Category Archives: transition

Grateful in 2009

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I’m a fallen human who was destined to die until an afternoon in August of 1991 when my boss at KISS FM, Al Torres, asked me two questions that changed my life forever:

If you were to die today, where do you think you would go?

If you died and faced God, and He were to ask you why He should let you into His heaven, what would you tell Him?

My feeble attempts at logical answers revolved around me being a good person and not a murderer or thief, and that at best, being a practicing Roman Catholic, I’d end up in purgatory and hopefully would get prayed up to heaven with each rosary, mass, or prayer said on my behalf.

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Three Seasons in Nashville

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I’ve been blogging a little too much about So You Think You Can Dance lately and neglecting the other parts that The Pseudo Expat is about:  single parenting and Christianity. There was a Filipina on SYTYCD though up until last night so that sort of covered the Filipina-American thoughts.

Some things are a bit too private to talk about so I avoided it until I learned from it and can now discuss it here.

I was driving down Old Hickory Boulevard, admiring the leaves in their different stages of death — explosions of deep reds, yellows, greens, and oranges — as if holding on to dear life in bursts of color defying the inevitable, their shouts of, “We live! We live! We live! Look at us!” falling on the deaf ears of their fallen comrades littering the ground, brown and dry, when the prosaic cycle of life came to mind. It is a beautiful death, this being born a leaf: to be birthed, to live, to color, to wither, and then to die, not unlike us humans.

We come into this world, we live for but a sliver of time, bursting with life, and then we slip into eternity. Something I’ve been thinking of a lot these days. It probably has to do with my turning a new decade last July. I’m thinking more and more in terms of “the rest of my life” and “the second half of my life”; thinking more about the impact, if any, my life has had; thinking about how good, or bad, a parent I’ve been.

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Here But Not Here

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As you can see from the date on my last entry, I have been ignoring this particular blog of mine. Not for lack of topics but for lack of a self-owned computer and a life.

I moved back to the US last September 19 and in the weeks since my last post, my energy was on upheaving my existence from Manila to D.C. to Tallahassee. Since arriving, I’ve been doing a First Ninety Days Back in the US Series on my other blog.

My daughter is still in the Philippines and will be following me here this November so my days are filled with readjusting and re-acclimatizing myself to my old/new life in the US.

So in case you wandered in here from a Google search on Malu Fernandez (which gave me the highest hits on this blog) or on announcing tips, or maybe even on my former morning show, welcome. I hope to be back to my old, frequently online self soon.

For now though, I’m just here but not here.

Cheers!

Going Home

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I grew up in the Pacific Northwest until 1980. My Dad died of Cancer in 1978, leaving me and my mom in Portland, Oregon, with a house and a small pension to live on. My Mom, a Filipina-Italian-American, had been living in the US for sixteen years at the time and decided that life without my Dad was too unbearable in a foreign country, so she sold our house and moved us a continent away – back to her homeland, and away from mine.

I was eleven at the time and had no say in the matter, as any child of that age does; my opinion and protests did not matter to her. She was lonely; a grieving widow with a daughter to raise. I acquiesced.

My first visit to my mother’s country of birth came four months after my Dad passed away on February 20. It was my summer break. I had missed out on a lot of school since the night he died. The months following his death were a blur – for both of us. Life was sadder, scarier, simpler, without Daddy. And all of a sudden we were on a plane to go to an island I had only read about in a book called “Let’s Visit the Philippines”. Continue reading →