Tag: Ella Jade Ismael

Adopt

Origin: Middle English, from Middle French or Latin; Middle French adopter, from Latin adoptare, from ad- + optare to choose

transitive verb

1: to take by choice into a relationship; especially: to take voluntarily (a child of other parents) as one’s own child

2: to take up and practice or use <adopted a moderate tone>

3: to accept formally and put into effect <adopt a constitutional amendment>

4: to choose (a textbook) for required study in a course

5: to sponsor the care and maintenance of <adopt a highway>

intransitive verb

: to adopt a child <couples choosing to adopt>

(Merriam-Webster Dictionary)

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“Paano pala namatay ang mommy mo?”

“Diabetic kasi siya”

“Hala. Dapat ikaw mag dahan-dahan ka.”

“Di man. Di man ako maapektuhan.”

“Bakit man?”

“Adopted kasi ako.”

I am an adopted child. My parents told me when I was 10 years old. They thought it was the right time to tell me that I was because I was starting to ask questions and wondered why people looked at me differently during family gatherings. I also wondered why my playmates would call me ―adopted whenever we had a fight during one of our games.

“May gusto kami sabihin sa iyo”

“Maalala mo noon na may nagasabi sa iyo na adopted ka lang?”

“Totoo?”

“Oo”

That was how my parents broke the news to me that I was indeed an adopted child. My tears that night represented every moment of my childhood where I felt confused why my playmates teased and why my relatives looked at me as if they were wondering how and why I got in to the family.

My mom said I met my real mother once. She wanted me to remember that day. She wanted me to remember the scene when I saw this woman sitting in front of her desk, crying. I did remember. But I couldn’t picture out the face of that woman. I couldn’t even remember how I felt when I saw that woman. My mom said I could meet her again. I said yes. But deep inside I felt it was unnecessary because I was not looking for her and didn’t feel the need to see her.

Continue reading In Need of Care

The jeepney that my friend and I were in lingered for a while across the emergency room of San Pedro Hospital; the driver was waiting for more passengers. I heard the siren of an ambulance approaching and I was curious to find out what was going to be brought out of the vehicle.

“Matanda na babae,” My friend Iggy told me.

“Parang. Feel ko din,” I said.

The ambulance stopped at the door of the emergency room and a girl about my age or younger got down from the ambulance. She was wearing house clothes– shorts that were big for her and a grey shirt. I didn’t exactly know if she was crying because her facial expression was not clear from where I was but when the gurney was being brought down from the vehicle I immediately covered my eyes with my hands and kept saying “Oh my God, Oh my God.” I saw the medic doing CPR on a man. The man’s body reacted lifelessly from the force of the medic’s hands. My heart was beating fast and I wanted to cry but I stopped myself from crying because I didn’t want the other people in the jeepney to see me cry.

Continue reading Chrysanthemums, Sirens, and Remembering

April 1 was my mother’s first day in the hospital. My mother could still talk and she could still move around but she kept feeling pain in her legs. She still had her dialysis, which was already part of her routine since she had her stroke. The doctors advised us that my mother’s legs needed to be amputated because they were starting to create pus that was going into her blood stream. She was then moved to the ICU because there were already complications in her body and she needed to be watched over very carefully. My family talked about the decision and we decided that both legs should be cut off. The doctors had to take away the source of the pus so that they could easily clean my mother’s blood by dialysis. But the doctors were having problems because they couldn’t do the operation as my mother was starting to weaken and they had to operate on her immediately. But before that, they needed bags of blood for the dialysis. We couldn’t get enough blood in the city so my sister Elaine, my brother Elmer, and his wife Cora had to travel all the way to Tagum City just to get blood.

When I saw my mother after the operation, I couldn’t help but cry because she had become noticeably smaller because of the amputation. We tried to lighten the mood around her, telling her that she could still have new legs. My mother just smiled. She wanted to see her legs but hospital procedure wouldn’t let her see them.

On the 8^th of April, my mother had her last dialysis. Continue reading She Had Her Way