The worst time ever
It’s like a bad dream.
Vergel and I are in the office of the police investigators for the protection of children, desperately repeating our story again and again, for the record. My 16-year-old granddaughter, left in my care all these past four years, has gone missing.
I wasn’t worried when her dad, my youngest son, took her on an unplanned vacation, but he has gone back to the United States, leaving her behind, in unknown hands.
My son suddenly appeared on July 7, jumping into our condominium elevator with us. I never saw his daughter, an only child desperate for her father’s affection, happier. I saw it as a perfect chance all around, not just for him and me to repair our long-strained relationship but most especially for father and daughter, to make up for much lost time.
I didn’t ask for this surrogate’s job, by the way. I was 80 when it fell to me, and, now 84, I’m even more overqualified for it. But I have stepped up, and loved it ever since—what grandmother would not?
Both father and daughter are American-born. An unmarried dad, he left the US Army to come and join us, his family in Manila. In 2019 he got a job offer in the US and in less than a year he was off, and his new wife and her three grown children from a previous marriage joined him shortly, leaving my granddaughter with me in the middle of the school year.
It remains a mystery why all this time my son hasn’t fixed her passport so that she could join them in the US and benefit from all the generous American privileges due her—free education and general state support, which I have myself provided for her in the meantime.
Vast generation gap
I transferred her to a school near me, where she is now an incoming 11th-grader with very good marks. My husband, not only younger but naturally resilient, tried to bridge our generation gap with her. He was somehow able to relate to her taste in music, which gave me a headache—the classical music that kept playing at home drove her crazy.
But with some home education in the classics, she developed what seemed a natural inclination. She joined the school chorale and soon learned to like concerts, and ballet and theater, too, and often joined us for them. She has always loved books and journaling.
Vergel became her choice of date for father-daughter day in school, and didn’t in the least mind being the old odd man out. Both had fun. He drove her to school and picked her up when her bus couldn’t do it or her extracurricular activities kept her in school long after school. We took her to her parties and hung around the mall ourselves, observing out of sight, whenever she and her friends hung out.
I was the announcer of bad news: bath time, lights out, and time to retire her gadgets. Lanie our kasambahay prepared her breakfast, often ahead of everyone else’s, and packed her lunch kit every school day.
Despite our best efforts, there was no denying the vast generation gap. At parent-teachers conferences we looked like the parents of the teachers. I had to color my gray again to seem younger, if only from a distance. We may have been up to the job, but our looks gave us away, no matter how much we tried.
Unexpectedly, my daughter and eldest child, Gia, moved in with us last year. She had been mother to my granddaughter since my bachelor son, her brother, brought her as a 4-month-old to live with her family, with her own son and two daughters, until he got married and took her, then already 8 years old, to join his new family.
Aging Pollyana
So how did this octogenarian end up at a police station in such desperate circumstances? It is a long and complicated story, one normal, reasonable listeners are bound to find incredible. Suffice it to say that all faults belong to the adults in her life and that she is completely blameless.
It’s true I reacted in a panic. I may have done too much, said too much. Maybe I took my responsibilities too seriously. Maybe it’s time to let go.
But there must be a better, kinder, less traumatic way for the child to be thrown suddenly into yet another set of new circumstances—our clinician herself has always advised regularity. Where is she, in whose care? She is due back in school on the 8th, and for dental and medical appointments.
For her sake, all the presumed grown-ups who now have her and claim to have the best of intentions for her should do what’s best for her—come out in the open with her and let her speak freely and make the choice that may be reasonably and legally left for her to make.
Meanwhile, a police alarm remains raised for her as a missing person, and police and social workers continue to seek and investigate, evaluating suspicious, untraceable communications claiming she is safe.
The situation is sure to take its toll on me, though, as luck would have it, my heart blockages have been opened by two stents and my latest CT scan has shown no growth, in any case nothing remarkable that is not due to age.
My journalist husband, a professional skeptic, is bothered that I have a tendency to be an aging Pollyanna. I believe in miracles too much. Vergel says I always set myself up for a fall. In this case, he alludes to my rosy projections from the sudden unannounced visit of my son—that he has come a changed man and father, for her daughter.
Still, I keep faith in prayers and feel lifted by the outpouring of messages of support and and sympathy, which by themselves—and here I go again—bring energy to all hope that things will turn out for the best.
