That’s how the ball bounces

The reality in 2012: I am expendable.

My mind races back to my published article on the deliciously bittersweet stages of parenthood, of the inexplicable joy of having children, of the tormenting empty nest syndrome (“Full strung and dizzy,” Inquirer, 4/9/03).

That was not too long ago. Nine short years—or were they light years long? That was (and is) my voyage—raising six productive professionals from the best universities in Manila into upright citizens of the world.

The universe belongs to me.

Yet now I skip along the pool of aloneness and loneliness. Is there truth to the saying that one can be alone and not be lonely? Isn’t it that humans are social animals and need the company of fellow animals?

I am in a total wreck of disbelief and in an oppressive state of unbelief. Where is my husband? Where are my children? And their families? Where have they all gone?

The handsome, affectionate husband has gone to the great beyond, and the beloved children and their families to the different continents of the world, where they have all grown strong, steady and healthy roots. Do I swim the oceans? Do I take a flight like the migratory birds?

The soul dries out as the house is emptied of jubilant voices and laughter, of children’s playful grumbling and bickering.

First to leave was the panganay  (first born). This first experience cuts into your heart and rends it to pieces. That painful memory haunts you forever, deeply imbedded in one chamber of your brain.

Not long after, the  bunso  (last born) flies off in a big bird called KLM. She’s a girl. She’s young and pretty. Her safety, dear Lord. Her womanhood in a strange European land. I get frazzled and my bolts are unscrewed.

Years pass and the numbers dwindle. Does the brain get paralyzed? Do motherhood’s sweet emotions, treasured and priceless, get numb, immune and paralyzed, too? Unfeeling, unaffected by constant migration?

Again, yet again, three of the children and their families have to go. My blood rages. My heart beats stronger than terrorists’ bombs. I try a good deal to defy reality. No more tears, not even a faint teardrop. As some of my grandchildren teasingly put it, “Alang  kikyak, Grama (No crying, Grama).” And folklore says you must not send them off with tears and with a heavy heart. So I send them off with crocodile smiles and tight embraces, prayers and blessings for peaceful, secured and contented lives.

I get frazzled once more. When will I ever embrace them again? Unsettled, living with an unnatural menace of fear and loneliness, I exorcise myself. And try hard in my mornings to bring freshly squeezed joy in my solo life.

Happily, in these days of magic jack and the magical world of the Internet, I enjoy the heat of long-distance love. The mighty webcam streaks with the faces of my grandchildren squirming like huge wrigglers, jostling for space to see me, to talk to me. Coaxing me to come over. I then imagine myself in a carnival of merry-go-round continent-hopping.

Yet in my intimate knowledge, my children and their spouses would have chosen to stay, clung tightly to their good lives in their revered Philippines, but for their children’s future.

What is the purpose of my life? Is this all there is to it? To be alone at the end of the rainbow?

“Alone” is a miserable, wretched word. It enervates the spirit. It slices the heart and soul and torments one’s nights. Well-meaning friends offer consolation, relatives come to visit. Yet I feel I am empty. The company of a loyal  yaya  of 21 years is not sufficient to fill the disquieting vacuum.

Then God, truly all-loving, commiserates with me. He leaves me one Philippine-side son and his family. As Rick Warren divinely puts it, “God already knows what you need, before you ever prayed for it.”

Recently, unannounced, my son and his wife came visiting from Manila, as they occasionally do. They dropped the nuclear bomb: “Mama, take two months. Give yourself two months to sort out all household goods and prepare to live with us.” I was like Chicken Little with the world falling on me. I could not just leave like that. Desert my lovely house, desert the womb and cradle of my children’s childhood? And what do I do with all the things I hold so dear, accumulated in a lifetime?

Dreams. Dreams of yesterday. Oh, to buy back time and to live once more my Camelot.

This is the purpose. This is what and how God meant it to be—FAMILY, FAMILY. Concentric wheels that never end. A cycle.

In this senescence of golden age, in this poignancy of solitude, in this irrational feeling of nothingness, of purposelessness, I grieve, immobilized by the thought that I am disposable. Petrified that I am now my children’s daughter, and they, the directors in the last lap of my life. Mortified, with certainty, that I am now losing my freedom and my right to make choices and decisions of my own.

I am expendable. Parents are expendable. That’s how the ball bounces.

P.S. I have been lovingly “house-napped” by my son and his wife and am now living with them. But with my neurons circuited actively and still having steel knees, I guess I will conspire with the angels to wing my way around the continents.

Estelita Buan Ocampo, 85, is a retired school supervisor and coauthor of textbooks in reading and arithmetic for Grades 1 and 2 in Philippine public schools. She holds master’s degrees in English and psychology from Ateneo de Manila University. She is a member of the Holy Name Society of Jesus and a former lecturer on family relationships and boy and girl relationships.