ABSTRACT
Cecilia, aged 23, was born in Manila. Her parents raised pigs, but the business folded and her mother felt she had to leave to pay their debts, going to the US as a caregiver, although entirely without training for this job. As was typical in our fieldwork, underlying the mother’s decision to leave was an estrangement between wife and husband. Cecilia’s father was already seeing other women and taking drugs. After ten years in the US, Cecilia’s mother returned only once to the Philippines, the year before we met Cecilia. Cecilia felt that this period of absence between the ages of 14 to 22, was pretty much exactly that period of adolescence during which she expected, following what has become a common trope in discussions of modern parenting, that her own parents would evolve from being more hierarchical figures of discipline and boundedness to becoming more engaged in equal friend-like relationships. In her case Cecilia felt that she had grown much closer to her mother after she left, and that their separation, combined with frequent communication, had provided just the right degree of autonomy to facilitate such a transformation in their relationship. In fact, Cecilia told us that she and her two siblings hardly saw their mother prior to her emigration. As their mother worked in a different town, she had to leave the family home before Cecilia and her brothers were awake and would often return at night when they were already asleep. Ironically, only after her mother left for California, did she consciously make the time to communicate with her daughter, first through a satellite phone and, once the family got internet access, through webcam. This equalising process was greatly facilitated by the fact that Cecilia was dealing with her parents’ separation. In Miller’s recent fieldwork in South London (Miller, 2008a), children often refer to this event as forcing them into the position of having to ‘parent their parents’ because divorce often brings out the most immature aspects of both parents’ behaviour. If her parents’ divorce had not been enough to contend with, Cecilia had then taken on the task of rallying her other relatives in the US to
support her mother when she became stricken with cancer and had to undergo chemotherapy. She is also consulting with both of her parents on how to support her younger sibling, who has had a much more negative reaction to their parents’ departure. Finally, and most recently, she finds herself talking to her father’s new partner in California about their recently born baby, and having to overcome the initial awkwardness of that relationship in order to empathise both with this young mother and her father’s devotion to his new infant.
