Three Strands of Staying

I have spent my whole life memorizing the grammar of Negros, Philippines — the way the heat settles into the sugarcane fields like a thought that refuses to leave, the slow folding of afternoon rain against the roof, the way home has always sounded like something that never needed explanation. But now, I catch myself staring a little longer at ordinary things, as if I am trying to store them properly in my body before they disappear. The light on the floor. The sound of Mama moving in the kitchen. The shape of a life that has never had to split itself in two, desperately trying to practice absence while I am still fully present.

And so I find myself often asking God why He placed a dream so big in my heart, only to anchor it to a girl who is so utterly terrified of leaving.

Because it feels like a contradiction — to be so full of passion that it burns like a forest fire inside me, hot enough that my heart threatens to jump out of its ribcage, and yet, at the same time, to be paralyzed by the thought of departure. There is this dream inside me that does not feel gentle at all because it pushes, it insists, it keeps growing even when I try to shrink around it. But beside it is the quieter truth — I have never lived apart from my Mama. Not once. For eighteen years, my life has been perfectly contained within a single frame: my Mama and me against the world.

Now, college is approaching like a looming, inevitable shoreline. They call it a step forward, a doorway into a better life. But they rarely speak of the grief that accompanies the congratulations. People talk about leaving as though it is a simple exchange: one life traded for a better one. Yet every future asks something of us. I feel it in small ways first — how I watch my Mama move through the house, how ordinary moments suddenly feel worth preserving. I have become acutely aware of the rituals that built my life, the gestures so familiar I once mistook them for ordinary. And among them, there is one I find myself holding onto most.

My Mama braids my hair all the time. It is such an ordinary part of my life that I never thought to examine it. I would sit before her and she would gather my hair into three strands, her fingers moving with the certainty that comes from years of repetition. It was simply something we did. Then one day she told me, almost casually:

Since then, I have carried the sentence everywhere.

When she braids my hair now, I think about all the ways love travels. Through touch. Through repetition. Through years of showing up — she is weaving love directly into my nervous system. Every gentle tug, every smooth alignment of a stray strand, is her way of wiring her devotion into the very anatomy of who I am. Her hands move the way they always have, but I no longer experience the gesture as something small. I oftentimes wonder if this is her way of preparing me for departure — not by teaching me how to leave, but by making sure there is enough of her woven into me that I never truly can.

The braid tightens, and I am reminded that long before I learned how to dream, I learned what it meant to be cared for.

Perhaps that is what mothers do. They spend years turning love into habit so that when distance finally arrives, their care remains. Not in grand gestures or dramatic declarations, but in the body itself — in the things it remembers without being told.

It was during one of those mornings, while her fingers moved through my hair, that I finally told her what I had been carrying. I told her about the fear. About the dream that felt too large for me. About how badly I wanted the future and how badly I wanted everything to stay the same. I told her that every time I imagined leaving, I also imagined everything I would be leaving behind.

For a moment, she was quiet.

There are silences that feel like pauses, and there are silences that feel like entire histories being rearranged. Hers felt like the second kind.

Then she rested her hands against the back of my head and told me something I had never heard before. She said that when she was young, she had dreams too. Dreams that asked her to leave, to become, to see what else the world might have held for her. But life happened. Responsibilities happened. And somewhere along the way, those dreams became things she carried instead of things she followed.

The room did not change after she said it. The rain still tapped against the roof. Her hands still returned to my hair. Yet something inside me was changed.

Until then, I had thought of this dream as mine alone — my fear, my departure, my future. But sitting there beneath her hands, I realized that every opportunity before me had been shaped by sacrifices I did not fully witness. The life my parents built for our family was never small. It was an act of devotion so complete that it required her to set parts of herself aside so that I could keep moving forward.

And suddenly, leaving felt different. Not easier. Never easier. But different.

Because my dream was no longer just a destination waiting for me across the water. It was also evidence of everything she had made possible. Every step I take toward that future carries traces of the woman who could not take those steps herself.

I used to wonder why God would place a dream this large inside someone who still struggles with the idea of leaving her mother's side. I am beginning to understand that courage is not something that arrives before fear. Sometimes it arrives alongside it. Sometimes it is simply choosing to move while your hands are still shaking.

Leaving will change my life. It will change hers, too. One day, I will no longer be in the room where she braids my hair. There will be one less plate on the table. One less voice moving through the house. She will continue with her days, and I will begin building new ones of my own. There is grief in that. There always will be. But there is also love.

So these days, when I pray, I do not ask God for smaller dreams. I do not ask Him to make leaving hurt less. I ask only for the strength to honor what has already been given to me.

And when the time finally comes to leave Negros behind, I know I will carry more than clothes, documents, and plans for the future. I will carry eighteen years of being loved by a woman who braided care into my nerves, into the smallest parts of everyday life.

Perhaps that is why I am able to go at all.

Because long before I learned how to leave, my Mama taught me how to carry home.