Welcome Home (You)

In between the months of August 2008 to October 2008, there was a song that got stuck in my head and that I would play whenever I would visit an Internet Café to listen to YouTube.

It was Backstreet Boys’ Brian Littrell’s Welcome Home (You).

The lyrics spoke to me because in a spectrum of parental favorites, I am my father’s child.

It also spoke to me when I listen to the song time and time again, because against the backdrop of my parent’s crushed dreams for me, my personal mistakes, and the failure to live up to societal expectations, I felt like the song accepted me for who I really was—bruised, battered, and broken.

In that song, the “father” speaks to the son—welcoming him home despite the son leaving home, and becoming his own person.

I remember my earthly father in the song because, in a different multiverse as compared to the universe that I’m in now, he’s the idealized example of a responsible father.

There was a time when, with prayer and preparation, I decided for myself that I would go to Metro Manila for my studies, after a year of taking a break from the rigors of school, and for feeling sorry for myself. It was 2007, we had no money for airfare and my father went with me via Dimple Star Liner and via Roll-On Roll-Off ships. I trusted him to lead the way because I had no idea where we were going.

After the enrollment and getting me settled down, he left for home.

Months passed and after spending most of my time in the library—studying, reading, and writing—my father came back in April 2008 and marched with me onstage to personally put the highest honors medal around my neck. After the recognition rites, that night, we had dinner at Chow King.

In third year high school, I quietly decided to stay at my grandmother’s place in Guimaras in order to maintain my standing in the honors list, while my family followed God’s call to move to Antique and work as pioneer missionaries. On Mondays, my father would bring something from Antique—bandi, lanzones, or just anything that he could buy while traveling for three hours with his good friend Ptr Panfi Cadeliña. On my 16th birthday, I remember, my father gave me a wrapped gift—inside was a maroon raincoat, perhaps something that he thought I needed during the rainy season.

When I followed the wishes of my family to pursue Nursing in a private university, we relied on my 50% tuition fee discount. And yet, because all seven of us were studying, we also lived by faith, literally. On Mondays, my father would hand-deliver my allowance. On examination days, he would line up at the business office to get my exam permits.

The process of writing these series of memories about my father because of the song Welcome Home (You) is difficult because my father also had to bear the most difficult job in the family—to serve as both the provider and head of the unit.

There was a time when, in order for me to understand where he was coming from, and the decisions that he made after Mama’s death, I had to retrace his steps and walk in his shoes.

Walking in his steps made me realize how hard it must have been to lose a wife, to lose the love of your life, to see someone deteriorate because of cancer.

One time, when I was doing my after-dinner walk in front of the church, my father joined. Without context, and out of the blue, he told me to move on. Although phrased, at that time, in an invalidating tone, he told me that I have to move on, we have to move on from the grief that we were feeling. He said that he has already moved on from his grief, even though they were together for 35+ years, how much more I who’s only in this world for, at that time, 33 years.

It hurt a little bit that people rush you to move on from the grief that you feel. Although I felt that my grief was invalidated by the only remaining parent that I have, I understood his thought process. I understood that, perhaps, as an extrovert, to be able to function again, he has to adjust his mindset—to look into the future, and what he would do with his days on earth.

And yet, I didn’t process or talk it out with him. I retreated to my corner of my room, my sanctuary, drowned myself with my work and my books, and sat with my grief.

The many days after Mama’s burial were difficult for the whole family. I had no idea how the other members in the family processed their own grief and I was scared to ask how each one was doing because I knew, we would just weep when we talk about all the things that would slice our hearts open.

For me, I was thankful that I had Doc Victor Amantillo who helped me through the whole process. My monthly sessions, then, were filled with so much tears, with talks about regrets, with survivor’s guilt, with reliving the last few moments when I was at Iloilo Mission Hospital and I promised on Mama’s deathbed that no matter what happens, even though I knew it would be hard for me, we were going to stick together as a family.

I imagine, it must have been on a different level of difficulty, and struggle, with my father, to lose a wife. And I could not understand it completely.

The times when I needed a parent to hold the family together, I felt like he was nowhere to be found. He was present on Sundays during church activities but in the months that I badly needed someone to be a beacon, a torch, a light in the darkest parts of my tunnel, my father’s lighthouse cast a ray of light somewhere else.

And now I understand that we, I myself, could never fulfill his own needs. I am just a child whom he welcomed home when I was struggling through life, and wanted my dreary days to end. I am only a son who used to listen to my father preach on Sundays, and who never understood, in the whole narrative of being human, that he’s also human—he falls, he stumbles, he scrapes his knees, and he also needs someone to welcome him home.

But Mama is, essentially and in perpetuity, home. And we lost her. We lost our home.

While the breeze of disarray sweeps through our beings as children, and our lives as children are only connected by blood, and not by space, I could say that I never left my father. We never left our father.

While we were stuck at our own hurts and grief, he was off to conquer hearts.

As a way to delve deeper into the heart of my father, I looked up. I looked to my Heavenly Father for guidance and comfort because while my earthly father could make decisions based on his needs, and his human heart, my Heavenly Father sees the past, present, and future, and I could only trust Him that whatever circumstances are smacked at my face, He perfectly knows what’s best for me, for us.

If hurting is part of His grand design, I would hurt. Over and over and over again.

But I weep in the stillness of the night and in the dark of my room, with Taylor Swift’s All Too Well to keep me company. Because, in truth, and as The Prodigal Kid, I love my father.

And yet, he’s making it hard for us, for me, to be home with him, to welcome him home. Because, in reality, I could not reach him. In his own meanderings, he has already left for someone else’s home.

These days, I wish I could go back to my childhood days, and ride the motorcycle with my father where he would wrap me, using his coat, around his body, in order for me not to fall from the motorcycle as I sleep.

But I am not a kid anymore. We’re all grown-ups, with our own lives to live.

So, I let go. I let go of my hurts, and the times when I felt my grief was invalidated, and replace them with memories of the moments when my father rallied at my side.

And in forgiveness, and in love, I welcome my earthly father home. Along with his heart, and another heart that comes with it—bruised, battered, broken, human.

[Photos, and video, taken in different contexts, and love languages—everything stitched with parental love, and human hearts.]