Growing Pains
Isn’t it interesting that we don’t recognise growth, until in retrospect?
The realisation often happens while you’re occupied with other things… Learning how to cross roads safely, memorising a certain bus route, watching suburbs spread outward without anyone labelling it as gentrification. By the time you thought to measure it, the change had occurred. You just know when to cross, you just know when the bus is delayed, and your childhood suburb is just that — one of the many suburbs in the Northern Rivers being overtaken by developers and their greed.
I grew up in Yugambeh and Bundjalung country, surrounded by its rivers. My mouth shaped itself around English, Tagalog sitting behind my throat. My feet learned the sandy pathways, eager ears know where the waterfalls are. Any other place existed only as a collection of memories, of gestures — passed down in the ways of how to salt sinigang so it balances its tartiness, how to hold one’s tongue, how to appear less intimidating as a brown girl. None of it came with directions. None of it I really followed.
The familiar neighbourhood of my childhood kept shifting. Weatherboards replaced by concrete, concrete replaced by bricks, bricks replaced by something advertised as ‘sustainable’ or ‘low maintenance’. Multiple townhouses replace backyards. Each place promised durability. Each one thinned with time, its human companions outgrowing it and leaving it behind, while a new family moves in. Beneath them, the ground remained unnamed in daily conversation, except when it needed to be described as flat, dry, or ‘promising’.
My afternoons were marked by merienda.
Not a big ceremony. Water was simply brought to a boil and poured without fuss. Leaves chosen by instinct. Ceramic cups stained from overuse rather than age. Tea was how time slowed without stopping. How the day admitted it was turning.
Before going to work, Mum would leave puto in the microwave, or sometimes a cold turon in the fridge — all a welcomed treat for me to find after school.
When I moved out, I brought this practice with me. It anchored me more reliably than any IKEA furniture. Wherever I was, there was a kettle, a cupboard shelf slowly filling with half-used packets, gifts, things saved for later (and then forgotten).
On nights when my thoughts pressed too tightly, I browse through the freezer for the frozen calamansi juice that was gifted to me the previous Winter.
In my childhood home, our calamansi tree took many years before it started to bear fruit; and once it started, somehow, it would fruit almost year-round. My Mum would always say it’s because it’s not native here, so the way it would grow is of course, different. It tolerated cold poorly but endured it anyway, leaves curling inward, waiting patiently.
I slice the block of frozen calamansi fruit juice thinly, scraping it against the knife and dropping it into hot water. The steam rose sharp and immediate, clearing the air.
Calamansi Tea
Mix 1/4 cup of calamansi juice with 2.5L Persian tea (or Ceylon tea).
Add honey or raw sugar to taste. Enjoy hot or cold.
Sometimes, while waiting for it to steep, I stand at the balcony and look down at the strip of land between buildings. It was described as common space. Grass cut short enough to the approved council aesthetic. A tree planted precisely where the plan allowed it. Seats are only big enough to accommodate one person to prevent ‘anti-social behaviour’. Nothing accidental.
I ask myself what had been there before. The question felt both necessary and unanswerable.
The year that my parents moved out of the Northern Rivers, the calamansi tree fruited unexpectedly. Too many at once, branches hunched under their own effort. Two months too early, with the aunties saying it’s due to stress caused by the drought. I watched this happen with a kind of unease I couldn’t justify. Fruit suggested success, wealth and abundance. I picked a couple of fruits slowly, squeezing them against my fingers and leaving some to fall and split on the concrete below, its citrus scent bringing gentle attention.
I spent a few months helping my family clean up the house and get it ready to be sold.
Asleep on the floor, on a banig surrounded by boxes that contained a life that my family had built for two decades. The calamansi tree left in the backyard, a housewarming present from my Mum… though all I could think of was that the new owners might not know how to deal with it. Our tree did not grow dramatically. It did not push against the fence or crack the paved barbecue area. Its resistance was smaller than that. It learned the limits of its container and worked within them, growing dense rather than tall, productive rather than expansive.
When the house sale was finally settled, my Mum texted me. I was in Tarntanyangga deciding whether to move here permanently interstate, or go to Naarm, or Manila. Imagining the many places I once called home, however briefly.
I continued my routines.
Trees would drop leaves as needed. It kept what it could sustain. Growth, it seemed, was not linear and didn’t look the same as others.
I began to think this might be true for us as well.
I pour tea into a cup, I inhale, I sip.
My sinigang is always too sour. My laugh is a little loud. And I do my best to carve out the space for people like me to be themselves, unapologetically.
I think of my last walk around that backyard. I sense traces of roots older than mine, moving almost imperceptibly, brushing against the calamansi tree. The tree roots never claimed the land as theirs. Instead, they made space. They do not claim one another, they do not compete. They respond to each other, shifting and bending, an acknowledgement of shared presence and care, preserved in time.
Essay by Alyssa Powell-Ascura
