Don't You Dare Take This From Me

I laughed in my doctor's office.

Not a polite chuckle. Not a nervous giggle. A full, ridiculous, are you serious right now laugh — sitting on the crinkly paper of that examination table, wearing a gown that tied in the back and exposed my dignity.

She had just said the words: high cholesterol, pre-diabetic, you need to stop eating anything that came from an animal.

Go. Vegan.

(And before any of you go typing "actually, plant-based eating is wonderful," I would like to remind you that I am Filipina-Chinese. Rice is not a food group. Rice is a love language.)

I told her, "Doc, I'm sorry, but I can't go vegan. I love to eat. And if you tell me I can't have rice — that's like asking me to stop breathing."

She did not laugh.

So This Is What Normal Feels Like, Mom?

We were driving back from Reno on a Sunday.

My current husband was driving. My daughter was in Las Vegas, in her own house, in her own life—living it the way grown daughters do, separate from mine, doing things I didn't always know about.

I was in the passenger seat trying not to suffocate.

There's a particular kind of quiet in a car when you want to talk about something heavy and you can't. When your husband is driving and he's not the one who needs to understand what's happening with your child. When you have so much to say and nowhere to put it.

Then the phone rang.

I wasn't expecting it.

I didn't know she'd been to therapy. I didn't know about the diagnosis. I didn't know she'd picked up medication from a pharmacy and was nervous about trying it.

My daughter was living her own life and making her own decisions and I was just... finding out.

I didn't know what to feel. What should I feel?

Why I Finally Stopped Arguing and Started Listening

 I used to think my husband was exaggerating about Yosemite.

The most beautiful place on earth? Really? I'd seen pictures. I'd been there. It was pretty, sure, but the most beautiful place?

No filter could capture what he sees
when he looks at this place.
No words can either. But standing here,
finally understanding why he loves it so much?
 That part I can feel. 📸

I didn't get it.

I think he finally stopped trying to convince me and just started showing me instead.

The Alien Learning To See

There are a lot of things I didn't understand when I married a foreigner and moved to California.

The language, obviously. I can speak English fine, but there's a difference between speaking it and feeling it. There's a gap between what I want to say and what actually comes out of my mouth. It makes communication hit or miss sometimes. He gets it. Or at least he's learned to.

The culture. The way Americans do things. The space everyone needs. The directness. The casual comfort with things I was raised to be anxious about.

The landscape. Manila is concrete and humidity and people pressed against you. This is... open. Wild. Indifferent to whether you're comfortable or not.

I'm the alien here. And for a long time, I was defensive about that.

But Yosemite? Yosemite is where I finally let him translate the world for me.

Excuse Me, I Lived 40 Years Somewhere Else

Somewhere between two worlds.

Here is something nobody tells you before you move to a new country at forty years old.

You don't just leave a place. You leave four decades of references. Four decades of songs that played on every radio, jokes that everyone got without explanation, history that was simply common knowledge because you breathed it every day. You leave the trivia. You leave the shared memory. You leave the thing that makes people in a room nod at the same time because they all grew up watching the same show, hearing the same names, knowing the same things without ever having to learn them on purpose.

And then you land somewhere new, and people forget you weren't there for any of it.