My mother temporarily moved into my apartment the other week, quite without warning. She had just rented out our old house. I hesitate to call it our ancestral home because the only ancestry it bears goes back to my parents, who bought the lot in the mid-1970s. Back then it was a bit of a risk, buying property in a suburb way north of Makati, then Manila’s financial and chief commercial district.

My father had often boasted that he had designed the bungalow mainly by himself, with only “the help of a young architect.” Which is why, I suppose, the living room and dining room, while featuring bay windows, French doors and a nest of dark wooden trusses instead of a traditional ceiling, tended to be hot and stuffy all year round. The other shortcomings, I imagine, could be attributed to financial constraints: the French doors open into a disproportionately large, untended backyard, which variously became basketball court, badminton lawn, clothesline yard or bicycle loop. On several New Year’s Eves the dark space became the general depository for exploding firecrackers and the colored fireballs from roman candles. And for a few years before my father died, at a startlingly young age, from his first heart attack, it became his oval for brisk walking and calisthenics.

By the time our house had finally been rented out, two weeks ago, it was a little more than 30 years old. By this time, too, its four bedrooms—separated from the common areas by a small, two-step staircase—had lived through many uses. I remember sharing a bedroom with my younger brother, then giving it up to my father who repurposed it into a study. We took to sharing the largest room with my youngest brother, before I moved out, box by box, appliance by appliance, into my apartment, which is just a few minutes’ drive away.

My mother, widowed for 10 years and more than just a little worn out from having to tend to such a large, by then unneeded space, gathered all the things we had collected and left behind over the years and had them shipped, batch by cumbersome batch, back to her Southern province where she was determined to start life anew.

What she had no time to ship or could not make head or tail of she brought to my apartment, on the evening of her moving day. Boxes, baskets, loose heaps and haphazard piles appeared in my tiny apartment, crowding out my floor and my private space, dislodging the small semblance of peace and quiet I had worked hard to establish over the years. A cursory look revealed things I thought I would never see again: old toys, worn out clothes, the very bric-a-brac I had been relieved to leave behind in my gradual migration. With them they had tracked in, from their hiding places in the old house, the faint smell of dust and rot. I complained about all this to my mother, who waved it away with a mixed look on her face that probably reflected mine. There was, after all, a kind of turnabout in this exchange; for the first time, my mother was in my house and I had neither the room nor the patience for this mess.

My youngest brother is preparing to leave later in the year for an education overseas. He will leave, I am certain, amid a planeload of Filipinos mostly bound not for graduate school, but for employment in private homes, hospitals, oil companies, software firms. For a country with a huge youth population and an economy virtually supported by exported labor, this is a sign of hope. For many Filipinos, it has also been an old, dependable formula. Sons and daughters, educated at great expense and sacrifice, are expected, sooner or later, to return the favor and the labor and bear the parental burden.

And yes, even our family, even our mother, despite means that may seem a shade more comfortable, calculates things quite the same way. She beams with a lost, vicarious pride whenever she talks about her younger sister Annabel, whose daughter has been lucky enough to be a nurse in the UK. The truly lucky one, it seems, has been Annabel, who has been provided with a house and a van by the daughter, who has recently married and is raising a family of her own.

But maybe these are more than just trappings of luxury and status. Maybe these are signs of our culture at work. I suspect that my mother can afford a house and a car of her own if she really wanted them, or needed them. After all, she has agreed to fund my brother’s education—an expense not to be sneezed at, and certainly not one that can be afforded by any of us children, perhaps even with our collective salaries. By the same token I suspect that, instead of moving into my shoebox lodgings, she could afford to obtain temporary storage for all the flotsam and jetsam left by the move, or, more to the point, rent more comfortable temporary quarters for herself.

Still, I remember a time, growing up in the old house, when we hosted—sometimes for years at a time—uncles, aunts, grandmothers and grandfathers, providing them with food, lodging and laundry services without any discussion, without any second thought. My mother and my father opened our doors to the lot of them—and the whole lot of us made up the extended unit that was quite commonly defined, in TV commercials, movies and by observing the houses of neighbors and friends, as family.

Now it’s different, I suppose. Times are harder, one can always argue. Where my father enjoyed an income that allowed my mother to stay at home and gave them enough savings to build a house early in his career, I would need to work and scrimp many times harder just to make the down payment—and then only on the lot.

The pressure of having to work so much harder for so much less, along with the anxiety of having to face the rising costs of living and providing, shows most clearly with comparisons of age. My parents were just in their mid-30s when they had their fourth child, my only sister. At 24 years old, she is still regarded as the baby in the family—someone to look after and provide for.  By the time my parents were of that age, they had already had me, their eldest child, and were already expecting their second. They were on their own in the big city, renting an apartment, without the support of family or friends, and most probably even sending financial support to their own parents.

Today, in our late 30s, my high-school friends and I gently tease the brave (and, some might think, foolhardy) among us who have more than two offspring. Whenever we meet, we return to the usual palaver about money and what it can or can’t buy. Times have changed, we say wistfully, as if remembering old photos of folks with armloads of kids on wide, sweeping lawns, grandparents smiling approvingly from rocking chairs in the background. Or as if we were those old folks themselves, clucking our tongues over the good old days.

But I wonder if something else has changed. As my mother’s two-week stay in my apartment threatens to stretch into a month, I feel an unsettling, alien burden. I wonder if my parents had ever felt it, during the worst of their times—a lack of tolerance for the small inconvenience, or for the other’s perceived disrespect.

Or was it a strange feeling of inadequacy, for not having enough room, or money to buy room for us both, for us all? With the movement of the times, maybe another kind of change happened, unexpected and unwelcome, too.

The thing was, I couldn’t even be counted upon to silently suffer my mother’s luggage and her baggage, reduced—by my very own description—to the psychological, aromatic, abstract concept of “mess,” for a period of weeks. The truth was, it was the only thing she had asked of me, and I did not have room even for that.

Mr. Lacuesta has received the Palanca, Philippine Graphic, NVM Gonzalez Awards and the Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Award. His collections of short stories, “Life Before X and Other Stories” (University of the Philippines Press, 2000) and “White Elephants: Stories” (Anvil Publishing Manila, 2005) won National Book Awards. He was recently a fellow at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He is also the Literary Editor of the Philippines Free Press.