After my husband, I thought I’d never introduce another man to my mother. Then I did

My homecoming was meant to surprise her. Turns out the surprise was on me

Golden hour in Batulao, Batangas, just down the road from the church where I was married. I’m positive one of my wedding portraits was taken on the same hillside.

I surprised my mother on Christmas Eve.

It took her a few heartbeats to register that I was really there, standing by the front door with my husband and daughter, holding a tray of food that my sister, my accomplice in this heist, had ordered for our traditional Noche Buena meal.

Then an elated shriek as her eyes sparkled to life, her dimples deepened, and her face lit up with a pure joy that made the scheming, secret-keeping, and nearly sixteen hours of flying time all worth it. When I hugged her fragile frame, she didn’t want to let go.

We totally pulled it off. Mom hadn’t the slightest clue that I was coming home to the Philippines for Christmas. Somewhere between my DCIS diagnosis and losing my navel, she’d written off the possibility of seeing me this year. “Put your health first,” she’d insisted.

I didn’t tell Mom that the head of the plastic surgery department had cleared me to travel in October. That after two major operations and three unplanned ones, I was finally done, free of medical appointments and plastic surgeons and emergency room visits until my next check-up in March; that leaving the doctor’s office, I wondered why I didn’t feel more celebratory. Didn’t everyone call breast cancer a battle; did this not make me a victorious warrior? But I didn’t feel euphoric or triumphant, just… numb. Flat. Depleted.

Yet weeks before my flight, I pined for home with an acute longing I hadn’t felt in years. I had come to see Christmas in Manila as a cacophony of traffic jams, social obligations, and heightened emotions, but now I didn’t care. I was hungry for it all: the traffic, the noise, the activity. This year will be different, I said to myself. This year is different.

Of course, each homecoming is different, because we are never the same. I returned home a woman changed.

And for the first time, my boyfriend came home with me.

The two of us had been tiptoeing around the idea for years. He had never been to Asia; what better reason to go, and who better to give him the real local experience? Some nights we gazed at the vintage-style map on his wall, eyes drawn to my side of the world, and the wish would express itself in wistful feelers and careful nudges. Bringing him to the Philippines was a pipe dream that was almost too audacious to dream together.

Shared dreams were not a built-in feature of our relationship. Our love was puzzled together from bits of borrowed time: one night a week off from husband and family, then a first attempt at camping for two nights, until we negotiated our way up to longer adventures, an endeavour that took time, patience, and trust. But traveling halfway around the planet needed more than that.

It took five years and cancer for me to finally feel like I could ask for that time; not for romantic reasons, but for myself. And it took five years to reach a milestone that most couples might tick off in their first year of the relationship. Then again, he and I aren’t like most couples.

This year was different. I needed the extended stay home; I wanted to gift myself a trip of dreams to mark the end of a year of nightmares. My family couldn’t extend their stay—my daughter had school, my husband his work—but my boyfriend could join me. So he did.

There is something deeply vulnerable about revealing the place you call home to someone you love, especially if it lies on the other side of a vast cultural divide.

With a husband from the same country and culture, I had skipped this step; now it was time for the big reveal to my European boyfriend. From a distance, the Philippines appears to many Westerners as a tropical paradise, but those of us who have left—those of us it has hurt—are intimately acquainted with the reality behind the fantasy.

I drove my boyfriend to exasperation with a hundred warnings meant to ‘manage expectations.’ Manila traffic is beyond comprehension. It takes forever to get anywhere. Stop asking about insurance for the car, no one in the Philippines has any. Flights are always delayed, our airports are the worst. Your fair skin will burn in our sun. I’m serious about the traffic. ’I’m sure I’m going to love it!’ he insisted, trotting out the Irish national motto: ‘It’ll be grand!’

He’s saying that now because he has no idea, I thought. Now he’s going to see why I’m the way I am. Now he’s going to see why I’m crazy.

As a low-profile control freak, I felt personally responsible for ensuring that his experience was perfect, which added a whole new layer of neurosis to my already roiling mix of emotions.

On top of all that, he was going to meet my mother.

*

There should have been no reason for me to worry. Two years ago, my mother’s response to my coming out as polyamorous, with a boyfriend, had both blown me away and reassured me.

But I wasn’t the only one who’d changed since my last homecoming. After the delight of my Christmas Eve surprise faded, I was confronted with just how much my mother had, too.

There are words that explain the changes in her, but that I don’t want to use. Doctors’ words, damning words, words that make it too real and me too disloyal to commit to paper and in public, words that my sister and I still struggle to accept, words that my mother refuses to return to the doctors to confirm. Maybe you know the words, or know someone who lives with them.

I had never dreamed that I would be able to introduce my boyfriend to my mother. I had never believed that it would really happen. And I never imagined that when it finally did, he would no longer meet the mother I’d always known. For this time, coming home meant having to accept that that mother might already be gone.

How I wished he’d met her before, in an unspecified then: somewhere between the height of her powers and the unnoticed beginning of her decline, anytime but now.

But she was here, and now, so was he. He’d come halfway around the world to meet her where she was, as she was.

Though I sprang the news on Mom last minute (one surprise at a time, Deepa), she never resisted, no questions asked. The day after Christmas, I outlined the plan in a rush—husband and daughter would fly back after two weeks, and boyfriend would fly in for another two weeks, giving me a full month back home split between the loves of my life.

Her eyebrows shot up in surprise, but I could see a kind of mischievous delight in her expression. Perhaps she recognized a bit of herself in me then, for when it came to ambitious gambits, she was always the original; perhaps the apple learned watching the tree.

He really wants to meet you, and I want you to meet him, I said.

Of course! she said, holding her hand to her chest in mock scandal. As if it would be unthinkable for her not to meet him, and not, as so many other mothers might have felt, the other way around.

I could confess how uncharacteristically quiet I was when Mom and he finally came face to face, and how I could tell she was nervous, too. I could write about how she surprised me by telling him stories I’d never heard before; or how he dialed up the Irish charm 200% so that she never had a chance; or how he made her laugh so hard that food fell out of her mouth (a fact he’s particularly proud of).

I could how describe how scared I was when she began to ramble, but how he just listened, with a gentleness I rarely see from this kinetic whirlwind of a man, and with a patience that moved me.

Or I could just tell you that when my boyfriend met my mother, I saw two open-hearted people welcoming each other with genuine warmth and acceptance, two empaths meeting on a heart level. With no other reason to have met than that I loved them both, and that they each knew how much I loved the other.

I saw proof that love exists beyond logic, and that love makes improbable connections possible.

t’s been two weeks since I came home the other way round: back to the calm and structure of Amsterdam, which I need as much as I do the color and chaos of my islands.

I started out with the intention to write something entirely different about my homecoming. I might have written a travelogue to spirit you away to warm shores and tropical waters, a voluptuously described escape in the dead of winter.

Crossing the West Philippine Sea from Coron to El Nido, Palawan on a traditional paraw, was on my bucket list for years—it should be on yours, too

I might have written about sailing the seas on on a boat as my ancestors might have done, unplugged from the world and attuned to my body; about nights under the moon and stories by the fire; about slinging jokes and singing songs in my native tongue with voices who knew not just all the words, but all the feelings.

I might have written about one spectacular day after another, a liquid loop of pastel sunrises and show-stopping sunsets. Or how much it healed me to experience a string of good days that I could rely on. Or how all those days gave me back my ability to trust that life is more than a series of disasters waiting to happen.

I might have written about taking my boyfriend to the church where I was married 17 years ago, or to the university where I met my husband, or the midnight drive by the Catholic school where the Church had attempted (and clearly failed) to mold me into a good girl.

Who knows, I still might write about those things.

But I left Amsterdam with a suitcase filled with presents and returned laden with gifts of another kind. Those that fill you up, then can’t help but spill over.

The gift of seeing someone you love fall in love with where you’re from.

Of love, expressed in new and previously unimagined ways.

Of acceptance.

Of home.

No longer depleted, I can share again, and this is what I wanted to share with you.

Sending you much love from Amsterdam, until next time.