don’t even want to get out of bed anymore. I’m depressed and I have anxiety.”
You yanked the quilts away and barked two words at me: “Get dressed.”
We drove and drove until we reached a strange warehouse area in the middle of nowhere. I thought we were going shopping. But instead, you brought me to a weird basement church located below a knock-off designer furniture depot and shoved me into a room with a big, cluttered desk. A Filipino pastor came in, groaning and clutching his lower back as he sat across from me.
Rather than leave us alone to talk, you stood behind me with your hand firmly on my shoulder like you were trying to stop me from running away. “She says she’s got depression and anxiety,” you blurted out, as if I’d made it up just to make you mad.
“You can’t be depressed,” the pastor said, shaking his finger at me. He had a patchy moustache and he wore too much gel for the few dyed black hairs left on his head. His glasses were dirty with fingerprints, and his breath smelled like patis. “Do you know how difficult it was for your mother to bring you to Waterloo? How hard she worked to satisfy the caregiver program requirements, deal with the demands of her employers, and complete all of the tests and paperwork just to bring you here?”
You stood behind me and sniffed so quietly that I couldn’t tell if you were getting emotional or if you just had allergies.
“But Pastor, I’m sad. I miss home. I don’t want to get out of bed.”
“But you’re in Canada now.”
“And I’m depressed.”
“But you’re reunited with your mother.”
“Yes, and I’m depressed.”
“And you say you have anxiety, too? How did you get that?” He looked at me like I’d caught a disease.
“I think it was triggered by culture shock.”
“Ha?” He looked up at you and you let out a dramatic sigh.
“Pastor, she spends all of her time on her phone. That’s where she learned how to talk like this.” Squeezing my thick shoulder, you added, “She won’t even lose weight.”
The pastor’s eyes lit up as he looked me up and down. “Your weight! Yes! This is why you’re stricken with these diseases. As your pastor, I recommend that you pray to our Lord Jesus Christ before each meal. Pray that you will eat less and exercise more.”
“I think I need a real counsellor,” I muttered.
“This will end your depression and anxiety in Jesus’s name,” he declared. “Amen?”
“Amen,” you said together.
That night, you turned on your karaoke machine to sing “May Bukas Pa” on repeat. It sounded like you were trying to be a Pinay Adele, but all your notes were flat. Maybe by singing it over and over, you were trying to tell me to have hope, that there would be a brighter tomorrow, that God would help me with my suffering — or maybe you were just practising your high notes. Either way, I didn’t care. You couldn’t even hear me crying because you were so damn loud. I put on the noise-cancelling headphones you’d given me and sobbed myself to sleep.
After being told that the answer to my depression and anxiety was portion control, exercise, and Jesus, I wasn’t in the mood to hear you sing. At that moment, I really needed you to talk to me. Here are some things you could have said:
As the days went by, I was spending less time talking to you and more time on my new Canadian phone. I was talking to Mama-Lola, calling her constantly so that I could feel like she was still part of my life. And after nine thirty (when you said I had to go to sleep even though it’s almost impossible for any teenager to sleep at that time), I was talking to Janno.
When I called him on Valentine’s Day, he kept asking when his plane ticket would be coming so we could finally be together again. “Ginette, where is it? I keep checking my email but it’s not there. What’s taking so long?” Janno demanded, the hurt in his voice piercing my heart.
“I don’t have any money yet,” I said, my voice a whisper so you wouldn’t hear. “I’m not allowed to get a job. Mama said I need to focus on school first.”
I could hear Janno slamming a door and storming outside, the sounds of the Malolos morning traffic almost drowning him out. “You don’t care about us! If you keep disappointing me, I’m going to cheat on you, I swear. The girls at school keep asking me if I’m single now that you’re gone. You can’t expect me to wait forever!”
“But I thought you loved me!”
“Love has a time limit,” he said. “I can only take so much long distance. I’ll tell the girls that I’m still your boyfriend, but only if you send over my sponsorship papers and my plane ticket.”
“But you know I can’t do that!” I cried. I dropped my phone and clamped my mouth with my hands, but it was too late.
You burst into my room and started yelling.
“You’re on the phone again? It’s past bedtime! See, this is why you say you’re depressed and can’t get out of bed — because you’re staying up so late!” You grabbed my phone, and I began babbling about love and heartbreak and sponsorships and money, but you couldn’t understand a thing I said.
“Why do you always think you can cry and just get your way? Grow up, Panda!”
“But I’m — I’m —”
“Maldita! Bruha!” You stuffed my phone into your pocket. “I shouldn’t have given you this. You’ll get it back when I say you can.”
“But I don’t even want the phone!” I cried.
“You don’t?” you sneered. “Is it because I bought you a new laptop, too? Then I’ll take away your internet. When you start going to bed at a better time, I’ll give you the password. Like I keep telling you, when I was your age, I went to bed at 9:30 so I could wake up at 5:30 every morning to study before school. I was a top student. When you get on this schedule, you’ll get your phone and internet back. Now go to bed!”
You went to your room.
I couldn’t stop crying. I knew that I had to let Janno know what you’d done, or else he would think I was ignoring him and he would cheat on me on Valentine’s Day and stop loving me forever, but I was too hysterical to explain. All I could do was burst into tears and yell, “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!”
Honestly, I didn’t mean it, but I just needed to scream. When I calmed down, I knocked on your door to apologize.
You never came out.
If you’d just opened your door, there were so many things you could have said to me. Please pick the best option:
When you take away your daughter’s phone and internet, thereby cutting off all her ties to her old life, her depression will probably get worse.
There are many things that you should not do at this time. Which do you think is most important?
When you had a day off, you finally took me out of the house. You drove to the Toronto Premium Outlets in Halton Hills. You said that we weren’t going there to buy anything, and that it was just a way for me to get out of the house, but you didn’t have to get mad at me every time I touched something.
“That’s expensive! Put it back!”
“Mama, I’m just feeling the fabric. What’s Tencel? It’s so soft.”
“You don’t need that!”
“I didn’t say I needed it. I just want to look at it.”
I flipped over the price tag and we both gasped. “Things in Canada are so expensive!” we said at the exact same time, in the exact same way.
I looked at you and you looked at me. And we both smiled the exact same smile.
Together, we blew through the Tory Burch, Burberry, and Kate Spade outlet stores, dramatically gasping and laughing as we found more and more preposterously priced things that we would never buy.
It would have been a good day.
But when I got hungry, you said that we had to go back home to eat.
“But Mama, can’t we just get some pizza?” I begged. “I don’t want to go home yet. There’s still so many more stores. I think the cheaper ones are on the side we haven’t seen yet!”
“No, we have to go home. We have leftover tempeh and kale salad, remember?”
“But Waterloo is forty-five minutes away. And Mama, I want pizza.”
“What, you don’t like my healthy food? You want to get diabetes? Gout? Cholesterol? Ahh, I know — you want high blood? Grabe, I knew it! You want high blood so you can die early like your Lolo and your Papa did!”
“No, I just want to stay here and —” I stopped talking as my tears began to fall.
“You’re going to throw a tantrum? You want to be like that kid?” You pointed your lips at a Filipina mother being attacked by her vicious little son at the Roots outlet store. She was trying to put a sweater on him, but he kept slapping her face and screaming. With her bruised cheeks and downturned eyes, the mother looked too exhausted to react.
“He was probably raised in Canada,” you said, kissing your teeth. “No manners! Walang respeto!”
“Maybe he’s just trying to figure out how to make his mama listen to him,” I said, watching the boy throw himself onto the floor and kick his feet against the store windows as she desperately tried to zip up a red hoodie with a Canadian flag sewn across the chest. “What if he can’t talk yet?”
“No excuses for bad behaviour. He’s too big to not talk. Such a brat. It’s not like how it was when I was younger. We knew how to obey our elders!”
I stopped on the other side of the store windows that shuddered with every blow.
“Is that why you left me with Mama-Lola, even though she told you to stay in the Philippines with me?” I blurted out. “Didn’t you disobey her when she said that you shouldn’t let me grow up without a parent?”
“My Papa and my husband both died in the year you were born. I was the only one left to support you and your Mama-Lola. What was I supposed to do?”
“I don’t know, maybe listen to her and not leave?”
“You don’t know anything about my options at the time.”
“You wouldn’t know the right option even if it was written out in front of you,” I snapped back.
Grabbing me by the wrist, you pulled me away from the little boy who kicked his mama away again and again, screaming like the Canadian sweater burned his skin.
And when we got home, I shut myself into my room for the rest of the afternoon to write out these seven simple steps.
I need help, Ma. And I think you need help, too.
This self-help guide is over, but I want you to know that there is actually one step that, if you’d followed it before any of the others, Steps One to Seven would not have been necessary at all. Now doesn’t that sound nice?
When I was a toddler and you decided to work abroad, did you know that it would be thirteen years until we saw each other again? I built my entire life without you. I had Mama-Lola, my kasambahay, my teachers, my boyfriend. I had so many people who made me feel loved and special. I know you wish that I was different, but honestly, I wish that you were different, too.
Now that I’m here, you’re constantly disappointed that I didn’t turn out more like you. But how could I do that when I don’t know who you are? I know that you’ve worked hard to bring me here, to give me a nice house and a good school and the latest gadgets, but none of that means anything when I feel like you don’t really hear what I have to say.
Now you’ve reached the end of Seven Steps to Reuniting with Your Teenage Daughter. In case you haven’t figured it out already, the answer to every single exercise is e) All of the above. If you didn’t circle e) every single time, read this guide again and again until you do. When you show me that you got a perfect score, I’ll be proud to announce that you’re truly ready to start building a relationship with your teenage daughter who …