Home alone

I’m not referring to the movie where a young boy is inadvertently left alone at home by his parents and siblings taking off for the Christmas holidays. Burglars attempt a break-in but the smart kid is able to fend them off several times.

The movie was a comedy, but I’m thinking of something more serious, which is the sense of being at home, and yet being alone.

There are times when we welcome being alone, taking in calm solitude. But I worry about a world where we find ourselves terribly alone in a street teeming with people … or in our own homes. It can be fleeting, such as after relatives or friends come to visit and leave, and you find yourself missing them. It’s a cycle I go through very often, especially now with the summer break and my daughters come to stay with me for extended
periods and leave with many more hugs, many more goodbyes and I tease them complaining that my dogs get more hugs than I do.

The sadness is fleeting because I know they’ll be back in a few days. It becomes harder when the departure is extended, and I grieve for the hundreds of thousands of Filipino families who have to say goodbye to loved ones who have to work away from home for long periods.

Then there is the overwhelming grief coming from a death of a loved one, but that too will pass, with more difficulty but it will pass.

The most terrible of the home alone situations is to be home, with relatives and friends, and yet to feel alone, for any number of reasons. It can be from a feeling of being unloved or unwanted. This can happen to adopted children if not told early enough so please, please do not wait until they’re adolescents to tell them.

It can happen as well in blended families, where children from different parents end up in one family, such as when widows or widowers remarry. The stepchildren may feel the difference in the way they are treated by the stepparent. Sometimes, a child may even feel a difference in the treatment by their biological parent once a half-sibling is born.

Then there’s discrimination. The child who feels he or she isn’t as smart as the other one. Sibling order comes in as well, the “bunso” (youngest) seemingly more favored.

There’s discrimination too simply because one is different. Lesbian, gay, transgender children have a much tougher time,
facing discrimination in school, then sometimes going home to find even harsher situations, including physical abuse.

Home pressures

I write now as an educator and school administrator. I worry too about the bright kids living with too much pressure from their parents and, occasionally, even grandparents. Kids are told they have to live up to the family name: all from the same university, or all from the same profession.

I tell my deans and institute directors that the brighter they are, the more fragile. And I’m telling parents and grandparents now: Don’t push your bright kids away by excessive pressure. They know what you want all too well, and are more easily overcome by guilt when they feel they’re not living up to your expectations.

The home alone syndrome affects older members of the family, too. Spouses and partners. You see him or her, and you miss that person you knew once. You are home, alone … if it were not for the children.

The children are smarter than we think: They know, and they will pay a dear price for it later. A study just published showed that children growing up in difficult family circumstances grow up actually “overreading” displeasure and anger in the faces of people around them. This is because, to survive, they have become conditioned to spotting tensions and conflicts in the family. In the process, they “underread” kindness and support from people around them and may feel home alone.

I’m sharing all these thoughts that came after a class last
Friday with Philippine Studies graduate students. We were talking about mental health problems of young people today. There was the usual enumeration of possible reasons, always phrased as “too much”: TV, the internet, gaming, marketing gimmicks.

‘Tahan na’

Then one of the students, Bernard Bragas, said he wanted to look at the problems with a different eye, by focusing on the home, “tahanan” in Filipino. He asked if the word might have been derived from “tahan,” which suggests calmness.

“Tahan” actually means “to cease” or “to stop” but you find it in many love songs, usually in the context of having hurt someone you love and are now overwhelmed by the pain you caused. You ask for forgiveness and promise to make amends.

I seem to recall it can be used as part of a lullaby, “tahan na” to mean stop crying. Even if the child is not crying though, you can still lull the child to sleep as you gently rock them in your arms with “tahan na” becoming a magical chanting to chase the anxieties away.

Somewhat a hybrid of a lullaby and a love song is Regine Velasquez’s “Tahan” from the movie “Paano Kita Iibigin,” which talks of overcoming the darkness of the night, with a reassurance that a new day approaches and to dispel fears of ever being alone.

I wanted to link this notion of “tahan na” to the English expression “home is where the heart is.” Homes should be a place for renewal and a refuge for weary, troubled, angry, hurt, and broken hearts. If we sometimes hurt each other in our homes, it must be, too, in those homes that we heal the hurt heart.

I grew up in a household that didn’t use “tahan na” but I can relate to the spirit of the term in the way my mother would console, comfort, encourage. More often than not, there were no words exchanged. I can think of the many times of wanting to rush home for “tahan na,” and this went on well into adulthood. There was that night, for example, before one of my daughters had to go through a second open heart surgery and I knew I had to go and see my mother. Her mere presence was enough of a “tahan na,” it will be all right.

That daughter now visits her very ill Lola to hug her, or gently stroke her arm, hold her hand, as do her sisters.

I tell my daughters about how their Kuya, who must have been 8 or 9 at the time, stayed with his Lola in a hospital room for a nasogastric tube insertion. I could hear her protesting, then heard his voice: “It will be all right, Lola, it will be all right.” Kuya scoffs when I tell the story, almost embarrassed, but I tell him, and the girls, real men must be as good as women when it comes to comforting people.

No one should ever be home alone and all it takes is one person who will be there to convey, with or without words, “tahan na.”

mtan@inquirer.com.ph