An Ode to my Mother, to the Manananggal, and to Womanhood

Dear Mama,

You always wake me up at ungodly hours.

It’s three in the morning, and you need to go to the bathroom. At 52, you are fearless except for one thing: the possibility of seeing ghosts or monsters outside the window while you’re on the toilet. So you rouse me from sleep and ask me to stand guard by the door, as if my body could shield you from a flesh-eating entity. This has been happening since I was thirteen, when you finally returned home after years of working abroad.

You think I’m not scared of ghosts because I love horror and folklore. Do you still remember the small yellow book I carried around with me as a child, the book of legends? It’s worn down now, the pages wrinkled by love and time. There’s one story there that, to this day, I could recite from memory: Ang Kuwento ng Manananggal. I believe it is when I started to become a storyteller.

Like all legends, this one begins with a woman. One day, she arrives in a small town. The villagers were both enchanted and suspicious of her beauty. The sun seemed to radiate from within her. Leaves rustled as she walked past, flowers awakened from their slumber to greet her. But she kept to herself and refused suitors. Neighbors called her names, whispered suspicions of witchcraft. It all worsened when a strange illness befell upon the village. First, it spread among the pigs and poultry. Then the children started getting high fevers. Some of the elderly suffered from convulsions. No one knew where it came from.

When you’re in grief, it’s inevitable to point fingers, because anger feels better than sorrow. They all blamed the beautiful outsider. So, in the dead of night, while the woman was asleep, they gathered kindling and set her house on fire, the flames devouring everything in infernal fury.

Days later, the sickness was gone. By some miracle everyone was healed. Someone discovered that the illness was not from evil spells or hexes, but from the dirty wellwater that they all consumed. Nonetheless, what’s done is done. Someone was dead because of their whispers and their fears.

But the woman wasn’t dead, not really. She was the wondrous manananggal of our old lore, a mythic creature whose upper torso can separate from its lower body. That fateful night, she was flying, wandering among the stars, perhaps finding solace in the dark skies. But she left her lower body at home, and when she returned, it was burned beyond recognition. Her pained wails resounded throughout the forest like howling winds. Legend says that, to this day, you can hear flapping wings in the distance, a scorned woman forever in search of her missing half. And the story ends there.

It wasn’t a proper legend; nothing extraordinarily notable happened. The woman did not exact revenge against the people who desecrated her body. The villagers continued to live in blissful ignorance. But as a young girl, it formed my first conception of womanhood: to be a woman is to be alone, to be forever apart from your other selves.

I recall this story every time you ask me to stand outside the bathroom at night. You are real and near, but like the manananggal, you remain mythic to me, always out of reach. Do I really know all of you? Was there a part of you that you left in the places you explored, the places where you lived alone—in the province, in Manila, in the Middle East? Which parts of yourself did you have to cut off, to excise and forget, just so you could survive? Which parts loved and desired deeply, which ones are still hurting from unspoken miseries? Which darknesses do you fear the most, which ones are capable of meanness and spite? Which one compelled you to return home, return to me?

I have this dreamlike memory, Mama. I was seven, and you visited me after a month of being away for work. You took me to the church grounds to play. When I tripped, bruised my knees, and wailed as children would, you shook me hard and told me to stop crying. “Is that all you learn when I’m not around, to cry? You cannot cry!” you shrieked. Up to now, I don’t know if I dreamed this or if it’s real. I’m scared to ask. But I remember vividly how angry you were, how heartbroken, and strangely, how afraid you looked. I think you were scared for me. As a single mother, you have endured greater horrors than ghosts. I imagine you were looking at my tears then, seeing your wounded self reflected back at you, helpless from the assault of the world. From my wails you may have remembered that I will someday be a woman too, fated to face vulnerabilities from which you cannot protect me. You mistook my tears for danger, so you tried to toughen my bones, forge my body into a weapon. I knew you returned home because you thought you could be my shield.

I was fifteen when I fully understood your fear. Walking on the streets felt like a fight for survival; I would get hooted at by men in cars, sometimes strangers would follow me to the sari-sari store and linger nearby, biding their time. At eighteen I was groped outside my university, and my body went cold from the shock. At 27, a man stood at the end of my apartment hallway, watching with sickening glee as I panicked to open my door. In my greatest fantasies, I want to transform into an aswang, a viscera-sucking creature that could drain someone’s blood in seconds. Even for a while I wanted to be feared. I wanted to have power.

As a child, I had odd fantasies and a visceral imagination. I dreamt of being a manananggal and flying off into the distance, searching for homes with screaming men and momentarily clutching their tonsils out of their bodies. I’d hold them in my palms, whisper kind and tender words, so that when I return the organs into their throats, they will miraculously spew not violent curses, but lullabies, ballads to their wives, verses of adoration. In my young mind, it was how the world was supposed to be: filled with song and magic, wife and child sleeping undisturbed—a home where no one is angry. My childhood was riddled with rage, and I wanted to build a different world.

I couldn’t be a manananggal, so I became a storyteller. Through words, I could build, brick by brick, the miracles I envision, the kind of home I wanted.

So now I’m telling our story, Mama. Here is the truth: you and I are different women now. My Mama when I was ten years old, before you left for the Middle East, is different from the Mama who returned, the Mama who is now watching YouTube videos on her phone as I write this. Your time alone, in a foreign inhospitable land, is indescribable: you were overworked, lonely, and irreversibly hurt from horrors I cannot speak about, ones that left invisible wounds on your body. I hurt for the woman I couldn’t save. I’m now beginning to accept that it is a part of you I would never entirely know. I think you’d always be in search of your lower half, the self that has been devoured by the flames and disappeared among the ashes.

But at the same time, you’re the same Mama you have always been—strong-willed, fearsome, my kindred soul. You’re the same woman who bought me the 64-crayon set in Grade 2 because I cried for it, even though it meant working overtime and cutting your grocery budget. You’re the same woman who would review me for quizzes and encourage me to do the harder thing—enroll in a foreign language class, apply for a challenging workshop, tell the story I’m afraid to write—and pay for it all by enduring the graveyard shift that eventually made you sick. You’re the same girl who has loved Snoopy and Charlie Brown since childhood, and now we have kitchen shelves lined to the brim with Snoopy plates and mugs. You’re the same woman who loves country music, hates cooking, rewatches Jason Momoa’s films, says hello to cats, and is perpetually paranoid that a ghost is always watching —identities within and beyond motherhood.

I’m also different now. As the eldest, I have learned to pattern myself according to what is needed: always a reliable figure, a confidante, a compliant granddaughter, an unfaltering older sister, a bearer of generational wounds. I had little time to get to know myself beyond all the guilt. But now I’m forging my character limb to limb, exploring what I like, what I hate, what kind of woman I want to be. For now, I know I love: lip tints, triple-shot lattes, my headstrong friends, and the singer Laufey. I know I hate: sticky lip gloss, weirdly shaped tumblers, rude drivers, and exorbitantly priced matcha. But I will always carry in me the little girl who dreams of flying in the night sky, filling it with poetry, song, and most of all, gentle silence.

So now, Mama, you’re asking me again to stand guard by the bathroom door as you go in. Of course I will go with you. I can’t promise to protect you from all the ghosts, but we will face them together and make them learn our names. After all, we have become fearsome creatures in the dark.

Always nearby,
Your little Kikay