The importance of being childlike, according to Jeannie Goulbourn

There are certain days in a week that fashion designer Jeannie Goulbourn climbs the monkey bars at the children’s playground of an exclusive village in Makati. She’s not alone. She accompanies her almost four-year-old granddaughter Karine Feist to the park. And there, as they play, she also rediscovers the child within her.

Jeannie lives alone now. Her home is an empty nest after her husband Cid passed on two years ago. Regularly, however, she’s visited by her daughter Katrina, who lives in the south of the metro with her own family. And every time Katrina visits Jeannie, she brings in tow her children Karine and months-old Tristan.

When Jeannie sees her grandchildren, especially Karine, her world takes a joyful spin. She’s reconnected to the child in her as the grandmother and her granddaughter slide down the park, climb the monkey bars or go up in the air as they swing together.

“Nana! Nana!” Karine calls on to Jeannie as the latter pushes the swing here and there, “I love you, Nana.” Jeannie melts. Happiness clearly lounges on her face. She becomes animated as she mutually admires the precociousness of Karine, the apple of her eye.

“I am most grateful for a lifetime of joy and happiness. My joy is being a child again as I spend time with Karine. We play and entertain each other no end. She has a sense of humor and her imagination is wild. I love it. She loves to dress up just like me when I was three to 10 years old,” she gleefully says.

Spontaneity is the blood that runs in Jeannie’s veins. She revels at the thought that she can be a child again — and she relishes every opportunity she gets to be in touch with her inner child.

“To be childlike is very important. You allow yourself to dream and fantasize,” says Jeannie, who will receive tomorrow her People of the Year award from PeopleAsia magazine for her achievements as a fashion designer and a crusader of life.

“From dreaming, it is important to take one or two visions from that dream. And make them real. Nothing should stop you from doing something,” continues Jeannie, founder and president of the fashion company Silk Cocoon that makes stunning and intricate dresses, gowns and Barong Tagalogs.

It took an ultimate turning point in Jeannie’s life before she rediscovered that the secret to a happy life is to be childlike again. Fourteen years ago, her 27-year-old daughter Natasha took her own life. The young lady suffered from depression.

“Is one ever prepared to lose a child? They say a circle is closed if someone is able to say goodbye to a loved one with lingering illness. But I never expected that Tasha’s life would slip out of my hand — quick and unexpected. She was so involved with life, followed US politics passionately the way she followed her favorite soccer and basketball celebrities,” she discloses.

Jeannie was filled with guilt, anguish and pain. “Were Cid and I not parenting well? What happened? Was I too busy a mother? I questioned God.”

She found the answers when she founded the Natasha Goulbourn Foundation (NGF) in 2003. The foundation, composed of volunteer psychiatrists and psychologists, helps give advice and guidance to those undergoing clinical depression and their families. Eight years ago, she also put up Global Vital Source, a wellness company.

She also involves herself with Hopeline 24/7, a suicide prevention and emotional crisis help line with branches in Metro Manila and Metro Cebu, which is manned the whole day by experts who speak seven Filipino dialects.

There’s not a single day that Jeannie does not miss her Tasha. “I am a mother. I miss my children always. I also miss the times when they were small. They were the children who first brought out the child in me.”

She banks on the many beautiful memories she forged with Tasha. To this day, when she misses being a mother to two young girls, she brings out a copy of a magazine where her two children were featured on the cover. “It makes me happy.”

Jeannie says her life matters all the more now that she gets to help others with depression. “We do have the privilege to leave a legacy behind. Our names are not important. I can be anonymous. But it is so important that mental health is given importance and respect because we function to the extent of how our brains can make us act, react to situations, to dreams, to visions. It truly will make us think out of the box and experience life with its surprises and joys once we get to understand and know our mental attitudes. And what a privilege it is to feel whole and live life with new possibilities,” Jeannie says.

Jeannie is just grateful she is able to help others in her own way. She is thankful that the weight of the world she carried on her shoulders after the untimely passing of her Tasha has dissipated. In its wake she found a “happy, content and blessed Jeannie.”

She laughs a lot now. “I am always in touch with the child in me. It teaches me to hope. To have a childlike instinct is to have faith that everything is possible.” 

(To call the Natasha Goulbourn Foundation or Hopeline 24/7, please dial 804-4673 or 0917-5584673.)

(For your new beginnings, please e-mail me at bumbaki@yahoo.com. I’m also on Twitter @bum_tenorio and Instagram @bumtenorio. Have a blessed Sunday!)