Dear Nanay or Tatay, somewhere in a country where the time zone is far enough off that you're just waking up as your child, back home, is being tucked in for the night —
I want to tell you about the specific kind of missing this is, because it is different from the general ache of being far away, and I don't think it gets named often enough. It's not the birthday you'll watch on video call instead of in the room. It's smaller than that. It's the drawing that shows up in the family group chat — a photo of a photo, half-lit, someone's thumb in the corner of the frame — of a crayon sun with too many rays, or a stick-figure family where you are drawn slightly apart from everyone else, or exactly the right size. You didn't see it made. You didn't see the tongue poking out in concentration, or the moment your child held it up and asked who it was for. You got the finished version, flattened into a phone screen, three or four days after the fact, if you got it at all.
More than two million Filipinos are working abroad in any given year, according to the Philippine Statistics Authority. That number is easy to read past. It is much harder to feel, at whatever hour it is where you are, that you are one of two million people going through a version of the exact same evening — reading a message, looking at a photo of a drawing, and putting the phone down without quite knowing what to do with the feeling.
Here is the thing I would want someone to tell me, if I were you. The drawings are not gone. They are usually still there — in a folder, in a bag, in a drawer at your mother's house or your sister's, or wherever your child is growing up while you are somewhere else keeping the lights on for that household. Someone is probably already saving a few of the good ones without being asked to, the way people do. What's missing is not the artwork. What's missing is a way to hold all of it at once, later, when you are finally the one sitting at the table with your child instead of looking at a photo of a photo.
That is the part a book can actually do something about. Not replace the year you weren't there for — nothing does that, and I won't pretend a stack of printed pages closes that particular distance. But a book turns "somewhere in a drawer" into something you can hold with both hands on the one visit home, or the one that finally becomes permanent. Something your child can open years from now and see the whole year at once, not scattered across a phone's camera roll that eventually gets a new phone. Something that says, without needing to say it out loud, that the distance was never about not paying attention.
If you're the one abroad, you are usually not the one who can gather the drawings, flatten them, photograph them properly, and turn them into anything — that work falls to whoever is home, and it is one more thing on a list that is already long. That's the part we can take off someone's plate: free pickup anywhere in Metro Manila, the scanning and the design handled here, a digital proof sent wherever you are so you can see it before it's printed, even from a different time zone. The Kids Art Book starts at ₱2,200. It is a small thing, against a distance that isn't small at all. I still think it's worth doing.
— Karen, Quezon City