I never loved ‘Wildflower’

We often compare women to flowers, a metaphor that says more about cultural expectations than actual people.

Perhaps that is why “Wildflower” became such a fitting title for a teleserye about suffering, revenge, and transformation. Lily Cruz, played by Maja Salvador, did bloom, if blooming is what we call turning pain into spectacle and vengeance into triumph. My mother loved that show. Every afternoon before “TV Patrol,” she sat in front of the television, invested in Lily Cruz’s suffering and transformation. It fascinated me how someone could be emotionally available to fictional pain and absent from the real thing.

People say life is a stage and each of us has a role to play. My mother must have taken that seriously because she always needed to be the main character.

To be fair, her life had all the ingredients of a proper Filipino melodrama. She became a mother at 16. Then another child followed. There was poverty, instability, fractured relationships, and eventually me, the youngest child, whose paternity remains uncertain because her relationships with two men overlapped closely enough to make certainty impossible. Friends have joked that my life sounds like “Maalaala Mo Kaya” or “Magpakailanman.”

The difference, of course, is that television scripts end.

My siblings and I were left with relatives the way some people leave pets with trusted neighbors before a trip. Fed, perhaps. Temporarily housed. Visited when convenient. I sometimes joke that some members of our family were “pet lovers,” but humor has always been one of the cleaner ways to tell dirty truths. At least stray animals are rarely made to feel guilty for existing.

I later learned that my mother once planned to give me up for adoption to a doctor, but my grandmother intervened. Sometimes I think about that alternate life, not because I believe money or professional parents would have magically repaired everything, but because abandoned children become very good at imagining parallel universes.

Perhaps I would have become the doctor I once wanted to be.

Instead, I became the child who cried too much. The child relatives compared to a tiyanak because of an ugly face. The child who learned early that gratitude can be weaponized against those who have nowhere else to go.

In the Philippines, we often romanticize the extended family as proof of communal care and resilience. Less discussed is how that structure can absorb the consequences of parental abandonment while children learn to treat displacement as normal.

My mother chose men. She chose gambling. She chose absence with a consistency that almost resembled routine.

I know the expected response here. People prefer to ask what happened to women like her. What wounds did she carry? What kind of childhood made her this way? Which social conditions shaped her decisions?

These are not irrelevant questions. Poverty, gendered precarity, abandonment, and limited choices shape many women’s lives in this country. But structural explanation should not become moral anesthesia. At what point do we stop treating harm as inherited tragedy and start naming it as a decision?

Our culture is fluent in stories of suffering. We consume betrayal, sacrifice, poverty, and abandonment when they fit familiar emotional scripts. We can root for fictional women demanding justice while overlooking quieter violence inside our own homes. When my mother came home, she did not always bring food, sometimes she brought a silence that made the house feel smaller.

Even now, my body remembers what my mind tries to intellectualize away: the tension at certain footsteps, the reflex to become quiet, the instinct to brace when someone enters a room too loudly. Trauma is political in that way. It does not remain private simply because it happens inside a home. The family is imagined as a sanctuary, but it can also be an institution where power is exercised without accountability.

And still, “Wildflower” played. That unsettles me most. How does someone spend hours watching stories about betrayal and injustice while participating in quieter versions of both? How does one root for fictional women demanding justice while creating fear in one’s own children?

Perhaps this is why I distrust revenge narratives. Pain explains many things. It does not sanctify them. We compare women to flowers as though blooming is inherently beautiful, as though difficult conditions automatically produce admirable resilience. But some things survive and become dangerous. Some things grow thorns. Some things learn to wound what comes closest.

I am not defending my mother. I am refusing the easier script. She may not have chosen every condition that shaped her life. Few people do. But suffering does not produce wisdom, tenderness, or moral clarity. Sometimes suffering produces more suffering. And children are often the ones expected to call that resilience.

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Christian dela Cruz, 23, is a communication arts major in writing student at the University of the Philippines Los Baños.