Roots, Branches, Leaves

There is a point in my life when I had decided that I should learn as much as I can about my family. Perhaps it is because I had always believed that taking a certain amount of pride in one's heritage is very important in the way a person would handle his or her relationships. Or perhaps, distant or not, relatives will always, always have some sort of effect on the person an individual would become. To prove a point, I would like to share parts of my family history from my mother's side, if only to explain the person I am today.

I am no expert in genealogy, but I have enough passing interest in it to sit through some of the best stories my mother could tell. To make things easier, I think I should tell this story chronologically. My great grandmother was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, in a province that is notorious for having seriously hard times and misers to the bone. She was a lady through and through � beautiful, and determined to look and be her best no matter what the circumstance. Falling in love with a farmer, she married and had four beautiful and intelligent children � all of whom she and her husband raised to be the best people they can be, professional or otherwise. Her vibrant, beautiful personality, however, was snuffed out when her children were still in school; her husband also died young, leaving their children orphaned. My grandmother was one of those children.


The second of four children who lost their parents to illness and being an older sibling to a younger sister with only one lung (due to tuberculosis), my grandmother worked hard to become a capable nurse. Because of her duties, she married quite late into her life before moving to a quarantined village that is dedicated to the treatment and research of leprosy with her husband and her sister. It is in this community that she had given birth to her four children, and where she raised four of them alone after her husband had gotten another woman pregnant and moved to another place, in a completely different island. The way my mother tells it, my grandmother was the one who had asked her husband to go, claiming that she is fully capable of caring for their four children, plus her sister, on her own � the other woman, much younger, barely has anything to support herself, much less the child. At the time, my aunt, their youngest, was only a few months old.

But my grandmother made good with her vow. All four of her children grew up feeling loved, and not once did they feel poor although their funds were often stretched thin in my grandmother's determination to get them all good educations. While not all of them were quite as successful professionally as any parent would hope, they all still somehow managed to develop strong senses of selves and a determination to live life with as much happiness as they can hold.

My mother was the third of four children, the first female child in their brood. Being the first daughter and having won a bet for her father, she and her father had shared a rather close and attached bond before he left with another woman. She did have to suffer ever so slightly having to listen to gossip about her mother being left by her father, but being the little girl that my grandmother raised, she quickly learned to dismiss the whispers and instead focused on being someone other than "that man's daughter". She excelled in her schoolwork as well as her extracurriculars and eventually graduated high school with top honors. She then got a scholarship into a prestigious private university where she took up mass communication and met the man who would be her husband.

It would not be long before she would become fairly well-known in the world of advertising as someone who is intelligent, hard-working and (not too long after graduation) married to one of the most promising creative writers in the business. With her husband, she had three children � all born within the first three years of her marriage. But as they progressed with their lives and expressed their own individual priorities, it became very clear that the marriage will not survive "'til death do us part". Before their inevitable separation, my mother had completely taken over paying for everything domestic as my father chose to move to a completely different, less paying line of business. By the time they were living in different households, their children (myself being the eldest) were in college and my mother has the working title of VP in a national branch of an international advertising company.

I have come from a direct line of incredibly strong women; it is something that I take pride in, and something that pushes me to be the best person I can be. The women before me may not have been all successful in their careers, but they are successful as women of strength. I aspire, with all my heart to be like them; and right now, as a writer, and as my own person, I feel blessed to have been under their influence, to share their blood.

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