Lives Made Whole

A tall noble fir stands next to the baby grand in a corner of the living room. Alicia Marcynyszyn sits across from it, containing her emotions as she has done for so many years. The unadorned tree is both beautiful and empty. Like Alicia, it waits for morning.

In her life, there has been great pain. This is the time of year when she hurts the most, when a past knotted into a tightly wound secret grips her heart and pulls her from her life in the Inland Empire, back 26 years to the day she last saw her son with the Christmas name, Noel, and another, Joel, taken from her in the Philippines.

She was so young, she says, only 17 years old in 1962, when she married. It didn’t take long to realize it was a mistake, and in 1971 she finally left her husband and took their two young children to live with her parents in Manila. She found work and returned to college to study accounting, pushed forward from poverty by unyielding ambition. Twice she was elected president of the student council.

One day, while she was gone, her husband came and told her parents he was taking the sons to a restaurant. Alicia never saw them again. He got word to her that if she tried to find them, “there would be bloodshed.”

Her husband was not willing to bend. It was, he told her, “a closed book.”

He had never been violent toward her, but she believed his words. The police wouldn’t get involved in what was considered a family matter. She felt paralyzed.

“I basically gave up,” she says. “I came to the United States in 1975. I wanted to forget everything, start a new life.”

She lived first in San Francisco, where she remarried. In 1977, she and her new husband moved to Whittier, then to the Inland Empire, where she still lives. They had a son, now 15. Throughout this new life, Alicia told no one--not her second husband, not her third son--about her children in the Philippines.

“I wanted to block it all out,” she says. “I didn’t want any reminders of them. I didn’t want to talk about them because it hurt too much.”

In the Philippines the closed book was handed down from father to sons, and in America the secret was buried and isolated. The silence lasted until shortly after 6 p.m. on Nov. 8, when Alicia’s telephone rang.

*

It is in the mornings, while she is driving the 22 miles to her job as an administrative assistant, that Alicia talks to God. It’s a good time to pray, she says, while she is alone with her thoughts. One morning in late October, her thoughts turned to the guilt she felt about leaving behind her sons, Joel, now 33, and Noel, 30.

“I asked God how he could ever forgive me for what happened,” she says. “I told him that if I had one wish, I’d like to see them before I die.”

The telephone call came on a Saturday evening as she was cooking dinner. “You’ll be shocked but happy,” her younger sister, Marites Cuyson, from Manila, said. “Your son is here.”

Joel Yambao was 7 years old the last time he saw his mother. It seemed that throughout his childhood, he and his brother were with one parent or the other. Rarely were they all together.

Birthdays and holidays were exceptions, and, as he turned 8 in December 1971, he asked if his mother would be coming for his birthday. Then came Christmas, and he would ask again. Eventually he would stop asking, but still he would wonder.

At first, their father told them she was too busy. As years passed, he told them she was gone, with no further explanation until, finally, they were told she was dead.

Through the years, it was Noel who refused to believe the stories about his mother. While Joel was quietly accepting, Noel was more vocal and rebellious. He dropped out of school and was never as responsible as his father would have liked. When they argued, Noel would bring up his mother, a woman he barely remembered.

He would ask for her address, threatening to leave and stay with her. It would make his father furious whenever she was mentioned. Perhaps that’s why he did it, Joel says, or maybe he just needed his mother.

Joel would tell his younger brother not to upset their father, to accept the way things were and make the best of it. While there was nothing tangible to indicate that his mother was still alive, instinct told him that they were not being given the entire truth.

Joel could have pursued the matter by seeking out his mother’s family, but he was resentful toward her and knew it would be a slap in the face to his father. It never seemed like the right thing to do, he says.

Then, in October, their father died from cancer. He left behind property and pension benefits listing Alicia as benefactor. Joel spoke to an attorney who said it could take years to remove her name. If his mother was dead, he needed information, and if she was alive, he needed her signature. That was all he wanted from her.

He remembered seeing an address on his birth certificate, which he was required to provide for a marriage license in 1993. His new wife, Myla, had been trying to get Joel to search for his mother all along, to find out if she was still alive, and, if so, where she was living. Joel never saw the point until his father’s death.

He and Myla went searching in Manila to find the address listed on the birth certificate. When he pulled up in front of the small, crumbling house, faint, detached memories returned to him. He recognized the street where he used to play.

He knocked on the door and Alicia’s sister answered. They spoke, businesslike, then Joel’s aunt left the room. Without telling him, she called Alicia, spoke briefly to her then handed Joel the phone. “It’s your mother,” she said.

What should he say? Where should he begin?

“Hello.”

“Is it really you?” she asked.

“Yes. It’s me.”

They spoke carefully like strangers for about 45 minutes. Joel explained he had graduated from college in civil engineering, married Myla, a dentist, and the two of them owned an ice cream parlor in Manila.

At first, he could not hide the bitterness in his voice, but the sound of his mother’s voice, the realization she was still alive, overwhelmed him.

He and Myla had been planning a trip to the United States prior to his father’s death, but he put the trip off when his father became ill. The trip was postponed indefinitely upon his father’s death, but as he listened to his mother’s voice, he knew he must come to America.

*

The night before they are to arrive, after they already have boarded a plane, Alicia sits in front of the Christmas tree, purchased earlier than normal this year so it could be in place for her son’s arrival.

“I’m not sure how long they are staying,” she says, “but I wanted to have a tree.”

On the mantel is a faded black and white photograph in a simple silver frame. Part of a buried secret, Alicia has never displayed the photograph before. It shows Joel’s face when he was 6 or 7 years old. A strand of hair curls over his forehead. He is wearing a white shirt and bow tie.

Even now, Alicia, 53, doesn’t know what she’s going to say to her son. “I’m just taking it one day at a time,” she says. “I told him on the phone I wanted to forget the past and only talk about the future, but I know I need to explain to him what happened.”

She thought it might be easier to write her thoughts down in a letter before his arrival, but she could never finish.

“I don’t know how to approach it so I won’t offend them, but I need to try to explain. I want to tell him I’m sorry I wasn’t there when they needed me the most.”

Before they can move forward, a closed book must be opened, a secret must be unearthed. And a Christmas tree must be decorated.

*

Traffic on the westbound 10 is unusually light, and Alicia arrives at Los Angeles International Airport on time with Steve, her third husband. (Her second marriage ended in divorce.) She and Steve were married four years ago, and up until the telephone call, hewas the only person she had ever confided in about her two lost sons.

It has been a period of adjustment as she, Steve and her son, Adrian, build their new family. Sometimes when Steve and Adrian argue, Alicia becomes scared. “Don’t make me choose between the two of you,” she has told her husband, “because I will never give up another son. That can never happen again.”

Steve, who runs his own business making and installing window shutters, has been supportive throughout. “I told her that someday when we can afford it, we will go to the Philippines to look for them,” he says. “It has been a hole in her life for a long time.”

Steve holds a camera as they wait. The Northwest Airlines flight has arrived, and passengers slowly filter through customs to the waiting area. A group of schoolchildren dressed in gray uniforms arrives anxiously. Behind a velvet rope, a line of people holding signs to identify themselves awaits passengers.

Alicia stands motionless, her hands folded in front of her as she looks down the corridor for Joel, Myla and Myla’s mother.

“Her heart’s still a little bit broken for the other son,” Steve says. It is very difficult to get visas to travel out of the Philippines, and Noel was unable to make the trip.

Forty-seven minutes after the plane’s arrival, Alicia still waits. The line of people holding signs has thinned. Most of the passengers have loaded their luggage and have left the terminal.

“Where are they?” she asks, a hint of concern showing in her voice.

“After 27 years you can wait a little more,” Steve offers.

Finally, she sees a man in a green coat next to a cart stacked high with luggage and packages. Immediately and instinctively, she walks toward her child, now a man. Joel recognizes her from an old photograph. Without speaking, they hug and don’t let go.

“Welcome home,” Steve says.

Alicia cries into her son’s shoulder. Joel wants to cry, but tears do not come to him. It has been a long flight, and he has been stirred by conflicting emotions until he doesn’t know what to think. His feelings become more certain as they hug, as he introduces his wife and mother-in-law and watches his mother hug them as well.

There is much awaiting them as they leave the airport: matters to discuss, amends to make, a tree to decorate. They will celebrate Joel’s 34th birthday and, finally, this time his mother will be there for him.

He wishes that before his father had died, there could have been peace in the family, but maybe this is the way things were meant to be.

Four days after arriving, he sits facing the tree, which seems whole now that it glistens with ornaments, and he holds his mother’s hand.

“There’s this feeling that I have already lost the feeling of being a son to a mother,” Joel says. “Right now, I’m really adjusting to that whole situation. I don’t know how to react.”

He has heard another side to the story of his parents’ separation and is beginning to see the past in a new light.

“Maybe we can call it brainwashing,” he says. “It was easy to believe what my daddy and his family said, that she’s not a good mother, that she left us at a tender age. He thought he was protecting us, doing what was best for us.”

He sees his mother’s new family in America and wonders where he fits in, hoping there is a place for him, Myla and Noel. Alicia grips his hand a little harder, her eyes again speaking in tears to her son. She is trying, still, to contain her emotions. She holds on to Joel with both hands now. This time, she’s not letting go.