Single Moms

For one of our classes in term 2 of MBA, we were asked to conduct a walkabout wherein we had to do something that is meaningful to us and would take us out of our comfort zones. I had done my walkabout with my classmate and good friend Amit Gupta. He approached me with the proposal of doing a documentary on Single Moms in the Philippines. I really liked the idea as it is a subject that I have a personal interest in. We interviewed several single mothers from different walks of life. At the end of the term, we had to write a reflection paper. My reflection goes like this:

Embarking on a walkabout is something not entirely new to me, I just don’t call it a walkabout, I call it living life to the fullest. Everyday, I find myself being taken out of my comfort zone and doing something that is beyond what I have done before. Life, I find is like that. Everyday is a new day that always brings something different. There is a challenge that goes with going through each day of our lives, to see each day from beginning to end without being bogged down by failures, disappointments, sorrow, anger or weariness. In my life, I have tried new things, tasted sorrow, been angry, was disappointed over and over by myself, my loved ones and my friends, and have been weary from all the hardships that I go through. But at the end of the day, before I go to sleep, I still and will always thank the Lord for the blessings that have come. Because life is to be lived and not to be given up without a fight.

The Walkabout of delving into the lives of the single unwed mothers we had interviewed proved to be one of the emotionally wrought activities I have put myself to. In each interview, these women who are strangers to me poured out one of the most painful episodes in their lives. As I sit with them and listen, I cannot help but be pulled into their lives and feel their pain as they recount the events leading up to their pregnancies. As they told their stories, I find myself forgetting about the written questionnaires Amit and I had prepared. I asked them questions that bore deeper into how they felt in those moments when they found out they had been betrayed by the person they had trusted instead of the formula question of what does the father of your child do for a living. I found myself feeling anger at the duplicity of the men who have taken their pleasure with them but then discarded them when responsibility came.

There is strength and courage in living our lives. This is a must in order to look forward to the beginning of each day. The women we interviewed took living with strength and courage into a different level. The courage and strength they have is not just for themselves, but also for the child(ren) they have brought into the world. These women have been honed by the bitterness of solitude in their most needful moments, by the cruel twist of faith that the men they have trusted have abandoned them in the eleventh hour, and by the necessity of giving life to a child when they themselves have just come out of their childhood.

I have taken a particular empathy with Jane. There was a naivety about her that made listening to her story all the more heavy. She had come to Manila to work, to be the breadwinner of a family that lives in the province. She met a man with whom she had given herself to only to find out, at the most crucial moments, that he was already married. As she told her story, I felt indignant that such men can prey on the naivety of such girls. There were moments when I was talking to Jane and to the other girls with similar stories that I asked myself if there is a gene exclusive to men that made them duplicitous. Of course, it was a feeling I knew to be wrong but those moments were such that I could not have felt anything else. After each interview, I asked Amit why men are like that, and he himself does not know the answer. He told me, coming from the interviews we did, that for more than two thousand years, many men are like this. Of course, I knew for myself that not all men are like this. I have living examples of men who are the most trustworthy. It is through these moments of contradictions that I realize that generalizing everything into a single box is definitely wrong.

Jessica is a girl, who is twenty-two years old, on her third trimester, and is on her second pregnancy. She had her first baby when she was nineteen years old. She came to Manila to work not knowing she was pregnant again. Up until we interviewed her, her parents do not know she is pregnant. Big fat tears kept rolling down her cheeks as I talked to her about her circumstances. There was such pain evident in her being while she recounted to us how she got into the situation she is in now. Looking at her while she exposed her pain to us made me feel small. I was doing a project for a school subject, she was living each day with her pain, and I was asking her to strip herself naked in front of the camera we brought so that we can show her to a roomful of people who do not know her but will see her naked. This was my walkabout. Realizing that what I had done as a walkabout was not really looking into the factors of why there are single women in the Philippines. My walkabout is realizing that in doing this project, I took these women, stripped them of their armors and vestments, and made them vulnerable to me, a complete stranger.

Who am I or Amit to them that they should bare their souls open to us? We were nobody in their lives. We came, we interviewed, we presented. But then what? Do I move on and forget about them? Then their sharing would have been futile and trivial. Doing this walkabout has given me my own quandary. Jane and Jessica are just two of the women we interviewed. These women were the most vulnerable out of all. I see Jane most everyday. I notice that sometimes she doesn’t fully look me in the eye, maybe because she knows I have taken a glimpse of her soul. I want to go to her and reassure her but of what? I have taken her story and told everybody. What would I reassure her of? That I would not tell anybody else? It is I who should not look at her in the eyes for I feel that I have also betrayed her.

We were told that our walkabouts should be something that would have an impact on our lives. That, years down the road, we can look back and remember what our walkabouts have been. I don’t think I will forget any of these women soon. Thirty years down the road, I hope I can still remember them, not their faces, but trust and pain they have shared to me, a stranger. That in the years I am to live from here on, I will take their stories and remember the courage and strength that they live each day, because it is with each day that they live their lives. That in the years that I will live from here on, I will remember to not take the privilege to delve into other people’s pain without also taking the responsibility of doing something about it to ease some of those pain.

I did not learn to be a manager with this walkabout. I learned about being human and being cruel. I learned about seeing raw pain in the eyes of strangers and seeing this pain I learned how to be ruthless. I was ruthless because despite the pain I saw, I still took regardless. It is a lesson for me. I do not like being ruthless. I found that the end really does not justify the means because I have to live myself and to do that, I must ask myself to forgive myself as well. I will not forget but I must forgive. And I hope these women also forgive me. This walkabout has been one of the hardest things I have to face. The walkabout itself is done, but the consequences are those that I must face each day. It has been a walkabout. It has been a rite of passage with me, a passage to a more human me, capable of doing good and cruelty. The difference is now, I know the difference between them and I believe I can now make the choice of choosing not to be cruel.