The package

Our overseas workers are considered our new heroes. However, even with their efforts of keeping their family members connected despite the distance that separates them, their heroism might not be sufficient to save their own family from breaking apart.

It was more painful than anything else. My clearest childhood memory was of my mother putting her clothes inside a worn-out suitcase that she had borrowed from a neighbor and promised to replace with a brand-new one when she received her first salary. In those vivid slides of images running through my mind, she seemed to be weeping inwardly, but her tears were solid as they flowed down her cheeks. When I tried to wipe them away, she hugged me so earnestly that I started to fret that the bridges of my bones would get fragmented if she left me. But then she did.

I thought I would never get out of my crib when my mother left me. With this mournful goodbye that I refused to hold in my hand like the stopping of a clock, I pursued the idea that she would come back to grant all my wishes: to have more pictures with her as I grew up, more pancakes and peanut-butter sandwiches to be served at the dining table when I got home, more stories to be told before I went to sleep, more lullabies to be sung when I had nightmares about bullying, more heartfelt conversations about infatuation and true love, and how she and my dad met right before she attempted to be part of a veiled clique. “How I met your father,” she would say, and how I wished she was a fisherman that could pull out a twisted hook from my heart.

The last time she was with me, we went to a toy store and we bought this Barbie doll. The cost was equivalent to what my father earned in one day. The saleslady handed me the box with a smile that flashed from ear to ear. I clutched the box with my small arms; it felt as if it was bigger than me.

The saleslady led us to the counter to pay for it. My mother fished out her wallet from her vintage purse and opened it. She seemed so bothered. When I looked at her wallet, I saw that it was full, not of money, but of photographs. All she had there amounted to the price of the doll. We left the store with me still carrying the box.

“Maybe we should take a walk. I haven’t had exercise for a long time,” she said. Her grimace was similar to the rays of sunlight on a Sunday afternoon—so bright you could never decipher the secret it hid. She was smiling painfully. I nodded—an agreement that we would get home terribly exhausted. She wanted to carry me but I knew she had been carrying too heavy a burden on her shoulders, and I didn’t want to add more to it. It took us almost an hour to get home.

We had those long-distance conversations through the years. Every time I answered the phone, I found that her voice had changed into a much older sound, and her words seemed to become more terrified to say that she was tired. Her way of saying “okay” was strange. It was an “okay” that was partly “okay” and partly “I want to go home.”

Every three months she would send us a big package. I always had great expectations of that package, hoping that when I opened it, she would jump out and surprise me. Inside the package were dolls and teddy bears, school supplies, and other things that she thought I needed.

But I needed her more than those things. Still I couldn’t tell her that those things were not what I wanted. I kept everything to myself, for the reason that everything was much harder for her than for me.

As I grew up, I also learned to keep secrets from her. I did not tell her that I saw naked photos of a woman in Dad’s cell phone. I did not tell her how I suffered from my first menstrual pain. And I did not tell her how much I missed her.

One morning a phone call alarmed me and took me to a different side of the world. I fell silent. The caller kept on talking, kept on saying that I should go to this place to claim her remains. All of a sudden, my entirety was swallowed up. I was nowhere. I could not let myself weep in misery because it did not sink into my heart immediately.

My expectation had become real. I would be receiving the last package, with my mother in it.

Jho Castro, 20, studies at St. Paul College of Ilocos Sur.