Let me tell you about the Eel River at nine in the morning on the Fourth of July.
My husband had set us up close enough to the water that I could hear it moving through the rocks before I even opened my eyes. Clear water. Actually clear — not "oh it's fine" clear but I can see the tiny fish playing near the shore clear. The morning was cool the way California mornings are cool when the sun is out but hasn't committed yet. Nobody was there. No fireworks crowd, no chaos, no lineup of people doing the most. Just us. Just the river. Just the sound of water that had somewhere to be and wasn't in a hurry to get there.
He set all of this up. He found the spot, parked the RV, positioned us just right. This is what he does. He finds beautiful things and puts me next to them.
I sat there and thought: I could cry. This is so nice. I cannot believe this is my life.
And then, because my brain is my brain, a 44-year-old man-child walked into my peaceful river morning and sat down uninvited.
Not physically. He wasn't there. But he was there. You know what I mean.
Before I go any further I need to establish some context because I refuse to be misunderstood.
I am Filipina-Chinese. I grew up in the Philippines. And before you complete that sentence in your head — stop. Delete it. Start over.
My parents were not poor. My parents were the kind of rich that came with a cook, maids, drivers, and a level of personal service that I did not fully appreciate until I moved to America and had to learn, as a grown adult woman, how to pump my own gas.
(The first time I did it I genuinely looked around for someone to help me. There was no one. There is never anyone. This is America. You pump your own gas and you are grateful for the opportunity.)
My first marriage — which is a whole other essay that I am not writing today because I need to pace my trauma — connected me to a family so politically prominent in the Philippines that we did not wait in lines. Not at customs. Not anywhere. We had bodyguards. We had vans that drove us across the tarmac — across the actual tarmac, through the actual airplane traffic — and delivered us directly to the plane door like we were cargo that needed special handling.
I find this hysterical now.
Because last month I was at the airport with my TSA PreCheck and my Global Entry — both of which I paid for with real money specifically so that I would not be inconvenienced — and I got pulled aside for a full pat-down. Arms out. Shoes off. The agent was very thorough. I stared at the ceiling and thought about the tarmac van and said nothing because what is there to say. (And maybe I won't pay extra for CLEAR if this keeps happening to me anyway.)
This is my life now and I have made peace with almost all of it.
The gas. The tires. The lines. The pat-downs. The customs agents who look at my passport like it's a puzzle they're not sure they can solve. (Ok, I admit...I am not photogenic sir.)
I have made peace with all of it.
And then I got an RV and I found a new thing to have feelings about.
The black tank.
If you don't know what a black tank is I envy you. I envy you the way I envy people who have never had to google something at 11pm that they cannot unlearn.
I know what a black tank is now. I think about the black tank. I monitor the black tank. I, a woman who grew up with household staff, have opinions about waste management that I share with my husband in complete seriousness.
This is character development.
The gray tank too, before you ask. I'm watching both.
But here's the thing about the RV — and I need you to understand this part — it is mine. Brand new. I christened it. I know what that means and you know what that means and we don't need to elaborate.
I want to be very clear about the brand new part because it matters.
Getting a brand new RV is like getting a brand new toothbrush. You don't share a new toothbrush. You don't hand it to someone and say here, just rinse it after. That's not generosity. That's a crime against personal hygiene and also my sanity. I did not spend forty years surviving things to share my toothbrush with someone who didn't survive anything with me.
It is new and it is ours and when I say ours I mean mine with my husband's name also on it because that's marriage.
Not anyone else's.
Mine.
Which brings me back to the man-child in my river.
He is 44 years old. He has Delta status. He would like you to know this.
He will tell you at dinner. He will tell you before dinner. He will tell you after dinner while you are trying to digest in peace. Every single visit, without fail, like a rotating PowerPoint presentation titled I Am Also Doing Well — the upgrade he got, the suite his father books on cruises, the first class cabin, the status, the status, the status.
(His father flies first class for me. This detail is not lost on anyone in the room. It is also not mentioned. We are polite people.)
He has the energy of someone who was told from birth that wanting something was the same as deserving it. Golden boy. Grandparents who loved him so much they forgot to say no. A mother who struggled. A young father doing his best. Nobody in this child's life apparently ever sat him down and said: other people's things are not your things.
I knew something was off the first time he mentioned, casually, how much money he was going to have when his grandmother passed.
His grandmother. Who was alive. Who was in the next room.
I filed that away. I never forgot it.
Then we got the Porsche — brand new, custom built online, shipped from Germany, a thing I helped design with on a website for hours. And he announced it to people who don't even know us before we could, which, fine, rude, but then — then — he stood in front of me and referred to it as his hand-me-down.
His.
Hand-me-down.
I coughed. My husband corrected him. I don't know if the cough helped but it made me feel better. Excuse me. I helped build this thing online, tracked its shipping from another continent, and someone wants to claim it before I even finished paying it off.
Then Maui. We have a condo. He wanted extra vacation days. He asked me directly, in front of my mother-in-law, without my husband present, clearly calculating that I would not say no in company.
He did not know me well enough.
I said no. Flat. Hard. No preamble, no apology, no softening for the audience. Just: no.
The room was quiet in a way that rooms get quiet when someone has said the thing nobody expected.
Then he asked if he could bring his friends.
To stay.
With us.
He brought friends — actual human beings he had invited — to a place he doesn't own, and then asked the owners if everyone could please have a sleepover...while we were also there. I dont know those people! And it's a one bedroom, one bath — I am not sharing that with four men I don't know.
I am from a family where my father's driver pumped the gas and my mother's helper ironed the sheets and I still managed to learn that things belong to people and you ask before you touch. Apparently this is not a universal lesson.
Days later, after several more nos — no to the extra days, no to the friends, no to squeezing into every trip that was supposed to be ours — he announced that his maternal grandfather was leaving him a Maui timeshare.
Someday.
When he passes.
(The timeshare has not materialized. We do not speak of this.)
Here is what I have come to understand about the Presumptive Heir to the Iron Throne.
(Presumptive. Because I am still very much alive.)
He is not just bragging. He is mirroring.
The highlights he got in his wig — the same shade as mine and same hair style. The dental work timed to mine — I got dentures because they were cheaper, practical, very me. He got one tooth screwed in and was genuinely surprised when I told him I had gone the denture route. Like he had expected us to match.
He copies the life his father built with me because somewhere in his 44-year-old brain this life was supposed to orbit around him. And then I arrived and it didn't anymore.
I did not take his father. I just became the center of gravity.
And he doesn't know how to exist outside that orbit so he just keeps circling. Announcing Delta status out of the blue. Showing up with uninvited friends. Getting one tooth done. Calling a car he didn't buy his hand-me-down.
It is, if I am being honest, a little sad.
It is also absolutely still my RV.
So there I am. Eel River. Fourth of July morning. Cool air, clear water, tiny fish, husband who found me the perfect spot because that is simply who he is.
No fireworks. We don't need fireworks. We are the kind of people who would rather watch a river than a crowd watch a sky.
And instead of being completely, fully, entirely present —
I am thinking about my bed.
My tiny toilet.
My black tank.
No. No. And absolutely not.
I am going to the Philippines next month. I will be gone for weeks. I will be holding my grandsons and meeting the newest baby and eating food that makes my cholesterol furious and I will be happy.
And somewhere behind that happiness, in the back of my brain, like a smoke alarm with a low battery —
beep
I know how this goes. Dad might give in. Dad loves his son. Dad is softer than he thinks he is and I knew that when I married him and mostly I love that about him.
But I also know what it feels like to spend forty years with nothing truly mine. A monster took the first half. Survival took the second. I came to this country and pumped my own gas and aired my own tires and stood in my own lines and got patted down at my own gate and I did all of it without complaint because this life — this specific life — was worth building.
I did not build it for the 'Heir to the Iron Throne'.
The water was so clear you could see straight to the bottom.
My husband was already making coffee. I could smell it from outside.
The tiny fish were doing their thing, unbothered, going wherever tiny fish go on a holiday morning when no one is watching.
I took a breath.
Not my bed, I thought. Not my toilet. Not my black tank.
Then I got up and went inside for coffee.
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