I Thought Taking a Toddler Somewhere Far Away Was a Terrible Idea. I Was Wrong

The real discovery of this trip was that I wasn’t actually the one showing the Philippines to my son: my son was showing the Philippines to me.

It’s 10 p.m. when the airport’s sliding doors open. And there it is again, the energy of Asia filling my lungs. My 18-month-old is in the carrier, I have a backpack on my shoulders, and we’re ready to make our way to Balayan, in the province of Batangas, where I spent the first 10 days of our trip.

It is certainly not the best-known part of the country, but it lets you step into a different kind of everyday life—slower, noisier, filled with roosters crowing early in the morning, church sermons I could hear through loudspeakers at 3 a.m., and children running barefoot through the streets. From there, our journey continued through the underwater gardens of Anilao, the golden beaches of Palawan, and the hidden corners of Cebu, traveling around the islands by tricycle with a toddler.

You can learn a lot about a country from the way it welcomes your child. And that is exactly how I began to understand the Philippines.

A Toddler Opens Doors

Traveling with a child completely changes the way people see you. People come closer, talk to him, try to connect. And suddenly you find yourself having conversations you probably would never have started if you were traveling alone. With women especially, conversations began with an ease I had rarely experienced while traveling on my own. Because even when miles and oceans separate us, motherhood seems to speak a universal language.

On the boat to Coron, I was desperately looking for somewhere to change a diaper when a young woman simply offered her lap so I could lay my son down. And, despite all the toys you packed for the trip, you watch your toddler and another little boy collect fallen flowers from the big trees above a beach in Moalboal and carefully arrange them from smallest to largest.

You learn about relationships between generations by watching small gestures. You see it in mano po, the gesture children use to greet their elders: they take the elder’s hand, heavy and marked by time, and bring the back of it to their forehead as a sign of respect and to receive a blessing. To me, it also felt like a small sign of belonging. And these are the same grandparents who later sit on the floor and play with their grandchildren. Or who, during a game of find, find, when someone needs to find a gray hair, pull one straight from their own head without thinking twice.

Hierarchy doesn’t prevent intimacy. Respect and participation seem to live within the same gesture.

It Really Does Take a Village

I found myself spending New Year’s Eve with a Filipino family. We ate pancit, sisig, and more rice sweets than I could count. We sang karaoke and danced to songs in Tagalog. And I understood what it means to have a village around you.

At Ate Imelda’s house—ate means “older sister” and is also used as a familiar term of respect—everyone was there: nieces and nephews, cousins, brothers and sisters, their children’s children, neighbors, and people who simply happened to be passing by. Imelda left the island many years ago to seek a better life in the West, and when she returned with some money she had managed to save, she threw a party for the whole neighborhood. What she was able to put aside in Europe was enough to make a beautiful New Year’s Eve dinner for everyone there, rent a karaoke machine, and give the children a night of fun. Everyone who came brought something: a bag of rice, fresh fruit, a few eggplants.

Sometimes it seemed as though everyone’s children belonged to everyone. Kuya Marvin —kuya means “older brother”—has a good job and, when he can, buys bags of rice for his cousin’s four daughters. Every afternoon, the girls play with his son and share pens and colored pencils while they finish their schoolwork.

Of course, this also comes with a certain intrusiveness I wasn’t used to. Everyone kisses and hugs you with disarming ease, offers sweets even to the youngest children, steps in, gives advice. The boundaries around a child simply seem different from the ones I was accustomed to. And yet it was through that closeness that my son was able to experience Filipino family culture. The motherhood that I have experienced, on the other hand, can make you feel terribly alone. You might find yourself living in the city of your dreams while raising a child far away from your family.

I came home wanting to find my own village.

Travel Less, See More

When you book a flight knowing you’ll be traveling with a toddler, you have to accept that you will travel less and do fewer things. But I promise you will see more.

I had to adapt my itinerary and the way we moved around. I chose domestic flights over long journeys by boat. Before moving somewhere new, I made sure I could find snacks he would like. I changed plans at the last minute when the weather wasn’t good enough for island hopping in El Nido.

Slowness followed us through our days, and thank goodness for that. Stopping and staying in the moment makes you appreciate a sweet mango bought from a roadside cart. It lets you notice how long an embrace lasts between sisters who have lived far apart for so long. That is how, after missing the bus to Manila while trying to get my son to sleep, I ended up in Conchita’s garden.

In the Philippines, leaving is part of the story of many families. And with leaving, you also learn how to say goodbye. Lola Conchita—lola means “grandmother”—is 84 and lives in Nasugbu. I met her while wandering the streets there, and she invited me into her garden for coffee. That day, she said goodbye to her sister. She held her for almost two minutes without letting go.

They have to. They have to hold each other as tightly as they can, whenever they can.

She told me they never know when, or whether, they will see each other again. Whether there will be enough money for another plane ticket, or whether life will surprise them with something unexpected that makes another reunion impossible.

Had I gone there alone, with my adult eyes and adult conversations, with my own pace and habits, I would certainly have noticed the landscapes, beaches, temples, food, and cities. But arriving as a mother forces you to keep your eyes wide open, to pay attention to everything, partly because you are afraid something might happen to your child so far from home. And that attention gives you a view that can sometimes be raw, but also deeply intimate, of how a society thinks about care, kinship, childhood, and belonging.

Traveling through the Philippines with a toddler taught me to nurture kindness; to say goodbye to people as though it might be the last time I see them; to search for my own village, so I don’t have to feel so alone; to be grateful for the feeling of seawater beneath my feet and for the chance to watch my son be part of the world.

And so I say: travel with your children. Some versions of you deserve to come home.