For all the women in my life, thank you. On this Happy Women's Day, I wish you all happiness, but there are those who are no longer around. For them, much thanks for the memory and to all, I am sincerely sorry for causing everyone unhappiness at some point in their lives.
It has been quite a journey, the details of which some of our relatives and close friends know. My father died at the age of 23, and it was my mother and grandmother who brought up my younger sister and myself. My mother and grandmother, we called them Inay Bata and Inay Tanda, respectively, were as expected, a powerful influence in our life.
Inay Bata enslaved herself at the Peter Paul dessicated coconut factory in Candelaria, Quezon, which brought us through the grades until we reached college. Inay Tanda spent a good part of her life working in copra-making facility in our village to add to the family income. My sister postponed schooling, waiting for me to finish college, and when it became obvious it would take probably another lifetime to get myself a college degree, she somehow was able to save money from what Inay Bata was giving her and she managed to get an education degree. She was a teacher when she died at the young age of 33.
Through the turbulent years of my life, these three women all provided support, taking care of my children whose mothers were running lives parallel to mine. They bailed me out with familial sympathy each time a relationship withered and died. I must also thank the mothers of my children for bearing with me in those years I was trying to elude arrest under the Marcos regime, and later, serving time in jail and doing so-called rehabilitation work for a number of years in an office in a park.
Those turbulent years seemed to have scarred me for life and again women with motherly instinct provided the warmth and shelter of home that I could pursue efforts to normalize my life after my sister, Inay Bata and Inay Tanda were all gone.
Again, to the women in my life, thank you for all the caring and the patience. You have been part of the continuing quest to define one's life in terms of some higher and more meaningful purpose.
I know you have defined being happy in this context, too.
Posted: Friday, 08 March 2013; 12.35 p.m.
It has been quite a journey, the details of which some of our relatives and close friends know. My father died at the age of 23, and it was my mother and grandmother who brought up my younger sister and myself. My mother and grandmother, we called them Inay Bata and Inay Tanda, respectively, were as expected, a powerful influence in our life.
Inay Bata enslaved herself at the Peter Paul dessicated coconut factory in Candelaria, Quezon, which brought us through the grades until we reached college. Inay Tanda spent a good part of her life working in copra-making facility in our village to add to the family income. My sister postponed schooling, waiting for me to finish college, and when it became obvious it would take probably another lifetime to get myself a college degree, she somehow was able to save money from what Inay Bata was giving her and she managed to get an education degree. She was a teacher when she died at the young age of 33.
Through the turbulent years of my life, these three women all provided support, taking care of my children whose mothers were running lives parallel to mine. They bailed me out with familial sympathy each time a relationship withered and died. I must also thank the mothers of my children for bearing with me in those years I was trying to elude arrest under the Marcos regime, and later, serving time in jail and doing so-called rehabilitation work for a number of years in an office in a park.
Those turbulent years seemed to have scarred me for life and again women with motherly instinct provided the warmth and shelter of home that I could pursue efforts to normalize my life after my sister, Inay Bata and Inay Tanda were all gone.
Again, to the women in my life, thank you for all the caring and the patience. You have been part of the continuing quest to define one's life in terms of some higher and more meaningful purpose.
I know you have defined being happy in this context, too.
Posted: Friday, 08 March 2013; 12.35 p.m.
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