Thursday, March 26, 2015

TRIBUTE TO THE WOMEN IN MY LIFE

For The Bohol Tribune
In This Our Journey
NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS

As I confessed in a previous column or probably a blog, I grew up in a family of women. Due to my father’s early death at 23 years old, I spent my childhood and a great part of my adult years in the company of my Grandmother, whom I called Inay Tanda;  Mother, my Inay Bata; and my younger Sister Lilia. Hence, what I know about women, I came to know initially from this unique family situation and from being involved with a few women as lover, loved one or occasionally both, in the course of a lifetime, which has now spanned over seven decades.

This being women’s month, March, which is about to end in a few days, I would like to say something about women, their role in my life and others, and contribute hopefully to the global advocacy for gender advocacy. We need to join this campaign to help prevent inflicting physical or emotional pain on women which we do out of habit or mindless pursuit of machismo in traditional family life and culture in the greater community.

As I was trying to organize my thoughts on this topic at this ungodly time of 4.16 a.m., trying to beat my Thursday deadline, I came to view at the same time an interesting TED talk by the psychologist Guy Winch on the importance of emotional hygiene in our lives. It was emailed to us by a former classmate and close friend, Nishi Mukerji. I now see the relationship between what this Guy Winch was saying on Youtube and my initial thoughts about women before dawn breaks on this Thursday morning.

Let’s start by summarizing what Mr. Winch says in this TED talk. He says that we put more importance to physical hygiene than emotional hygiene, that while we have first aid for bodily pain, we do not have first aid for emotional pain. We are often left on our own to cope with loneliness, rejection, failure, and  low self-esteem, the common emotional injuries we suffer from day to day – sometimes with disastrous results!

Take loneliness, for instance. Mr. Winch says studies show that if left unchecked, loneliness can increase the likelihood of early death by 14 %,. It can lead to high blood pressure, high cholesterol level, and defective immune system. It is as harmful as smoking, but unlike the latter, there was no warning that says it can cause untimely death.

Loneliness is a feeling of emotional and psychological disconnect from the rest of the world. But for this emotional pain, there is no clear prescription available at home or at the work place. Not like if you have toothache or other cases of bodily pain. When you are lonely, you may not know how to deal with it because it does not rate high as an ailment that family members suffer from, not like when you have aching joints or a sore finger.

Those who want to know more about emotional hygiene can view -http://www.ted.com/talks/guy_winch_the_case_for_emotional_hygiene 

As I viewed the video, I realized that like countless others, I have survived all these emotional anguish, what he calls as “emotional bleeding,” not actually on a self-help basis, but with the assistance of family and friends, most of them women. It is as though women are more inclined to provide this kind of emotional healing and better mindful of emotional hygiene than most of my male friends who have been close to me through the years. On these final days of Women’s Month, I would like to pay tribute to some of the women who have made my life more bearable on account of their seemingly instinctive knowledge about emotional healing or emotional hygiene.

My maternal Grandmother, probably like most Grandmothers, had an instinct to detect this inner loneliness and would do everything to help me overcome it. Growing up as the only boy in a family of women gave ample opportunities to be lonely – and with Lola at your side, so many chances to get out it and be happy.

Inay Tanda took the task of taking care of me and my sister while Mother slaved herself in the dessicated factory as a worker, slicing off the brown skin of the coconut after the male workers had taken the shell parts off. Sometimes my Grandmother would take me to the factory to watch the shellers and the parers work in long rows oblivious to the factory noise and the people milling about to watch them in this daily ritual. The laborers would take turns in daytime and night shifts.

At home, I would lay awake thinking of how Mother would have her feet wet with coconut water as she removed it by puncturing the shelled coconut fruit. I worried that she might get sick for lack of sleep and having her feet always soaking wet with coconut water. Inay Tanda would always remind us this is a sacrifice Mother had to make to save money so we could go to school someday.  It was my first exposure to the benefit, as well as the impersonal nature of the capitalist system.

I remember my Grandmother would take me to the nearby river to watch her wash our clothes or to the copra drying kiln owned by the caretaker of the coconut plantation in our barrio. She would occasionally be employed there to remove coconut meat from the shell and get them dried in the kiln. In other times, she would take care of the supervisor’s children but without salary.

Somehow Inay Tanda probably sensed my frequent bouts of loneliness while being mostly alone at home.  She probably saw me staring blankly at nothing on the sawali walls in those days when I was five years old waiting to be old enough to get enrolled in the local elementary school.  Inay Tanda gifted me from our meager family resources three goats that I had to take care of and this helped me survive those lonely days by the window thinking of nothing in particular while anticipating what I imagined to be exciting days at school.

Raising goats was the most exciting activity that I got involved in during those days. I had to learn where to bring them for grazing and this gave me an excuse to get outside the confines of our nipa hut and limited front yard. I was able to explore the big coconut plantations in the barangay and met personally some tenants who worked on the land and took care of the coconut trees. They were the ones who showed me where the ipil-ipil trees grew where I could get leaves that goats are particularly fond of eating although they seemed to be eating anything  green on sight. Best of all, I was made to see the rest of the river that runs through our village and was able to explore the creeks that snaked their ways to it during rainy days.

From the simple activity of putting the three goats to pasture, I learned a lot about the neighborhood, the river and creeks a few kilometers from our place, the rest of the neighbors who tilled the land and make copra and prepare a feast each time landowners and their families from Manila would come to bring relatives and friends to show off their vast landholdings tilled by our neighbors for what I imagined later as so many centuries after the passion and death of Jesus Christ.

I have no way of knowing if my Inay Tanda, who reached Grade IV by her account, knew at that time that giving me three goats to take care of when I was five years old was the best way to cure me of loneliness that afflicted me during those childhood years spent surrounded by vast coconut plantations which defined the local economy and our lives.

Psychologist Guy Winch talked about the inability to rise up from failure as caused not necessarily by lack of competence, but by a defeatist attitude that became predominant after the initial bad experience of failing in an activity. It is more of a mental predisposition reinforced by a negative view of oneself that persists from day to day until such time that a positive reorientation of one’s belief system has become possible with some encouragement from family members and friends.

He acknowledges that changing such mind set as being predisposed to believe about one’s inability to succeed is a major stumbling block to improve performance. In the family, my Mother who had the strongest character among the three of them, always carried the banner of persistence and hard work. I lived through some darkest moments from adolescence to adulthood, and it was always my Mother who would come with timely interventions, in terms of either calculated, intriguing silence or well-articulated and sensitive advice to get me back on track again.

Among those reversals that only my Mother could have the nerve of steel to put me in shape again to do battle with the demons of defeat are as follows: the inability to get a bachelor’s degree after “overstaying”  in college on account of my involvement with the protest movement of the Sixties; the obvious tendency to forget priority goals in the heat of a passionate commitment to a cause which seemed to be vaguer in direction by the minute; the stubbornness to fall in love with the thrills and excitement of the hunt rather than specifying the desired outcome of all the sacrifices being made in the struggle to be free. It was my Mother who communicated quite clearly with her stoic silence and clear statement of purpose at each critical juncture of my punctuated journey towards maturity at a rather late stage of the futile struggle to emancipate the oppressed.

For her part, my Sister who was a teacher, became reason personified who would bring in logic to temper my enthusiasm and passion when the costs were getting bigger on the part of the family. She could not study in college right after graduating from high school because she had to wait for my graduation from college which never materialized. Her rational approach to life was a foil to my romantic predilection and on hindsight, I believe this contributed immensely to helping the family be on course for its goals when leadership was not forthcoming from my side due to my getting distracted that I often got off-track somewhere along the way.

In a previous blog years ago, I already commented and paid tribute to all the women who became part of my life at specific stages of my journey. I will not repeat this tribute due to my fear that it will bore the readers. Enough for me to say that I owe each of these noble women profound gratitude in helping me at each step of this journey I have chosen to take. More importantly, they have helped me survive the hypocrisies and betrayals of those who chose to stand on the opposite side of those who remain persecuted by bad governance and an unjust system reinforced by the arrogance and indifference of those who consider themselves as the political and economic elites in our midst.

Women of the world, on this your month of tribute and blessings, much thanks for your love and devotion to the cause of helping create a better world during this our life and times - despite obvious obstacles and constraints.#genderNMP


NMP/26 March 2015/11.59 p.m. 

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