An Open Letter to My Mama

From a Filipina daughter, far from home but never far from you

Mahal kong Mama,

There are mornings here in the UK when I wake up before my alarm — the sky still dark, the radiator ticking against the cold — and the very first thought that finds me is you. Not the you of a memory or a photograph, but the real you: the one who was already awake long before any of us, already moving in the kitchen, already carrying the day before anyone else had even opened their eyes. I used to take that for granted. I am so sorry, Mama. I did not know what I had until I crossed an ocean to find out.

When Kuya and I left the Philippines, we packed our bags with nursing licenses, borrowed courage, and the smell of your cooking still in our clothes. The airport goodbye was the hardest thing I have ever done. I remember how you smiled — wide and steady — and I knew that smile was a gift. You were giving us permission to go, even though I could see the cost of it in the tightness around your eyes. You held my face in your hands the way you used to when I was sick as a child, and you said, “Ingat kayo. Mahal ko kayo.” Take care. I love you. Such small words to hold so much.

The first months were harder than I admitted to you over the phone. My accent felt too thick in the wards. I second-guessed myself in ways I never had at home. Some nights I sat in our small flat and cried quietly so Kuya would not worry, then dried my face and cooked tinola with the wrong kind of ginger because the right kind did not exist here. I was homesick not just for a place but for a feeling — the feeling of being fully known, of being someone’s daughter in a room full of people who loved me. That feeling, Mama, has your name on it.

It was only when I became a nurse in a foreign country that I truly understood what you sacrificed for us. You worked double shifts. You went without new clothes for years so ours would be new. You carried the weight of our futures like it was the most natural thing in the world, like a mother’s back was simply built for that particular kind of heavy. I am a nurse, Mama. I know what exhaustion looks like on a body. I know now that you must have been tired in ways you never showed us. I am in awe of you. I am undone by you.

But I am growing, Mama. Slowly, like the plants you used to tend in our backyard, the ones that seemed to do nothing for so long and then suddenly, one morning, were just — blooming. I have found my footing here. My patients trust me. I have learned to advocate for myself in a system that is not built around someone like me, and every time I do, I hear your voice in the back of my mind — steady, certain, unafraid. You raised a woman who does not shrink. I am trying to deserve that every single day.

I carry you with me everywhere. In how I touch a patient’s hand when they are frightened. In how I never leave a meal unfinished, because you taught us that food is love and wasting it is ungrateful. In the way I call people “Po” and “Ate” and “Kuya” out of habit, even here in England, where no one quite understands why. I carry you in my faith, in my stubbornness, in my capacity to keep going when I would rather stop. I am made of you, Mama, in all the ways that matter most.

I want you to know that this is not the end of the story — it is still the middle. The hard, uncertain, beautiful middle where daughters become themselves. I am becoming myself, and the woman I am becoming has learned that sacrifice is not just giving things up. It is also giving things forward. You gave your sacrifices to us so that we could give something to the world. I am doing that. Kuya is doing that. Every twelve-hour shift, every patient we bring comfort to, every night we come home and still call you — that is us honoring what you gave.

So this is my letter, Mama. Not a perfect one — you deserve better words than I have — but an honest one. Thank you for the sacrifices you made so quietly that I only understood them years later, from across the world. Thank you for the love that does not require my presence to exist. Thank you for teaching me, without ever saying the words, that a woman can be soft and still be strong, that she can cry and still move forward, that she can be far from home and still be home — because home is the people who made her, and you, Mama, made me.

With all my love, across all this distance,

Your anak,

Your Filipina daughter in the UK ❤