Colloquium with Professor Francis Alvarez Gealogo, Department of History, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines.
“Miranda” is the surname of the people who adopted my father. “Abibas” and “Dalaguit” are the surnames on my mom’s side. “Paula Jean” is a name that my mom’s American boss at the time gave me. Sometimes, I can feel pretty rootless.
I was helping clean out my Tita Lina’s (my ex-stepdad’s ex-wife) garage and found a box of my mom’s and ex-stepdad’s stuff.
My mom had a manila folder full of letters that me and my brother wrote to her when we were kids. This one reads:
"Ma, how are you? Hopefully you're always healthy and happy. Ma, I would like if you would buy a Barbie and watch. I'm fat now. Ma, when are we going to America? Regards and I love you."
My ex-stepdad kept all his cash advance receipts in trail mix jars. He used this to gamble. A decade’s worth of money down the drain. The bane of my life and my family’s life in these jars.
Charmaine Poh explores the almost-unnoticed passage from childhood to adulthood, looking at the expectations placed upon women.
The poem:
This is how you walk in heels.
This is how you dress up for a date.
This is how you laugh to not show your teeth if you can help it.
This is how you sit: up straight, back strong, an anchor to yourself.
This is how you smile when he says he wants someone more beautiful.
This is how you look at yourself in the mirror: up front, then left and right.
This is how you weigh yourself: in kilograms, in educational certificates, in achievements.
This is how you give up.
This is how you stay, as you have seen your mother stay.
This is how you accept a flower.
This is how you secretly think flowers are underwhelming.
This is how you shed four tears.
This is how you dab them away — delicately, so as not to ruin your makeup — and open the door.
There’s a blog post / journal entry that I keep wanting to write about how effectively colonized the Philippines is/was, how we are like fish and whiteness is our water, and how I’m trying to breathe now. I see it in pieces throughout the day, but like with other things, I have a hard time pulling it all together. Shit, I can’t even put a title on this post.
This weekend, I attended a discussion circle at the Empowering Women of Color Conference. It was facilitated by two Filipina psychology PhD candidates and used decolonization as a framework for discussing the ways in which colonial mentality manifests and hurts us, our families, and our communities. One of the first women to share told us about the molestation that they experienced from their stepfather and how that trauma has underpinned her personal journey of decolonization.
This afternoon, I met with a (really inspiring) person who works at an organization where I’ve begun to help/volunteer in the service of criminal justice reform. One of the things we talked about was my experience with a relative who had been incarcerated. I ended up talking about things that I haven’t talked with anyone about since the year my family went through that ordeal. It hasn’t been since I read Just Mercy that I began to look at this ordeal through the lens of the perpetrator.
All of this is just to say that there’s a lot to unpack. I feel like I’ve been hibernating since moving up here. Two+ years of sitting and thinking. I haven’t felt very productive or helpful- to my friends, family, community. I’ve barely taken any photos or done any work to continue or finish projects, let alone start new ones. Lately, though, I’ve started to see this as a time of healing, of fixing. It’s not a cop out, just trying to be real about the time and space I’ve been given to work through things I need to, and give myself a little bit of grace. I want to be excited about a new project again and feel like I’m working towards a goal, which is hard to do with the zig-zaggy way the lessons I’m learning are pulling me. I can’t keep one clear thought long enough to make sense of it or anything near it. The photos I took used to make sense to me; now I don’t understand them and they feel empty.
News of a criminal sex tourism case in Orange County spread quickly around the nation earlier this month. Rejecting Robert Ruben Ornelas' argument that political hysteria has made pedophilia and child pornography possession worse than murder, U.S. District Court Judge Cormac J. Carney issued a sentence of 2,280 months, or...
..assistance from a surprising source: a woman identified as "Josephine P," who "facilitated" illicit access to her own two daughters, her younger sister, two nieces and three neighbors' kids.
This one cut deep and close to home. I’ve seen the level of physical and spiritual poverty that make strangers of daughters, commodifies families. It is being dead while alive.
This post started out as a shoutout to SnP, TLC, and Janet Jackson -- women whose music I loved and listened to over and over and over again when I was a kid, like as early as 10yo (Ooooooohhh... On the TLC Tip came out in 1992, when I was nine/ten). Obviously at that age I didn’t know much about sex, but that they required plenty conversation with it seemed really reasonable. They sang and rapped about things that I understood in plain terms at the time but were actually complicated lessons about owning yourself, your body, and respecting people’s rights and choices to theirs.
So, yes, this post is still definitely a shoutout to them as empowered role models that I could look up to in the absence of more women in my life. But as I thought about it, it’s also a big shoutout to my mom, who let me listen to them. I still struggle to accept some of the parenting choices that she made, but these small things that turned out to be good, big, foundational things shouldn’t be overlooked.
