I’ve spent more time with my Filipino cousins, aunties and uncles than I have in the past 10 years. We eat together. We celebrate each other. We connect via our groupchat and random facetime calls. We support each other’s businesses. On multiple occasions they’ll hire my husband for handyman work and expect me to bring the kids for lunch. When my children are sick or in the hospital they’re the ones I call and cry to because I feel so frail that I’ll fall apart.
I don’t have the ability to be physically present with my Black family members back east. But we text each other daily and call each other weekly. Their encouragement and keeping-it-real-ness has anchored my life in new ways. Often I get a message from them saying, “you gotta come out and see me!” or (my favorite message), “send me them babies.” Their love is loud and real and it’s the place that I go to when I feel like I’m falling apart.
This is all to say that I come from a big love that is loud, eats a lot, makes excuses to see each other (when we don’t really need excuses), is on point with the medical knowledge, unabashedly demands to see pictures of the kids, and is committed to the daily text message.
It’s important to note that I’m coming back to this love. Because, for the past 10 years I was completely immersed in white evangelicalism. I was fed the theological scraps they served at their table of privilege and power. I was made to hate ourselves, call our cultures demonic, and give in to their oppressive ways of respectability politics.
Alas, the prodigal daughter returns home.
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