The skills my parents never knew they were teaching me
Nobody sits down and tells you what they are passing forward.
That is not how it works. The most significant things a parent gives a child are never announced. They arrive through repetition and proximity and the particular texture of ordinary moments that do not feel significant until decades later when you are sitting somewhere far from where you started and you notice yourself doing something exactly the way you watched someone else do it, without ever having been taught.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately.
Partly because my daughter arrives in a matter of days and I am trying to understand what I am actually bringing into that room alongside the research and the preparation and the protocols. And partly because I owe two people a debt that I have not named clearly enough in public, and this is the place where I do that.
This is about my father and my mother.
What they gave me without knowing they were giving it. And what I intend to do with it.
My father's mother finished only elementary school.
In the Philippines, in a mountain town in the Cordillera, that was not an unusual ceiling for a woman of her generation. What was unusual was what she did with it. She became a teacher anyway, which tells you something about the kind of stubbornness that runs in that bloodline, and she wrote poetry, which tells you something about how she saw language. Not as a practical tool only. As a living thing worth tending carefully.
She passed that understanding to my father. And my father, when he had children of his own, made a decision that the community around him thought was strange and more than a little pretentious.
He decided we would speak English at home.
Not Ilocano, which was what everyone around us spoke. Not Tagalog. English. At the dinner table, during homework, in the ordinary exchanges of a household going through its daily business. The neighbors had opinions about this. They were not shy about sharing them.
There is a specific kind of community criticism reserved for people who appear to be reaching above their station, and a family in La Trinidad choosing to raise their children in English qualified. People said it would amount to nothing. That they were putting on airs. That the children would end up confused and belonging nowhere.
My father was not interested in any of that.
What I remember from those evenings is not discipline or formality. It was almost the opposite.
After dinner, when homework needed doing, my father would settle near the window with a book and a cigarette. Not hovering. Not directing. Just present, in the particular way of someone who has made his availability known and is content to wait until it is needed. We did our work. When we hit a word we did not understand, we called out to him.
He would answer without putting the book down.
First the meaning, delivered plainly. Then the context, because a word without context is just a sound. Then a simpler sentence using it, so the meaning had somewhere to land.
Then he would ask us to do the same, to make our own sentence, which forced the word from passive reception into active use. Then spelling, out loud, which is different from knowing how to spell something on paper. Then pronunciation, corrected if needed, because sounding a word correctly is its own separate skill and one that matters when you are eventually going to use it in rooms where people are deciding what to make of you based on how you sound.
He did this from behind a book, with a cigarette, by a window, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Every word, every definition, context, and example. It wasn't just making daily practice easy. It was also building infrastructure.
The returns on that infrastructure did not show up immediately.
They showed up in high school, in the way significant investments tend to show up, quietly at first and then all at once.
I got into debate. I had always been quick with language, good with comebacks, comfortable in the particular rhythm of an argument, but debate gave that instinct structure and competition gave it stakes.
I organized a crew of friends. We practiced. We decided, somewhere along the way, that we would only speak English together in and around school, which earned us the same ridicule my family had absorbed for years from people who thought the choice was pretentious and unlikely to amount to anything. But now from classmates who thought we were being cringy.
Then we went to the regional debate championship.
We swept it. Every award. First tournament we entered as a team, regional champions, the boys and girls who had been told their English was an affectation standing at the front of the room collecting everything there was to collect.
The classmates who had done the ridiculing watched this happen. I do not know what they made of it. I know what I made of it. The thing my grandmother had decided to take seriously despite finishing only elementary school, the thing my father had passed forward through evenings by the window with a book and a cigarette while his children called out words they did not know, the thing the neighborhood had dismissed as pretension, had just won a regional championship.
It was not pretension for me. Instead it was a thirty year investment in the next generation paying its first visible dividend.
The second thing my father gave me is harder to name cleanly but I will try.
There is a specific quality in certain people that combines a sense of justice with the willingness to act on it regardless of the odds. Not recklessness. Not aggression. The particular calm of someone who has decided that what is right matters more than what is comfortable, and who moves toward the confrontation rather than away from it when the moment requires it.
I saw it first with my encounter with "the string beans incident".
I was in high school, in a farm science class where we spent an entire semester growing a crop from seed. We bought the seeds ourselves, pitched in for fertilizer, tended two plots each for months through the kind of patient physical work that united both the farm kids and city kids under the same physical demands. When harvest came, we received a surprise announcement from the teacher that all of it was going to him.
I did not accept this.
I organized the boys that afternoon, laid out the plan, and we went to the plots and harvested all of the crops before he would put his pants on the next morning. Then, combining my fathers sense of justice with the instinct I had watched my mother develop into a business model, we bagged the string beans in one and two kilo portions and sold them on credit to his colleagues as they left the faculty office. The next day, the teacher was livid but knew he did not have the right to even be. He never saw a single bean.
Where did that come from. That instinct for justice combined with the operational thinking to execute it cleanly. I was simply following instinct then but now know exactly where it came from.
My father was half the size of my high school teacher.
This particular teacher had been a problem throughout my final year(same teacher who wanted to steal the beans the year before), the kind of educator who understood his position as an opportunity for small accumulations of power over people who could not easily push back.
In one occasion, he confiscated a hat I was wearing inside and kept it rather than returning it as the rules required. I broke into his office that afternoon and took it back. By the end of the year he had graduated to requiring students to purchase photographs he had taken at the graduation ceremony before he would sign their end of year clearance waiver.
I refused. I went home and told my father.
The next morning he walked with me to school, demanded to speak to the teacher in the faculty office, and without mincing words, my dad confronted him directly.
My father is not a large man. This teacher was a former bodybuilder with the physical confidence that comes from having been the most imposing person in most rooms for most of his adult life. My father was not phased or interested in any of that. He stood in front of this man and said what needed to be said with the particular clarity of someone who knows he is right and has decided that being right is sufficient regardless of the physical arithmetic involved.
After under 3 minutes, the teacher signed the waiver on the spot.
He bad mouthed my father to colleagues afterward. Said parents should not be doing their children's clearance tasks for them. What he did not say, because there was no version of it that served his narrative, was that he had caved. That a man half his size had walked into his office on behalf of his son and made him do the right thing through nothing more than intention and the willingness to show up.
I was proud of my father in that moment in a way I did not have full language for at the time. He felt for me, showed up for me, and backed me up with both words and actions towards doing what was right.
What I understood was simpler and more important than anything I could have articulated. It is acceptable to stand up for what is right. Your heart and your intentions are real forces in a confrontation, not just your size. And when someone you love is being wronged, intentionally lean into how to help with not just your words but also actions.
I have been moving toward things ever since.
My mother's version of passing things forward looked completely different and was equally precise.
She sold Avon and Tupperware through catalogues, which is not an unusual thing for a Filipino woman of her generation and circumstance. What was unusual was how she did it.
The standard approach was to throw parties, gather people, demonstrate the products, and close sales in a social setting. My mother did not do this. Instead, she bought the catalogues, identified the places where her customers gathered naturally, salons, school lounges, places where women with purchasing decisions sat together during the gaps in their days, and she went there.
She did not pitch. She sat down, pulled out the catalogue with her name on it, showed them a few things, left it with them when she stood up to leave, and told them she would be back. She took orders on credit, delivered on payday, and collected. Then she came back the next time.
This is a GTM motion. She did not know the terminology. She understood the principle instinctively, which is that you find the right people where they already are, give them something useful, make it easy to say yes, and build the relationship through consistent follow through rather than a single convincing moment. She was running a distribution and credit model in a small town in the Philippines decades before anyone was writing frameworks about it.
Her resilience is harder to describe in a single story because it was not a single story. It was the texture of every day across years of making things work in circumstances that did not invite working. Raising children, running multiple income streams simultaneously, navigating a country where the systems are not designed to help people like her move up, and doing all of it without complaint in a way that made it look like the natural shape of things rather than an ongoing act of extraordinary will.
I did not recognize it as extraordinary until I tried to do a fraction of it myself in Ottawa. Then I understood.
What I took from both of them I did not take unchanged.
My father's sense of justice and willingness to confront, I inherited with more emotional range than he carried it. Sometimes, he has not always known what to do with feelings that did not fit neatly into action. Through some difficult years, distance, and some significant internal work, I learned to acknowledge what I feel and move through it rather than around it. The protector instinct is still there. The heartfelt tenacity on behalf of people I love is still there. It runs with more self-awareness now than it did when I was harvesting string beans to spite a corrupt teacher on behalf of my classmates, different circumstances running on the same engine.
My mother's entrepreneurship I took and redirected into a global operation she could not have imagined when she was leaving catalogues in school lounges in La Trinidad. She thought I was clever and good with words. She did not think in terms of what those things could build at scale because the version of scale available to her was constrained in ways mine has not been.
I took the instinct she modeled, the language my father normalized, and the chip on my shoulder that my circumstances installed, and aimed all of it at a world that had more surface area than any of them could see from where they were standing.
I took English and spent the next thirty years sharpening it into the primary tool of my livelihood. Every client conversation, every piece of copy, every campaign and pitch and post and product has been built on a foundation that started with a woman who finished elementary school, decided that was not the end of the story, and wrote poems.
I am the product of both of them. Visibly. In every room I walk into.
What I want to pass to my daughter is not a version of what my parents directly passed down to me.
I want to pass the foundation that allowed me to build what I built. Not just the specific skills or the specific hustle or the specific confrontational energy that sent a former bodybuilder teacher reaching for a pen. Those are expressions. The foundation underneath them is what matters.
The foundation is this. You will not choose the cards you are dealt. Nobody does. What you choose is whether you spend your life resenting the hand or learning to play it so well that people forget you were given random cards to start.
What my parents gave me did not look like advantages when it was happening. English at home looked like pretension. A father with a temper looked like a liability. A mother running catalogues through school lounges looked like hustle with a small ceiling. The skill is not in receiving the right gifts. It is in recognizing what you actually have, taking it seriously enough to develop it, and combining it in ways that nobody around you thought to try. Gratitude and ambition are not opposites. Used together they are the most powerful combination available to a person who did not start with everything. This is real life alchemy.
Acknowledge what you have. Be genuinely grateful for it even when it arrives wrapped in difficulty. Hone it past the point where it feels like enough. Combine the pieces in ways nobody else would think to combine them.
That is not settling. It's how you play the actual game.
And the game has no closing time. No matter how old, bad, or how your previous programming is stopping you, you can still pick up the cards and play life differently at any point.
The people who matter are still at the table.
