I once exchanged my mother for Barbie dolls. At eight, I thought it was a brilliant idea, but ultimately I regretted it.
Money was becoming increasingly hard to come by, with three children going to the same expensive private school and only one minimum-wage earner in the family. The only option left was for my mother to go to work, preferably abroad, where the work hours are longer but the pay bigger. But there was clingy eight-year-old me, youngest of the three children, and fiercely protective of my mother.
At that time, I had a passion for three things: reading fairy tales, becoming a princess, and acting mom to my worn-out Barbie. Seeing it as a perfect opportunity, my parents offered me a choice: Force my mother to stay, or let her go in exchange for new Barbie dolls—shiny originals, not like my knock-off whose head fell off whenever I combed its uncooperative hair. Like a child being offered candy, I melted. They promised that my mother would be back soon anyway.
She was gone for six years.
As an eight-year-old who barely knew her way through household chores and homework, spending my days without my mother was a bumbling, awkward mess. I had to learn, through all the afternoons alone with my gentle (but very sleepy) grandmother in the house while my sisters were in school and my father at work, how to be my own person. It was a hard task, too, being the spoiled bunso who got away with everything just by crying, “Mommmyyy!”
It was not the best environment to grow up in, what with an empty house devoid of the sound of my mother working on her sewing machine, and motherly advice delivered through the choppy connections of a cell phone instead of face to face and with a comforting hug. But we tried to make it work. As everyone else said, the situation was “all for the best.”
Our Saturday family nights, previously spent watching rented VCDs, morphed into us staring into a different screen as we conducted video calls with my mother until it was time for her to tend to other children again. My father and sisters always talked to her first, but I usually had her longest. Like tucking me in with a fairy tale, she told me about her adventures, her new friends, and all the treasures she’d bring home for me.
She was the complete opposite of the Barbie dolls I wanted her to give me. The ones I wanted had perfectly curly hair, colorful makeup and the most elaborate dresses, with a grand doll house—and even Ken. My mother, in all those calls, looked worn. Her thin hair fell limply to her shoulders (she blamed the cold weather in the Netherlands), her previously-healthy frame seemed frail (she said she thrived on vegetables and bread), her eyes were swollen (she said she was always reading well into the night), and her face pale (she stopped wearing her usual brown lipstick). But her face always lit up whenever any of us sat in front of the camera, always ready with a warm smile and an exclamation of how beautiful we were: “Ang ganda-ganda ng mga anak ko!”
Her vacations became more frequent when her wards moved to Malaysia, and she was allowed to visit every few months. She was supposed to come home for good after her stint in Malaysia because my eldest sister had only a couple years of college left and then it would be her turn to be “strong” for the family and provide. But my mother would have none of it. The only time we would go abroad, she said, was for leisure, and never to be a helper like her. We were never to waste our education to wipe the poop off someone else’s dog.
Then she moved back to the Netherlands with her bosses, and we were back to e-mails and video calls.
Oh, I did get my Barbie dolls a year after my mother’s departure, on one of her rare vacations from the greener Dutch pastures. Receiving the dolls was underwhelming, even more so because my mother stayed for only a few days before heading back abroad. Sure, the dolls were what I wanted, but they only gave me the kind of satisfaction one gets from eating sweet candy. You enjoy it for a while, and then you’re left with a toothache.
My mother came home for good during my last year in high school. The Barbie dolls had long been forgotten, and I tried to make up for all the years we’d missed. But my decision to exchange her for something plastic and temporary I will always remember.
Lausanne D.R. Barlaan, 20, is in her last year in communication arts at the University of the Philippines Los Baños.