Gary D. is Home for Good!

Who is this Gary D?

Gary D is my pseudonym for my wonderful hubby. He loves Gary Valenciano and his first name's initial is D, hence the name.

I thought I'd start out with this post, in celebration and thankfulness to the Lord for bringing him home to us again. For everybody's info, Gary D. left to work for the US last November 2006. I was only three months pregnant with our fourth baby at that time. It was bittersweet, him having leave us. While we were looking forward to the dollars that he would earn, it hurt us to be so far apart. Gary D seriously loves to be with us, you see. If he's not doing anything, he'd rather be with us than be with anybody else. Our children enjoy a lot of playing time with him, and we love to have long conversations with each other. Despite this, because of our growing family, we decided to separate.

It was a difficult two years away from each other. Our children experienced several hospital confinements, and I developed anxiety attacks. One of our children was ill several times which our pedia attributed to missing her daddy so much. My anxiety attacks was brought about by the stresses of living by ourselves and caring for four children alone. For Gary D, his difficulty lay in not being around during those times. When we were at the hospital, he felt helpless and alone over there.

He did come back in May 2007 during the birth of our son. At the same time, his brother died a week after I gave birth. He was here for a total of six weeks. After six weeks, we had to take him back to the airport and say our sad goodbyes.

By the end of last year, he was allowed a three-week vacation by his boss. He came back home with the plan of leaving us again in three weeks. The children and I prayed that he will decide to stay with us instead. Upon coming home, we still continued to experience a lot of emotional stress due to adjusting to him being home. Despite missing him so much, we have already been used to living without him. We developed our own rhythm to life and suddenly he's here, and we have to consider him all the time. He, of course, noticed this and was saddened to see how much we have all changed while he was gone. One thing he did see clearly was the difficulty of raising up the children by myself. Guitar Babe, our eldest, once told me "Dad is not our dad anymore, he is just the giver of money". Sad to hear but I can't blame her, she's telling the truth.

After about a week and a half, he was already unsure about going back to work abroad, but can't decide yet because of the lack of a job here in Manila. However, going back abroad will mean that we will have to go into debt again for the purchase of his return ticket. We felt that we can no longer do that again. We considered for him to go back and return again when he has found a job here. However, we did not consider this a wise move because of the debt that we will incur to purchase his plane ticket and the amount of time that it will take for him to save up for another plane ticket home. We felt that this was already impractical.

The deciding factor, though, was really what God had put in his heart for his family. We are a family that deeply loves the Lord. This family needs a present husband and a father to four precious lives. We had to ask ourselves, “Was the money he was earning worth the time lost with us?” And the only answer was “No”.

After some time, he finally decided he’s not leaving us anymore. It’s a risk we took. He doesn’t have a job here. I, too, am not working. After considering the possible things that could happen to us while he’s still looking for a job, we decided we’ll go for that risk rather than risk losing each other.

This is the reason for this blog and this blog’s title. We are a Filipino family dedicated to staying together here in our home country. We have not given up our dreams to migrate to another country, but as of the moment, we are here to stay. This blog will be about our efforts in making it work here. We’ll be sharing about our income generating opportunities and how it is working for us.