The Story Behind Papa's House, Mama's House
Some weeks after my husband and I separated, my then five-year-old son, Paolo, after a trip to the neighborhood sari-sari store, asked me, “Mama, what is a broken home?”
Apparently, the neighbors, after learning of the changes in our household, asked my guileless son how he felt now that he was a child of a broken home. How adults can be so irresponsibly cruel!
It was hard to come up with a quick answer: “Hmm… I think it’s a house with broken windows. Do you see any broken windows in our house?” And he said, “Nope.” I asked further, “Do you feel broken?” He thought a while longer, then said, “Nope.” So I concluded, “Then the neighbors are wrong.”
Papa’s House, Mama’s House is inspired by this experience. It made me more conscious of the words we use around children and how our words create our realities. And it made me struggle to find a way to explain to my children that, even with our unusual family set-up, they are still very much loved. They are still part of a family, although the family members live in different houses.
In an increasingly complicated world where people struggle to find authentic selves and lives, I strongly believe in bringing up children with a respect and appreciation for diversity, and practical examples of struggling to learn how to live as peaceably and harmoniously as one can, amidst differences.
I remember a college English class I once took where we had a lesson on the proper way to define things. Our professor gave us a list of ten everyday words to define, one of which was “home.” Almost all of my classmates defined it this way: “a home is a house where a group of people related to each other by blood live together; it is usually composed of a father, mother and their children.” Our professor asked me to read the definition I made: “a home is a place where one belongs.”
It’s interesting how the way we define concepts in our minds affects the degree to which we gracefully accept or struggle with the realities in our lives.