A Change in Attitude and Perspective

Changes in life is a normal thing to go through, But some people have a harder time excepting change. When I was younger I hated things around me constantly changed, and I would get very depressed about it. I wanted things to stay the same as they are, when things around me changed, I felt like I was being left behind. When I was fifteen years old, my mother decided to take me back to the Philippines. My mother had taken my older sister and me to the states when I was two and my sister was four years old. So going back was a change that was exciting and yet a bit scary for me. I have not seen my Aunts, Uncles and cousins in thirteen years. When my mother and I got to the airport, my heart was literally pounding, because this was the first time I had ever been on a plain, since I left the Philippines, when I was two. When we got there we were greeted by my aunts and uncles who started to cry, due to happiness and excitement. My relatives were so glad to see my mother and I, they wanted to show us off to everyone they knew. My mother, having been born and raised in the Philippines, knew her way around. She had planned a tour for me. She took me to several different churches in and around Baclaran, which is the City she was from. Going through this tour for two weeks, I saw how the people lived there and how life was like for my relatives, as well as for the people I saw and met. My mind began to think about how I use to feel my life in the U.S. was very poor, because I didn’t get to do a lot of things like the rest of my friends, and I found myself to jealous of them. Although after seeing some children living in a shack and seeing a little disable girl beg in the middle of the market street, I began to realize that I had no right to feel the way I did in the U.S. When I came back home to the U.S., my attitude and perspective about my adopted home that I grew up in was different. Going back to the Philippines was immediately a life changing event for me, I learned not to take my home here in the U.S. for granted and to appreciate my life here. As I got older, I told my children and friends the experience I had there and the lesson I felt I had learned. I still keep that appreciation and thank my mother everyday, even when she is no longer with me, for taking me back. That trip, was one of the best eye opening gift, she can ever give me.