Letters From Your Momma

As absurd as it may sound, I have been waiting for your Dad to find a girlfriend.

In the beginning, it was because I saw it as a sign that he was over any delusional ideas of us being a family again. Then it was just an act of magnanimity. I didn’t want him to grow old alone. I always thought that he was entitled to his own happiness and being with a person who could give that to him.

And now, I hear from you that you have met one of his woman friends and are becoming good friends with her daughter.

It was weird to hear that name. It was a name from my own past. She was a good friend. When we were in university, she taught me how to drive and her old beat up car was the first car that I ever drove. She met you even before you met her. She used to visit me in the condo that I used to share with your Dad. And when I left him, she was one of those I went to, shameless and vulnerable in my wretchedness; crying and bawling.

It is a name that I expected to hear again in one way or another, but certainly not in the context of you going out of town with your dad, her and her daughter.

Perhaps in the characteristic first stage of emotional unraveling, I was in denial. Jokingly telling myself that Manila is really just too small a city and how I was relieved that now he is with someone, it’s at least someone I know and someone I can trust to love you and treat you well.

But then, it hit me. This is someone I know. This is someone I trusted. And someone I thought of as my friend.

This was someone who witnessed my humiliation and knew all too well my suffering and anguish.

And that was when a new kind of pain set in. One of betrayal and plain and simple disbelief.

How could she do this to me? It was a mockery and a belittling of everything we went through in the decades that we had shared a deep friendship.

Old wounds that I thought were just old scars were torn open. And there it was again, torturous thoughts of the past and the unspeakable ordeal short of hell, that your Father and I put ourselves through. It was hard enough to get over the fact that he could be kind and everyone else except me, but my good friend to?

True, it has been some 5 or 6 years since I had seen or talked to her, but that did not erase that decades of friendship before that. It didn’t change that she is still someone I considered a friend.

And years of absence or no years of absence, isn’t there some kind of moral code or sense of delicadeza that is being violated here?

And even if there is, who am I allowed to cry out to? And am I not striped of any kind of right to voice an objection; to cry out my uneasiness about just how wrong the whole thing feels?

But then it would be pointless. I have no rights. I have no pretensions about my own need to have a life of my own and enjoy the liberty of finding relationships of my own.

But it hurts me and it feels empty and phony for me to say that I am happy.

Because I am not.

Once again, I am reminded that I can never be completely free of your Father and the cruelty that always marked our relationship. Once again, I grieve at the thought that while my life with him has long been buried in the annals of court room decisions, I still have to live through petty inconveniences such as the thought that someone I had trusted and believed to be my friend betrayed that trust and that friendship to be with your Father.

And yes, I continue to wish your Father happiness, but question again why, it seems to be happiness attained at my expense?