My Difficult Relationship With My Filipino Mom — Reflections of a Disrespectful Child
I was close to my mom growing up, mostly because I was her bratty little sidekick that longed for her approval and tag teamed with her to catch my older, teenage siblings doing things they weren’t supposed to be.
I was also a straight “A” student which was like striking gold to my mom who was an elementary school teacher. She dressed me in poofy dresses and parted my hair into immaculate, braided pigtails, complete with matching bows. I was like a little doll she could show off and brag about to her co-teachers. A co-dependent relationship in retrospect but at the time, I was her favorite so I was happy.
When I entered middle school, things changed. Not only was I becoming a teenager, which she seemed to inherently despise, but my dad also had an affair and left us.
Our family was in crisis. My older siblings packed up their lives from afar and came home to be with us and support my mom who had just lost the one and only partner she’d ever known.
There were a lot of tears, wailing, confusion. We got the contact information of his mistress and left nasty voicemails on her answering machine. We surprised my dad at his shop and pleaded with him with tears in our eyes to come back home. He had turned cold and callous. His eyes were empty, unfeeling.
A whole year would go by before my dad conveniently decided he wanted his family back. He came to lunch with us after church one day and that was it. After that, things kinda just went back to how they were. Like nothing ever happened. I remember hearing or at least believing he had missed us.
My mom took him back. I never really understood why, nor did anyone explain it to me. But over the next 30 or so years, I would witness countless iterations of her disdain for him.
My dad is a passive, mostly quiet fellow. Any of his disrespectful or frustrating behaviors go under the radar, for the most part.
My mom, however, is loud and passionate. Her resentment was thick, heavy, encompassing. It was easier to see her disrespect toward him, mostly in her relentlessly condescending tone, than it was to see his disrespect toward her.
This set the stage for almost every interaction I witnessed from them. I never really knew what he did that was frustrating. All I could see was my mom going off and emasculating him.
It made me mad.
I hated how she talked to him. I thought, “Well, no wonder he doesn’t want to help you do x, y, z! Look at how you talk to him!” It seemed pretty obvious.
What’s worse is the 4 of us children internalized her tone and disrespect for him and condescended him, too. We automatically blamed him if something was missing, even when he wasn’t at fault. Our patience with him was nonexistent. He just took it. He still takes it.
I don’t know at what point I forgave my dad for leaving, or if I ever really did. The year that he was gone seems to be a faint memory. A story I recount like any other in my past, happy or sad. It was a blurry time loaded with emotion and pain.
My mom, on the other hand, seemed to be overflowing with resentment. She was hard to be around. On top of that, I had become one of those damn teenagers she so instinctively despised and distrusted. It was frustrating and confusing for me because I had always been a responsible child and was even valedictorian of my middle school. I felt betrayed and abandoned. So naturally, I turned to my dad.
His quiet, easy-going nature was perfect for me at that time of my life. This emotionally-laden teenager with hormones and feelings — deep, deep feelings. I needed someone to talk to. To vent to about my mom. Someone who understood my frustrations with her and could empathize. Who knew I wasn’t crazy or being a brat. Who knew how unrealistically demanding and over-controlling she could be.
He was that for me. A listening ear. Consistently there. Every day, he drove me to school all the way across town and picked me up. I didn’t know it then but that time was what bonded us. Stuck together for 45+ minutes a day, we became buddies. Sometimes we would joke. I would reenact a funny skit from a sitcom I had recently watched. And sometimes I’d be venting about my strict mom. He listened to all of it.
When you’re a teenager, sometimes that’s all you need.
I had become a daddy’s girl.
I went on to college and even decided to pursue a minor motivated by heated discussions my dad and I would have about religion. We shared books and he even read my college texts. Our discussions were always enlivening and interesting. He appreciated finally having someone to have intellectual, philosophical conversations/debates with. I appreciated being challenged and encouraged to dissect religion and implicitly whole institutions.
My mom became this person I didn’t understand. Someone brewing with bitterness that I wished she would just process and face instead of running from. It was easy to fault her for her own misery since she took him back in the first place.
My mom would hate my relationship with my dad. She never really liked it when any of us kids would bond with him, but she seemed to especially hate my time with him.
She would go to church every single day and preach this and that but her behaviors at home seemed to greatly contradict everything I had ever learned in church. Lessons of grace. Parables of patience. I didn’t see any of that so I grew resentful. I hated her hypocrisy. It disgusted me.
We butt heads. A lot. I would call her out on her unhealthy, narcissistic behaviors and in turn, I was labeled “disrespectful,” the ultimate Filipino condemnation if there ever was one. Her behavior only pushed me closer to my dad, which infuriated her even more.
I kept my distance from her and that seemed to work. But every now and then, I would be exposed to her yelling and tantruming until I could no longer bite my tongue and eventually exploded. When a toddler tantrums, it is developmentally appropriate and therefore, more socially acceptable. When a middle-aged woman does it, it is not.
I didn’t appreciate my dad or any of us being treated as outlets for unresolved pain that wasn’t ours to hold (well maybe it was for my dad) and that she refused to address. I didn’t like being criticized for doing the exact same things she did — like coming and going in and out of the house. It didn’t seem fair that respect was demanded of us, yet not given. I didn’t understand why what was expected of us was not modeled.
So I pushed back. I spoke up.
I was the only one, not just in our family, but likely in her whole life to challenge her the way I did. Our various family members, immediate and extended, knew how impossible my mom could be. They also knew that calling her out was like opening a can of worms and no one was willing to do that. It was easier to brush everything under the rug. Not to mention, my siblings and my dad depended on her financially and otherwise. For them, there was too much at stake. It was best to keep quiet.
But I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t enable her narcissism and tantrums simply because it was convenient to ignore them. That didn’t align with my own personal values or moral compass.
And so, being the only one to push back or speak up made it seem like I was the only one who felt this way, which merely reinforced her view of me as disrespectful.
And I was. I won’t deny that. I could have had more tact and grace in my delivery. It would take me years of processing and therapy to finally get to a place where I could approach her with my objections in a calmer way.
But of course, it didn’t matter how I approached her. Suggesting your Filipino mom is wrong in any way is like a death sentence. She snapped as I was in mid-sentence and yelled at me inside of a busy restaurant on a Friday night. She couldn’t handle being called out. It didn’t match the story she had created about herself. And as embarrassing as it was, making a scene was still less threatening than admitting she may have been wrong even once in her life.
We did what we always do after we fight. We let time go by, eventually see each other at a family gathering, and pretend like nothing happened. I don’t apologize because that would only reinforce her narcissism and self-righteousness. We silently agree to not talk about it.
This has been our cycle.
Over the years, I moved out, got married and had a family of my own. My mom and I have had our continuing issues but there’s been more space around them. And as time goes on, our arguments become even more few and far between. We haven’t argued once in the last year which is unheard of.
We’re more able to talk to each other as people and not from a parent-child hierarchy. I was also able to unclench my ass and not direct all my anger about unhealthy parts of Filipino culture toward her. I’ve also internalized some of the respect for elders embedded in our culture in a way that feels right for me instead of something I felt pressured to do even when I didn’t think elders deserved respect.
Following my own path, I somehow ended up crossing with hers. I became more active in our church, which became a subject we could converse about. I joined the gym and would often see her there which gave us more contact and opportunity to chat about her day.
I also began asking her for favors — something I never did, which I personally believe was a big part of our disconnect. All my others siblings had needed her in some way. And she was able to be a mother to them even in their adulthood. I, on the other hand, didn’t want to be a burden to her so I made a point to be self-sufficient…like her.
But she loves to give. And she loves to mother. So I learned to receive.
Now, we’ll invite each other out to dinner and take turns paying. Occasionally, I’ll ask her to stop by my house and feed the dogs if I’m out longer than anticipated. She graciously and happily obliges. Sometimes, she’ll text me and offer to bring me food. I’ll usually accept.
The favors I ask of her are different from what my siblings ask. We have a less dependent kind of relationship that works for both of us. One that feels like it comes more from love rather than need or obligation.
Our relationship has shifted.
We are no longer resistant and unyielding toward each other. Instead, there’s an ease and a flow of energy that wasn’t there before.
She’ll even call me to see what I’m doing or bitch about my dad. I’ll listen and empathize. She doesn’t need much else.
She very recently called and cried to me for an hour about her ongoing frustrations with my dad. She knew I could hold it and said I was the only one out of the 4 children that finally understood. I had mentioned that I needed space from my dad a few weeks prior. I didn’t give any other details, but I guess I didn’t need to. She already knew what I was going through with him and his constant negativity. Suddenly, she felt connected to me.
The call wasn’t like our usual 2–3 minute, where are you now, did you eat yet? kinda calls. This one was sad. She was sitting in her car parked somewhere and crying.
She unleashed all the shady things he had done to her and to us when he left us for that year. She kept it a secret for 3 decades. Maybe to protect us. Maybe because she deemed it inappropriate to share with young kids. Maybe to deny her own pain. Maybe to suffer in silence as Catholics often learn to do. Who knows?
Learning all these things threw me. I couldn’t believe some of the things my dad had done and all the ways he had tried to screw us all, including displacing us from our home.
Finally, I had more context for why she had been so resentful. I had more understanding and clarity about her lack of patience with him all these years. I wouldn’t say it was all completely justified, but I will say I don’t know what it’s like to hold all that pain on your own while raising kids and doing all the things.
My judgment melted away. I softened toward her.
Since this and another similar phone call, I have noticed how much lighter she seems. Having been able to unload some of her marital grievances, both past and present, and not keep it all to herself has done so much. Knowing that finally, one of her children understands her frustrations with my dad instead of seeing him as this benign, innocent old man, has provided her with remarkable relief.
I’m glad she feels comfortable and trusting enough to call me, almost like a friend. I never thought, in a million years, we’d get to this place. I had expected to go on never understanding each other and then eventually regretting our disconnect after she passed.
I’m so fortunate this is not the case. I’m grateful that we’ve learned to do more than just coexist and actually have a relationship.
Lately, she beams with pride as she introduces me to her classmates at the gym. I’ve even caught her bragging about me to her friends, much like she did when I was that poofy-dressed girl in pigtails. It’s a sweetness that still catches me off guard.
We can finally see and appreciate each other. We can laugh and enjoy each other’s company.
She likes updates and even a little “tsismis” (gossip), so I share whatever is relevant. I know which stories she’d like to hear and show her pictures of all my friend’s babies. These anecdotes of my continued childhood friendships comfort her.
She is happy that I freely share and include her in my life instead of seeing her as separate from it. That I no longer stubbornly withhold information from her. That we are no longer engaged in an ongoing power struggle. A metaphorical tug of war. We have both let go of the rope and have finally found our common ground.
