Early 1960s

ANGELA GARBES

Even more than my mother’s face, I love the whimsy in this photograph: the plastic flowers and knickknacks on her vanity, stripes of Philippine sunlight spilling through the blinds and echoing the curve of her body, how she holds the camera daintily above her head.

The stories I remember her telling me about her youth are stormier. How she hated her skin, darker than that of her eight siblings. How her legs were “ugly” and marked from so many mosquito bites. How, after graduating from nursing school, her father informed her that he was sending her to America to work and send money back. And how, when she decided to marry my father—a slobby med student with nice lips and a perpetually wrinkled lab coat—after just six months, jeopardizing her family’s plans, my grandfather walked her down the aisle whispering, “This is nonsense.”

Soon after she and my father arrived in America, she got pregnant and had a son. When it was time to return to the Philippines, she told my dad, who never wanted to emigrate in the first place, that she wasn’t going back. She had another son and then, against her doctor’s recommendations, a third child—me—because she always wanted a baby girl.

My mother and I are different people. I love my brown skin and my scars and am even less inclined toward filial piety. Our relationship has never been as easy as either of us would like. Right now she is deeply involved in the work of caring for my two young daughters, which means we are constantly fumbling our way through the intergenerational muck of family, obligations, femininity, presumptions. We misunderstand each other all the time. Recently, she asked me to lower my expectations of her.

In this photo I see the woman who willed me into being. I am here only because she insisted I be. The corner of my lip does the same upward curl. I’ll never stop trying to connect, and I know I’ll never be able to expect less. Look at her. How could I?