"The World’s 506th Coolest Dad" by Ma Kyla N

Ever since I was a kid, I always thought my dad was pretty cool. I mean, he isn’t the coolest person on this earth. He’s more like the 506th coolest dad. To me, he’s almost like a superhero that doesn’t have powers. He encouraged me to try a lot of things as a kid, such as play different types of instruments and play different types of sports. He always suggests to me, “Hey Kyla! You should try playing the piano!” or “I saw this little girl play soccer, do you wanna try it?” I always saw the hope in his eyes and the big smile he always had on his face whenever he asked. Of course, I would always agree to try it, but nothing really stuck. I never really understood why he made me go through all those things when in the end, I ended up not having any passion for the things he made me try. Don’t get me wrong, I was grateful that I had the opportunity to try all those things, but I just didn’t know why he was trying so hard to get me to do these activities.
            One day, he sat me down and started talking about his life, starting off with his childhood. Unlike mine, he didn’t have the things I had as a kid, like those Tickle-Me Elmo toys that I used once and never used again, or those small cars I would always lose the day after I bought them. Actually, he didn’t have anything. He lived in poverty with my grandparents and my uncle. He used to play with bottle caps from the beer bottles and used soda cans as soccer balls. He would spend his time after school playing with or bullying the other kids in his neighborhood. My grandma had a little fruit stand at a marketplace, whereas my grandpa worked at an electrical company. My grandparents worked hard to provide for their children and hope that their future was a lot better than theirs. My dad also never really mentioned how my uncle was, but all I know is that their relationship isn’t really great. They lived in a rundown apartment-like complex, but the apartment room was literally a room. That one room was where they slept, ate and cooked. I should also mention that the walls of this apartment were so thin, my dad said, “You can hear people cursing at each other and breaking things all the way from a room at the other side of the complex.”    
            My dad was one of those neighborhood bullies that threw rocks at kids’ heads and fought people just because he felt like it. He was basically those kids who didn’t really care about school, and he is what people would consider a “hooligan” or a “bad influence” to other kids. Despite those names people called him, he was actually a disciplined kid compared to others. At age seven, he was already fetching thirty to forty pounds water from a mile or two away and coming back with it. He hand-washed his family’s clothes, helped my grandma sell fruits at her market and just did the most he could do to help out his family.  Though his family wasn’t well off, they still put him and his brother in a private school due to public schools not being as good as private. He didn’t do very well at school but started getting more serious as high school came along. I mean, he wasn’t top in the top twenty or didn’t have the best grades, but he still managed to graduate but ended up going to a monastery to practice priesthood.
            He stayed at a monastery for 5 years, until they had a retreat to my mom’s hometown: Infanta, Quezon. Due to the circumstance of his future wife being in the same vicinity as him, you already know where this is going. When my dad first met my mom, he said, “She radiated like the sun and I knew I wanted to marry her when I first saw her.” My dad was always a hopeful guy, so he prayed to God, hoping my mom would be the one. Cheesy? I know, kind of cute though. After the Lord answered his prayers, he left the monastery to be with, as he says, “The one and only sunshine in my life that I will always love and cherish.” My mom moved to my dad’s city, where she studied to be a nurse at a university. My dad worked at a company that sold textbooks to colleges across the city as well as three other jobs. They already knew they were going to marry each other, so they saved up money to moved to America. With the jobs my dad was taking on and my mom working at a bank, everything was going as they planned. All of a sudden, my mom became pregnant with yours truly.
            I was born 5 months after my parents’ wedding. My dad described me as a crybaby who always preferred my mom over him. I would always cry whenever he held me and said, “That was the only time I was jealous of your mom.” He definitely put effort as a parent since the day I was born and it touches my heart that he did all of this to show his love to me. Even for my first birthday party, he invited everyone he knew in my mom’s hometown and his family to go. He cooked for hours the night before and made sure everything was perfect. He even made party favors for the kids and hired a photographer. I was too young to thank him, but I definitely would have if I knew how to talk.
            Remember when I said everything was going smoothly? Well, a couple months after my first birthday party, my parents moved to California without me. They wanted to build a foundation for me before I actually moved there with them. As a baby, if my mom wasn’t there, I would know, so I would cry every night looking for my mom for the next two months. Meanwhile, in America, my mom was still training to be a nurse, while my dad worked as a caregiver for a couple of years. My mom also worked with him to earn more money. Two years later, they sent me and my grandma to America and that’s when my dad started suggesting me to do this or doing that. At this point of the story, I knew why he was doing all of this.
            My dad didn’t have a lot of things growing up. He never got the opportunity to do things kids usually do. He didn’t have a house as nice as the one we currently live in or had money to buy the things he wanted. He basically sugarcoated all the things he told me and made it seem like it was okay, but for the 45 years he’s lived on this earth, it’s been hard for him. A smile is always plastered on his face whenever he’s with his family and it hits me hard that he went through a lot to make that smile possible. I realized that him pushing these activities was a way for him to prove that he did it; that he’s giving his child a life that he never had.

Right now, he’s back in the Philippines, building an apartment in a city where poverty is pretty high. He’s also planning to bring me there as well, so I can experience life the Philippines, minus the poverty part. He’s been going back and forth from the Philippines for the past 4 years and whenever he leaves, it feels empty. My mom and I get all sad, whereas my brother hasn’t realized how hard he’s working. He’s even sacrificing things up to this day and I think that’s pretty cool. Like I said, my dad’s like a superhero to me and I hope he knows I love him as much as he loves me.