Playing Catch-Up

Finding out a family secret in your late 20s is pretty wild

Earlier last year I got a phone call from my brother, who had been on vacation and staying back home with our family in the Philippines. Niles had been calling and texting frequently, giving updates about our family whom I hadn’t seen since I was 12: how tall our nephew has gotten, how our aunt’s business was going, how my cousin looked like the spitting image of his late father, how the experience of thinking that I was speaking to a ghost over Facetime was a very first world problem.

He called me an hour before his flight out. The phone call went something like this:

“You know it’s 1AM here, right?”

“Hey. Oops. Anywho, did you know we have a half-sister?”

This was only a little shocking to me, as our father is, as I like to put it, a scumbag that I would gladly beat the dogshit out of on sight. Of course after leaving our mother he went and ruined someone else’s life. My response was likely sputtering and confusion.

My brother continued, “Yeah, he had a first wife.”

There was no room in my tiny apartment to really, truly scream. But I did anyway. We laughed at the absurdity, yelled about how literally everyone in our family had kept this from us, and he told me that our aunt dropped this on him right before he had to go to the airport. Then, he hung up to the sound of me cursing him out for doing the same to me. The bastard.

Months later, I visited him where he had been living in Belgium with his fiancé. My first day there, he slacked off from his work-from-home position and we sat on his couch and played catch-up. And I mean really caught up. There was only so much we could say over the phone and through text. I got a play-by-play of his days spent in our childhood neighborhood. He listened as I spoke of the imposter syndrome that stopped me from writing the things I’d wanted to write. We ranted about things we had been watching and playing. I don’t even think he got any actual work done that day.

I couldn’t tell you how many times “Oh wait, I didn’t tell you this yet?” was asked, or how many confused and disbelieving noises we made. Later in the afternoon he revealed that our dad has been heavily using drugs and alcohol.

Yawn. Next.

Then he told me about a day that he and our uncles and cousins drank together. A recipe for disaster, he knew. Everyone involved knew. Niles remembered distinctly how much our father insisted that he go out and do things, experience what our hometown had to offer, but never once joined him. Only when booze was involved did they really spend time together. There was a moment where my father, who once threatened me with scissors when I couldn’t remember my times tables when I didn’t even need to know them, whom I got my eyes and hair and last name from, lamented to my brother how he wished he could have been there for us.

Please. As if he knows us at all.

It’s weird to think that my family doesn’t even know my new name. Niles kept having to code-switch to my old name, stop calling me his brother, pause when people would refer to me as his sister and remember, oh right, they mean Kaz. It was like a little secret between the two of us, one that we’d whisper and giggle about behind closed doors, brothers that had stolen sweets from the pantry in the middle of the night when everyone else was asleep. 

Our mother, who knows about me and also has a rocky relationship with our father, asked when I would be visiting home again. I only have one living grandparent left, after all. My father’s side of the family was not exactly good to her, and yet she still wants me to visit and show respect to my father and his mother, to have filial piety to a family that doesn’t even know what I went to school for, where I live, or what I look like.

I understand that I have the privilege to even have the opportunity to go back home, but would that even be the right thing to do? I can’t in good conscience go back and lie about my entire life to the elders of my family. I’ve been living as Kaz for so long that it takes me more than a moment to process that my mother is calling out to me when she says the other name. 

I had been the failure of the kids when I was growing up as the second child, the first daughter of the family, never good enough, not loyal enough, at least to my father’s side. Should I just lean into it? Should I allow my grandmother to die disappointed and hating me because I wanted her to know the truth? That her second grandkid turned out to be some queer? Or should I not show up and let her die thinking I didn’t care enough to visit? 

And worse, I know that everyone on both sides of the family will think this reflects badly on our mother. Our mother, who had only done her best to raise two children on her own and encouraged me to pursue what I wanted, would be looked down on because of me. Her first child, financially stable and living in Europe, and her second child, broke and gay and a writer of all things. What would my aunts say?

The kindest thing to do is to pretend that the last two decades of my life never happened, to pretend that my current life, open and loved and so so happy, is something to be ashamed of. This is probably what I should do, as a child of my mother. 

But I know that I’ll do nothing. I know that I’ll never go back home. 

And how strange it is that I continue with this phrasing. Back home in the Philippines. Back with my family. It’s been nearly two decades and I can’t bring myself to stop speaking like that. There’s a clear dissonance when my brother speaks about our cousins, people my age that I’m sure I’d be close to if I had maintained contact with them. I only learn things about them secondhand, years later, but my heart aches and wishes to know them as they are now, wishes that they know me as I am now. 

Back home. Back then. It’s always in the past. To learn about my family now, for them to learn about me, the information would be coming on a major delay. Would it have been better if we had learned these things in real time? Would it have been better to have never learned about my father’s second family at all? The time difference between Niles and I usually has us playing catch-up naturally— him reading my late night messages when he wakes up first thing in the morning and me seeing his messages only after he’s gone to bed— but that’s only a 5 hour delay. 

How do you deal with a decades-long one?

My brother’s getting married in a year, and our family is invited. There’s no way I’m not going. He cares for me and doesn’t want me to come to his wedding in what would feel like a costume, and both of us know what this could mean. The mess it could make. The bridges it could burn. I won’t go back home, but home would worm its way back to me.

Maybe they’ll all take it in stride. Maybe their treatment of me will be misguided, but ultimately loving like my mother. Maybe they’ll be hostile and play into what I expect to happen. But that’s something I’ll have to deal with later, and frankly, I have other things to worry about than the opinions of strangers.