Missing Home
by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz
Do children absorb what we learn while they are still in the womb? I was taking language lessons during my first pregnancy, and I wonder if this explains Joel’s aptitude for languages.
It amazes me how easily he switches from Dutch to English and how he’s managed to pick up some Filipino words which his father still can’t master.
It’s fun listening to him say: “What did I tell you, O di ba? See, see, O.”
He says it exactly as I would, with matching accent and facial expression.
He’s also picked up on how I use “hay naku talaga!” when I’m a bit exasperated. Like the time he crossed the street on his bike without looking and I almost bumped into him.
“Don’t you do that again, hay naku talaga, Joel Jan!”
Later, I’ll hear this repeated back at me when I keep away something that’s not meant to be kept away, like this Lego car he keeps adding pieces to every day.
“Mama, I was working on that. Hay naku talaga!”
And when he wants something really bad, his intuition seems to tell him that if he looks at me pleadingly and says, “sige na, please”, he’s got a ninety percent chance of getting it.
These days, we have these conversations while biking home from school about what we have in the Philippines and what they have here in The Netherlands.
“The Netherlands has havens,” he said to me the other day. “Do they also have havens in your country?”
“Of course we have havens in The Philippines.”
“But probably not as modern as the havens in Rotterdam,” he says.
To him, everything in The Netherlands has got to be bigger, better, more modern, more sophisticated, and simply more than anything we’ve got back home.
Another day, we had a discussion about skin color and about how I am a brown Filipina and not a white Dutchwoman. This discussion seems to come back around every now and then, coupled with ambivalence on his part about his own identity.
Is he Dutch or Filipino? Which country does he belong to, and what should he call himself? And how many countries does he belong to anyway?
Coming home from our last trip to the Philippines, it was so silent in the back of the car, I thought he’d fallen asleep. And then, I heard a sniff.
Me: Are you okay?
Joel: Yes. Except, I don’t know anymore where my real home is.
A part of Joel Jan still longs to return to the Philippines and I understand how going home at seven years old affects him much deeper than our previous visits. For one, he’s much more mature and he understands how distance means he won’t be able to see or enjoy his grandparents and his aunts and uncles as much as he used to.
I’m glad for the openness that still exists between us. Glad that he’s not yet in those years where Mom and Dad come from a different planet. I understand too how his need to feel grounded here in The Netherlands has a lot to do with him missing The Philippines and the family we’ve left over there.
Every now and then, he asks, “Mama, when are we going back again to the Philippines?”
Yes, I know he misses home too.
Rochita Loenen-Ruiz is the mother of Joel Jan and Samuel. She is married to a Dutchman, and has been living in The Netherlands for the past eight years. Aside from being a fulltime housewife, she gives piano and voice lessons, and is a volunteer for Stichting Bayanihan (a support center for Filipinas in The Netherlands).
Her work has appeared in a variety of print and online publications both in the Philippines as well as abroad. She is also a regular columnist for The Sword Review; an editor and columnist for Haruah, a magazine of Inspiration, and a columnist for Munting Nayon, a newspaper for the Philippine-Dutch community in the Netherlands. She is currently working on a number of projects, including a poetic memoir—excerpts of which have appeared in Route’s Skin Byteback Book (March 2007, UK), and Chickflicks Ezine (March 2007, USA)