Z-Mom-Bie Falling

Life lesson: When the bottom drops, the terror is not in the falling but in the unending break. 

There is no rest for my soul!  I feel like  my mind and emotions have been wandering nowhere… forever… and I’m now functionless.  I have become what my dad dubbed as a “z-mom-bie”; a zombie mommy.  I’ve even begun looking the role, as family/friends watch me fall apart. 

I hate being this way; I prefer happiness and all things that make me want to smile all the way down from my toes. Yet, I am not going to lie—I’m heart sick.  I am sick of crying; sick of stress; sick of watching loved ones suffer; sick of complaining; sick of ‘sucking it up’; sick of trying so hard to just live my life! Gee…am I depressing? Yah... I know…I’m sick of that too.

But wouldn’t you feel as crappy as I feel too—if you found out your father was dying and couldn’t travel half the world away to say goodbye in person because of fear to leave your son when he is fighting pediatric cancer? And just when you finally come to terms of inadequately saying goodbye in a written letter and accepting your brother’s good will to be the ambassador for both, you find out that—THAT dreadful plan may not be an option anymore because a typhoon that has devastated the Philippine islands…most majorly the island in which your father is too sickly to evacuate…and now you have no news as to his and the rest of your family’s safety and well-being!!!!

I bet you would feel just like me… Not only do I feel confused, sad, lost, alone, desperate, and angry, I also feel guilty and regretful.  I feel regret in not being more of the daughter of the best father in the world and guilt for having a life that is so incomparable to the one I would have lived if I never left my third-world country.  Ever since I was separated from my father, I vowed that I would come back and take care of him; I had taken the responsibility and burden to better myself through US opportunities, ultimately providing my family relief in every way that I couldn’t if I stayed.  Unfortunately, by the time I was able to give help, my father’s health was deeply negatively impacted.  Marko and I have sent money the past 12 years to help my father and brothers buy food, make repairs on their fishing boat, and address proper health care with medicine and specialty care.  Still…it wasn’t enough.  I could only send very little and he had compounding health problems that I could not heal.  Don’t get me wrong, my Tatay appreciated and took the help that I knew made him feel ashamed to be helped by his daughter.  It was and is the least I could do for the man that gave me this life…that I very much love: the family that I have created with my husband and my children.

And now…I scan the news and online websites fearful that I would glimpse at a vision of my father taken away by a typhoon.  I absorb the photographs of a destroyed coastal homes of Leyte and its non-operating airport of Tacloban city. With no power and no forms of communication available and working, I am frightened into silence and despair.  It will be a week before my brother and mother fly to Manila and I hope that we hear good news from my father—or at the very least, the airport is again in use… My greatest fear is that my brother will have to spend his time there in-search of our father…eventually, unable to have the moment to say goodbye. 

There can only be an empty finality if our father departs without either me or my brother by his side and the comfort of love that he deserves. The feeling of unrest will remain forever.

 I pray that God will be merciful.  Until then, I will be waiting for some good news to break my fall.

**oh and on a freaky side note…Roman has been taking the framed picture of my father, me, and brothers off the piano and studying it as he sits it on top of his dinner placemat, his designated area to sit and eat.  For the past few weeks, he has done this, before all the bad news has occurred. There was no interest before his sudden particular interest and I wonder if Roman has some sort of sixth sense...

I have included the picture.
salamat sa iyo kaibigan