The parents, a child’s sanctuary

By: Merne S. Natividad

“…but ma’am, I want my mother’s hug more than the money she sends me from Chicago each month. I am having difficulty with my friends now and I miss my mama’s counsel…I think I am pregnant too…I miss my best friend. My dad is nowhere. I think he has a mistress…”

“…I got hooked on shabu a month after my father left for Qatar to work there ma’am. My grades are no better than an idiot’s. I don’t like going home because my mom is always shouting at my younger sisters. She’s alone raising us. I wish my father came home. We don’t really need money. We used to be happy. There’s always public school…”

These are some disclosures from the many college students whom I have counseled through the different difficulties they experienced as they tried to adjust to a life with an absentee parent.

It is sad that the payoff for working outside of the Philippines for a parent who only wants to give the best to his children brings more harm than good. I cannot utter more distinctly why I have said this. Every Filipino knows what this portrays. This is an unassailable fact.

In the beginning, there is excitement. A parent goes off to work in a more lucrative place. Earning in dollars is seen as the key to ensuring a bright and successful future for the children left at home. Visions of the future flashes through before one’s eye like painted caricatures depicting a “better life”. Children’s tuition paid-off, branded clothes and shoes, and the house looks exactly like the ones from real estate advertisements.

Everything is laid out very nicely and successfully. No need has ever been thwarted when a child has a dollar-earning parent. Tangible needs, that is. More money means more “meaning” to the family. More happiness. More fun. More. More. Of the good things.

However, as time passes the creeping loneliness sets in upon the child who is left behind. The price of leaving a family for better pay comes in a more insidious fashion. The first months are difficult because loneliness sets in. As a parent tries his best to swallow every lump of tearful longing to be home the child he has left behind has to displace his yearning for a parent’s physical presence. A child always finds sanctuary in a parent’s physical presence. Take out this refuge and you might as well cut the umbilical cord from a fetus in a mother’s womb.

The setback begins when the need to fill up the gaping hole left by the lost sanctuary starts to set in. More unconsciously than otherwise, the child left behind starts to find another sanctuary. Another gap-filling-in-the-hole situation comes along figuratively, a child who seeks security, which obviously, the money of a parent working abroad can never fill in.

In all these years however, not one of my college counselees have been ungrateful for what a parent working abroad has given them. They are aware of how difficult it can be for their parents to temporarily cut their ties with them. These counselees are very appreciative of this loving deed a parent does for them. And yet, they are emotionally restless. They are lonely. Having counseled numerous college kids over the years, it makes me terribly sad, that a child gets lost because a parent is physically absent.

But the question still lies suspended in the air. What does a child whose parent is working abroad really need from a parent? I cannot answer, as I am not a parent. Of one thing I am certain though. In all these times, I have repeatedly seen that a child’s greater need is parental affection and not material things. The happiest college students I have encountered are those who are intimate with their parents. Those who get regular hugs from by their sanctuary, their parents.

*Merne Natividad is from the Department of Psychology and Guidance of Xavier University-Ateneo de Cagayan