Pedro's Daughter

I put my arms around his tiny, thin frame and gazed into my father's stricken Filipino face. Flecks of snow started to fall as I glanced out the hospital window helplessly. I could see the fear in my mother's eyes as she looked into mine and took her last breath. My father sat in the corner of the hospital room, his head covered with his shaking hands, over come with grief and loss. It was their fiftieth wedding anniversary.

Dad was like a lost child. He was sobbing and shaking his head in bewilderment and confusion. I held him in my arms, asking myself why I hadn't been able to love this man as much as I had loved her.

My mother had been almost eight months pregnant before she realized she was carrying a child. A tiny, dark-haired baby of Filipino-American descent had arrived practically overnight after thirteen exasperating years of trying. At eight or nine years of age, I started to realize I was different, not like the other children, and I hated it. On weekends, we would embark on Sunday drives. Occasionally at stop signs, there would be an adjoining car next to us.

"Why are they staring at us, mama?" I asked.

My mother never answered me. She would simply roll down her window and say with what she considered dignity: "Why don't you pull up a little closer and take a good look?"

It was then that I realized it had something to do with me. They were staring at me disapprovingly. George Bernard Shaw said, "we live in an atmosphere of shame. we are ashamed of everything that's real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, our homes, accents, incomes, opinions, experiences, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins."

That's when it began, my shame and guilt. At first it was my own, and then it turned into my own prejudice toward my father because of his nationality. I became a prisoner in my self denial.

It was many years later that I found closure and acceptance of who I really was. I had carried a poison inside me with no antidote. I had let it fester like an incurable cancer. It was only through my father's profound faith that I was able to find my own. Through God's understanding and forgiveness I finally was able to find the beautiful child I had forgotten.

Pedro returned to his homeland of Iloilo, on the island of Panay, 55 years later after living in the US, with his then new bride of 88. I flew to the Philippines with my youngest daughter on a medical mission and met my family for the first time in my father's hometown in the Visayas a few years later after his death at 98. It was a trip long overdue.