It must have been hard to live with that knowledge. The sense of defeat must have been profound. To have come through a world war, a life of abject misery. To have struggled and survived. To have known a life of utter despair and darkness then to have moved her heart and soul back into the sunshine only to discover a new more ominous inner darkness.

How could all of her hard work come to this? As a child, all she knew was to wait for the next day, and the next day, and the next. Eventually all of the bad would just melt away and she would have a life again. A life worth living. But what kind of life was this? All of her tomorrows were going to look like today.

She knew what it was to be stretched thin, to wonder if tomorrow really would come. Her mind and body had been broken by the war. But not her spirit. At 11, 12 ,13 years old, she had willed herself to see the new day. And she relied on her spirit to heal. The chaos that was her mind was quieted by her new life in America. The over abundance of everything America had to offer healed her body. But there was no fix for the damage she was suffering now.

If she were back in The Philippines she could send her youngest to be raised by a childless family member. No one to say it was wrong, because it wasn’t. Her first role as a mother is to provide the best life for her child. And her role in her family was share what she had plenty of. But America was different.

The child would remain with her and her other children. She would care for the child. Her youngest daughter would have everything the others had, except for a mothers love. She didn’t didn’t know how to conjure feelings that simply didn’t exist. And she could not lie, not really, not about how she felt. Life was too fragile to spend time with falsehoods and fake feelings.

But she would not ever put herself in position to have another child. With her husband still working three jobs, that was not that difficult a task. Between his 18 hour days and their six children, private time for them as husband and wife just wasn’t possible. So she settled into a routine of caring for all of her children, although the lack of real bonding with the youngest made mothering her a little harder. And joyless.

It wasn’t long before her life took a decidedly worse turn. With no time to nurture a healthy adult relationship, the marriage unraveled. In the legal language of the 60’s, she cited “Mental Cruelty” as the cause for the divorce. My father countersued with the same cause leveled at her. At the time, divorce was a protracted legal action. Add to it the issue of custody and the fight took years. In the end, my mother was granted custody of the girls, and allowed to continue to live in the house they bought as a couple. My father was given my brothers and ordered to pay alimony and child support.

He did neither. My mother, unskilled and uneducated, struggled. During the custody battle, all of us children had to attend counseling sessions with a social worker. Fortunately that social worker was able to help steer my mother through the maze of public assistance, Welfare. Because of a technicality involving a trust account in my oldest sisters name from insurance money paid to her for injuries sustained in accident as a minor, my mother was only allotted money for three children and herself. They also took into account her “earnings” from alimony.

With no alimony and only enough money to feed four when there were in fact five of us, times got very lean. She had to maintain a household, and a car, dress and feed all of us. We all went foodless quite often. Her more often than us. My aunts and uncles helped but no amount of help could make things right. My mom was intent on doing it herself. She had been through worse. But the divorce had cost her more than financial security. She was excommunicated from her beloved Catholic church. She was more alone than she had ever been. But she could do this. She had to.

At 32 years old, when her youngest started school, she went back to school to get her GED. Her education had effectively ended when she was 9 years old. There was some makeshift schooling during the recovery her after the war, but her attendance was sporadic. She had had to work to support herself. Now, after earning her diploma, she got a minimum wage job. She was making her own money now and living her own life.