Families
The first time I brought my partner home to my family, it was around Christmas. My parents fetched us from SM Southmall and we brought home cake. I introduced her to my parents, then to my mother’s siblings, then to their wives and their children, and that was it. We had dinner, and I remember one of my (semi-drunk) uncles telling her about me as a child, about how she’d made a “good choice” (to which I had responded, semi-drunkenly as well: No need for a ‘sales pitch’ — I have already been bought!) It was the first time I’d ever brought home a girl — the first time any of us actually brought home someone, but nobody seemed surprised. As far as they were concerned, I’m the eldest kid and this is all part of growing up, and it just happens that I wanted to grow up with another woman.
When I talk about my family, I remember my father. A retired pilot, my father had a stint with the Navy before working for a government-owned corporation, before leaving the service after I graduated from college. When my mother died, he remarried, and I spent the rest of my adolescent days in a less-than-conventional family — with a loss so pronounced I carried it around with me so heavily, plodding through high school as if I were constantly wearing a soaked coat. My stepmother is actually my mother’s favorite younger sister. We plodded along fine.
As a pilot, my father was often out of town on assignment, and this meant that he wasn’t around to attend my graduations (two out of three, actually), and that you wouldn’t have called us traditionally close, at least at the time. I lived in our home until I had to go away for college, and though I’ve never really gone back, I wouldn’t say my father and I aren’t close.
Close came much later, when I was already working, and we had to work together to run our family, somewhat — him and me and auntie and my two younger siblings, four and twelve years younger than I. We’re not in a call in the middle of the night kind of relationship (this is probably auntie, my henchman of choice), but I like calling him my True North. He reminds me to be kinder than I feel.
I remember when I first came out to him — well, I didn’t, not exactly, but I do remember what he always said after it became clear that I was lesbian: That I was old enough to know what was good for me, and that it was up to me to live my life the way I wanted to.
That he trusted me to do the right thing.
These days, when I talk about family, I refer not only to the one I was born into, but also the one I have built; of friends met along the way and made kin. When I talk about family, I also mean the many hands I have held, both for work and for play.
When I talk about family, I mean the ones I could trust, the ones I could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with and never doubt, the ones I could get my hands dirty with when working toward a shared goal. I talk about eyes I can stare into and not flinch, even when the truths I see are difficult.
When I talk about family, I mean not only blood.
I mean love.
The Pope is in the news again, amid the Vatican Synod on Family Issues and his visit to the United States, which had recently legalized same-sex marriages. I remember when the Pope was in Manila — we had been filled with hope that Francis would be a game-changing Pope, and perhaps in many aspects he is, much to the discomfort of traditional sectors in the Vatican, but still: The bedrock of the family is the union of a man and a woman.
A man and a woman.
I remember when they said, Don’t call it marriage. Let the Church have the word ‘marriage.’ I remember being young and lesbian and single; I remember thinking I didn’t need ‘marriage’ anyway, because love can happen without marriage, right? Let them have it, right?
And then I got partnered. Suddenly the whole marriage thing just looms on you as something bigger than love — you begin thinking beyond love, about building a life after just love. When the haze of the honeymoon fades, and you begin thinking about the long-haul, you think about: A house together. Maybe kids. Maybe getting old together, and protecting each other, under the laws of a nation that, all considered, you have also been diligently contributing to anyway, and not just via taxes.
When they told me to let the word marriage go, I supposed I could find a good enough word for it elsewhere: Partnership, perhaps? Like this were a business and not a life-long commitment to be with someone. Union, maybe? A bit militant, after all. Perhaps it’s just semantics; perhaps it can be let go. After all, I have never been married before.
But now they’re also telling me the word family is also beyond my reach.
I think about my father. I think about Christmas dinners and dancing in the mall with my siblings. I think about my mother’s menudo. Then I think about going home to my partner after a long day’s work. How is this supposed to be different? How do I let go of that?
GIRL 911, Ms Dela Cruz’s column, zeroes in on girls, news, things. (In no particular order.)
