Capítulo 4
The Sensual Nature of Caregiving
The body is central to mothering-both as physical experience and as a means of expressing love. I recall sitting at my mother's feet while she carefully cleaned my ears with a silver pantutule, scooping out ear wax with expert tenderness. This intimate ritual created a profound closeness-no distance between us, her scent and warmth enveloping me completely.
As poet Ocean Vuong notes about Vietnamese culture, "a lot of love is articulated through service... We don't say, I love you. We cook, we massage, we cao gio, we scratch each other's backs." This resonates deeply with me. Though my mother told us she loved us, it was always in English, not her native language. The physical demonstrations-like painstakingly removing fish bones from my tuyo before I mixed it into champorado-conveyed her love more eloquently than words ever could.
Bodies and their needs are often treated as inconveniences in American culture, especially those that differ from perceived norms. But mothering rejects this view, showing children there's nothing wrong with having a body and having needs. As Audre Lorde writes, this vital physical energy is "the erotic"-not just sexual arousal but "the deepest life force." Mothering is fundamentally sensual work that cultivates a child's essence while providing profound satisfaction to both child and caregiver.
For young children, the geography of mothering is the body itself. Yet parents are actively discouraged from trusting their bodily instincts by so-called experts. As Lorde notes, "As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge." Dr. Spock's advice from 1946 still resonates: "Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do."
Mothering requires physical labor-wiping, washing, feeding, dressing, holding. Words alone cannot convey dedication to a child; physical attention and affection must be demonstrated repeatedly. Though draining and repetitive, this work keeps us connected to our corporeal forms and makes us more tender, empathetic and sensate.
Since 1968, artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles has explored how our culture devalues maintenance work-a subject she was drawn to after becoming a mother. We see maintenance work as undesirable and not worth our precious time, believing progress means outsourcing care and distancing ourselves from it. But this is self-delusion-our bodies and homes require constant care, regardless of who performs it.
Ukeles's "Manifesto for Maintenance Art" proposed living in a museum with her family, performing domestic tasks as art. She connected mothering to professional maintenance jobs, noting that both receive "lousy status" and minimal compensation. Her work reveals that caregivers and sanitation workers perform the essential labor that sustains life.
Maintenance work doesn't have to be isolating or exhausting. In 1881, Atlanta's Black laundresses formed the Washing Society, growing from twenty to three thousand members in just three weeks. Their collective organizing transformed isolated domestic labor into powerful solidarity. A century later, Angela Davis envisioned socialized housework and childcare-maintenance work done together rather than in isolation.
Capítulo 5
Building Family Beyond Blood
My childhood was rich with family connection, especially during gatherings with extended Filipino relatives. Our brown, plush family van became a second home as we traveled to visit aunts, uncles, and cousins across the Northeast. Holiday tables overflowed with both American and Filipino dishes-turkey alongside chicken embutido, siopao, and bibingka. These gatherings brought together family from across North America: Lola Lily, the matriarch; Tita Nene, who almost became a nun; Tita Tessie from Berkeley; and when we were lucky, Tita Baby and her family from West Covina.
During these visits, we cousins ran wild until mealtime, playing cards, making videos, defending ourselves from older siblings' teasing, and doing karaoke. The adults gathered to drink beer, set tables, and share tsismis (gossip). Nights became slumber parties with multiple cousins squeezed into one room. These joyous, cacophonous gatherings contrasted sharply with our quiet daily life in rural Pennsylvania.
At home, I was often alone. As a latchkey kid, I'd return from school to an empty house, my brothers uninterested in playing with me. I'd wander our backyard woods or watch TV until my parents returned to make dinner. Though we had family friends, I remember many lonely hours and yearned for communities with larger Filipino populations.
In the Philippines, many of my cousins still live with their parents well into adulthood, even after starting families. Intergenerational homes are the norm, not the exception. Central to precolonial Philippine culture is bayanihan, meaning communal solidarity-a concept rooted in shared labor of farming, child-rearing, and house-building. In Filipino folk art, you'll often see images of people carrying nipa huts on bamboo poles to higher ground during floods-a literal representation of community lifting each other up.
According to historian Luis H. Francia, bayanihan was the cornerstone of Indigenous Filipino communities called barangays, where "producers owned their means of production" in a system that was "not only precolonial but also precapitalist." The Banaue rice terraces, carved into the Cordillera Mountains and still used today, exemplify this communal spirit, requiring tremendous coordination to build and maintain.
Modern American culture has largely lost this tight-knit community structure. Extended personal networks have been replaced with privatized jobs and isolated family units. This lack of shared responsibility leads to isolation and an every-family-for-themselves mentality, making parents feel their domestic struggles are personal failures rather than structural problems.
My family survived 2020 thanks to the Chase-Chens-Becca, Jondou, and their daughters Ruth and Sunny, the same ages as our girls. What began as a childcare arrangement evolved into a profound connection. Wednesday night dinners became a standing date, where we shared meals from spaghetti to oxtails to Filipino Noche Buena feasts. Together we weathered toddler meltdowns, election anxiety, and health scares. In a time defined by loss, these meals created abundance-a new iteration of family.
The American Dream celebrates individualism and freedom from others, but as activist Mia Birdsong explains, freedom originally meant "the idea that together we can ensure that we have all the things we need." True freedom comes through connection, not isolation.
Capítulo 6
Affirming Every Body's Worth
The shame we feel about our bodies, the questions we grapple with over our worthiness, don't come from inside. A person is never inherently a problem; it is the prejudging of able-bodied, cisgender men that makes so many of us feel unworthy. Together we, the othered, far outnumber the standard-bearers. Together we might build something much more powerful, based on love and inclusion, mutuality and acceptance.
Disability activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha writes: "Love in action is when we strategize to create cross-disability access spaces. Why am I fighting so hard for fragrance-free space or a ramp, if it's not something I personally need?" She argues that "when disabled people get free, everyone gets free. More access makes everything more accessible for everybody." It's simple yet revolutionary.
This logic comes naturally to children, who have a clear sense of fairness. They understand that development varies among peers and regard this as normal. If we preserved that perspective, we could build communities accessible to everyone, operating at a pace accommodating the realities of human bodies.
Designer Sara Hendren's work showcases creative adaptations disabled communities make to improve daily life. At Gallaudet University, DeafSpace design includes wooden tables that better transmit vibrations when slapped for attention, glass walls allowing uninterrupted signing in consistent light, and blue interior surfaces providing contrast with skin tones for clear hand visibility.
I want to show my daughters that disability is a creative way of living, that aging isn't decline but an area of imagination and freedom. I normalize concepts often shrouded in silence-pointing out wheelchair users in books, noting a schoolmate's bright green leg braces, creating space for questions. By never turning away from differently abled bodies, we teach children that caring for them is essential work.
Disability challenges us to see "the sensuality, the unruliness, the beautiful potential of alternative ways of moving through space and being in time." The concept of "normal" is toxic-anyone who isn't a straight cis white able-bodied man learns they're somehow abnormal, though such "normal" bodies comprise only a small portion of humanity. Instead of prizing whiteness, purity, youth and achievement, we can emphasize color, darkness, nuance, imperfection, emotions, stillness, and age.
On Jeju Island in South Korea, the haenyeo-mostly women over sixty-are free divers who collect oceanic delicacies. These women "peak in their fifties" and visitors see women in their 80s and 90s "abandon their walkers at the shore and seemingly morph into mermaids." In the children's book "The Ocean Calls," young Daeyon is nurtured by elderly women masterful at diving-making senior citizenship aspirational.
Capítulo 7
Embracing Appetite and Desire
As a child, I had an outsized appetite. I'd raid our kitchen at all hours-scooping rice from the cooker to mix with patis and lemon juice, hollowing out French bread loaves to my brothers' dismay, sneaking slices of frozen German Chocolate Cake.
For a long time, I thought of my body as inconvenient-not necessarily fat, but definitely too much. Too brown, too round, with large calf muscles that made skinny jeans tight. My mother called me "big-boned"-compared to her delicate wrists, my joints were thicker.
Where did I come from? My breasts confused my mother-reaching DD-cup size in high school while she wore A and B cups from clearance racks. She didn't know about proper bra fittings, saying "You must have gotten those from your Ima." When my leg hair appeared, she claimed "Asian people don't have to shave." When I wanted to try tampons, she only knew about pads. My body wasn't the petite, hairless Filipina body she understood. I had to figure things out alone.
Since birth, people have told me my daughter Ligaya looks just like me. I see her growing into my facial features and body shape-robust, sturdy, with short strong legs. I've hesitated acknowledging this resemblance, fearing she'll inherit my body image struggles. Parenting her challenges me because she's "too much my familiar"-when she digs in stubbornly then wants to reverse course but can't due to pride, I'm unsure whether to comfort or let her express herself.
Can I inspire my girls not to care about their stomach shapes? To pursue their appetites and "manifest the audacity of space-taking"? Caregivers play an essential role in developing young minds that don't hold self-disdain. I want my daughters to unapologetically take up space and follow their hunger, curiosities and desires.
Our babysitter Penelope arrived wearing a t-shirt reading "You were brainwashed into thinking European features are the epitome of beauty." When my daughter Noli read it, we explained "brainwashing" and showed her Europe, the Philippines, and Nigeria on her placemat map. We discussed how white people in power created a culture claiming beauty means being thin and white. "And pointy!" Noli added. I explained beauty isn't the most important quality, and comes in many forms-brown skin, bridgeless round noses, freckles and curly hair.
In my youth, I worried about being fat because that was the only language I had for my bodily discomfort. What really bothered me was otherness-feeling foreign, different, inscrutable, solitary. I was always at odds with other bodies. In white spaces, I was too brown; in the Philippines, I was too big, too American, too bossy.
Eating is necessary; being beautiful is not. Pursuing attractiveness felt depressing, but indulging my appetites, especially for Filipino food, gave me pride and identity. My favorite special occasion dish has always been pancit palabok-rice noodles in briny orange gravy topped with pork, eggs, scallions and chicharron. My parents ingeniously substituted Campbell's Cream of Shrimp soup when traditional ingredients weren't available in rural Pennsylvania.
Now, we share mackerel at dinner, a bony fish we carefully pick through for Ligaya. She eats breathlessly, cleaning her plate as quickly as Will can serve more. She insists on eating all the fish eyeballs-a delicacy she once shared with us but now claims entirely-just like her Apu, my dad, who breaks bones with his teeth to suck the marrow. Noli, like my mother, prefers the crispy, charred, flaky skin. I see my parents in my children's eating habits and am glad they witness this too.
Capítulo 8
Movement as Liberation
Children instinctively know how their bodies need to move. Chris, a nine-year-old with intellectual disabilities who's partially deaf and blind, rocks back and forth while banging a rattle. My four-year-old sways her hips to Drake. My teenage niece ends each day curled up rubbing the silky corner of an old blanket. Young people understand their internal rhythms.
Sociologist David Goode discovered that Chris's movements weren't meaningless but provided sensory richness her eyes and ears couldn't give her. As disability scholar Sunaura Taylor notes, Chris's movements were "deeply pleasurable and meaningful" even if unknowable to others. In a world fixated on exercise for better bodies or maximum health, these hidden, personal pleasures should motivate our movement.
At thirty, frustrated that my body seemed to need more activity, I half-heartedly sought an exercise routine requiring minimal effort with maximum results. Running didn't work-I could quit anytime and remained distracted by daily concerns. Bikram yoga offered rigor and heat I enjoyed, but felt expensive and rigid.
After my first daughter's birth, I discovered Dance Church-guided improvisation to pop music taught by professional dancers but open to all bodies. With no mirrors, you see your movements reflected only in others' bodies. Instructions blend aerobics with whimsical poetry: "rainbow arms, reach and pull, sparkle rain, put it in your pelvis." For over six years-through my second pregnancy and beyond-this class has reconnected me to myself weekly.
Dance delivers me back to my body, restoring command and humor I'd felt slipping away. I experience synovial fluid sliding, heat in my foot arch, tiny knee pops, hip openness that feels volcanic. I've never moved so uninhibited, doing it purely for myself yet gaining unexpected relationships and pleasures.
What I love most are people fully committing to movement-bombastic or quiet. Seeing someone move in a way only they could in that particular moment reminds me what bodies are for: to communicate without words. As choreographer Bill T. Jones notes, in our culture of incessant talking, "we're constantly trying to convince the world that there's beauty in movement. That space is an eloquent medium. That text is not always necessary."
Each Dance Church begins with anticipation as I feel into my body's tight and tender parts while the room's heat builds. The shared vitality of dozens of people creates a wave that lifts and propels me until I exit my brain completely, becoming just movement, salt water, energy. As Zadie Smith observed, dancing among strangers offers freedom from modern life's demands of personal branding: "To me, individuation is a kind of hell; the most human thing is to be part of people, less aware of the self."
For over a year, I danced with a woman whose arms and hips created a circle of light, her long black braids crowned her head, her lips painted brownish-purple. I wanted to know her, but it was enough to receive her energy across the room. When we finally spoke, I learned Dalya was Filipinx and Egyptian-confirming what I already sensed: we were kin. Our first verbal interaction felt like the culmination of silent conversations we'd been having for months.
Capítulo 9
Mothering as Revolutionary Connection
My daughter Noli has talked about becoming a botanist for three years, collecting plants, rocks, shells and creating a "Nature City." Her interest blossomed after attending farm camp, where she learned to identify plants and their uses. I've watched her develop self-possession and confidence as she's grown, and I'm trying to see her as her specific self rather than my fixed impressions of her.
Growing up in rural Pennsylvania with immigrant parents from the Philippines, I never went camping-"dirt floors were something they were actively trying to get away from." Though I played in the woods behind our house, I saw outdoor activities like hiking and camping as "rich white people activities" requiring expensive equipment.
When I met my husband, an avid outdoorsman with worn ski equipment and performance gear, I was suspicious of his lifestyle, reading his thin, white, athletic male body as privilege. My first hiking experience with him was miserable-rain-soaked glasses, no proper raincoat, and disappointment at not seeing the promised waterfall.
My perspective shifted when my sister-in-law easily started a campfire that I struggled with. When I expressed surprise at her skill, she explained, "I grew up camping. My family never had any money. All our vacations were camping vacations." I realized I had misunderstood outdoor recreation as exclusively white and privileged, overlooking how my own non-white family had financial privilege.
Over time, I formed a new relationship with nature. I learned to walk slowly, find my rhythm, and discovered pleasure in hiking-"it's just walking." Guided by Bonancio's wisdom "A tu paso" (at your own pace), I began to see the natural world as my birthright.
Though some people can live without a conscious relationship to nature while others can't imagine life without wilderness, most of us exist somewhere in-between. My four-year-old would happily stay indoors watching TV, yet outdoors she transforms-climbing, exploring, and inevitably asking, "Mama, it's okay if I get naked and in the water?" This elemental connection exists in all of us but becomes harder to access as adulthood pulls us away.
Reconnecting requires letting go of our human-centered perspective. Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic "changes the role of homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it"-the part we struggle with most. Jenny Odell suggests bioregionalism as a solution-learning to identify with place by observing and taking responsibility for local ecosystems.
Indigenous Filipinos attributed supernatural powers to nature, believing ancestors could be absorbed into these sources. They showed reverence for wind, water, and stones-cutting down an old tree was sacrilege, and failing to ask permission to pass an ant mound invited retribution. Even in language, this connection persists: while Tagalog absorbed Spanish words for objects and American corporate terms, native words endure for things that cannot be quantified-wind, rain, tree, soul, spirit.
When my daughter plays "sushi" with friends using flowers, leaves, and sticks, they intuitively reject capitalism's notion of scarcity. As botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer suggests, we might consider the gift economy instead, which operates from abundance with gratitude as currency. While we can't immediately escape capitalism, we can create parallel gift economies-sharing food, childcare, trading skills. This caretaking labor reminds us that "the gifts of the natural world are inherently diverse, queer, adaptable, creative, and enough. And that means so are we."
I support Noli's botanical interests through walks with field guides, collecting specimens for her magnifying tools, and helping her navigate reference materials. Her passion is nurtured by our community-like our friend Rachel from the Parks Department who identified flowers on our walks, explaining how some grow in clusters called "umbels," and gifted Noli a plant identification sheet and later sent waterproof nature journals.
Though I don't know if Noli will become a botanist, I recognize she's developing a way of seeing and being in the world. Through her, I'm learning too-that Douglas fir cones have "mouse tails" peeking from their scales, and the legend of small creatures taking shelter in pine branches during a great forest fire.
Lucille Clifton's poem "Generations" reminds us that humans must be accountable to all living things, not just ourselves. She writes that if consequences were shared only between people "it would be different," but "this business of war" is "erasing those natural obedient generations."
To commit to witnessing, to showing up-whether mothering, fathering, parenting, leading or following-how is this anything but right? Being part of the humbling and heroic details that comprise a child's wondrous life is our duty of care. The growth I attend to now extends beyond my daughters-to tiny pinecones on neighborhood Sitka spruces, wolves returning to wilderness, marking my children's heights on our kitchen wall, tracking local orca populations, even the improving jump shot of a middle-aged dad practicing in the park. Love is acts of attention, and I love witnessing how everything around us moves, changes, evolves.
