How To Deal

For the last two-three weeks, there hasn’t been anyone appearing in my dreams except for my crushes. This is quite reasonable: I have no love life, I don’t want to have a love life, but apparently, my body/soul/libido wants me to have one. I’ve dreamt of at least 3 of them, and I think I have a few more to go, but what’s annoying is the recurring presence of a particular someone in my dream: Ven. Aha! He’s back! Five times counting today.

Well, a little background on Ven. I met him in our org, and he’s two school years younger, but we’re the same age. Basically I have the biggest crush on this guy, and he knows that. The deal was I told him I liked him because I thought it wouldn’t matter since I was graduating. So whatever happened, whether it was “mutual” (in my wildest dreams) or not, I wanted it to start and end last year. Unfortunately, I found it difficult and one thing led to another, and now we’re pretty awkward, but we pretend we’re not. So I named him Ven after Miss Universe last year who has my first name, and his last name.

So I gave him my blue rose, symbolically reiterating the fact that I like him (note: present tense) and even told him that in a letter. It’s the L word. I couldn’t say it aloud to him, because I knew that was license enough for him to ditch me BIG TIME. I thought (note again: past tense) he would understand and he wouldn’t judge me and that there was no ditching. Still, there was. After that heart-felt letter that he had to read by signing out of Yahoo Messenger, I get a message: don’t worry, I won’t delete your YM or your number. How LAME and painful is that. I know it was my fault, partly and maybe completely my fault for not having enough courage to say it aloud. I think I will say it to him, one day. But thinking about it now, I’d rather say it to him when it’s already loved and not merely love. Then again, I’ve been through that crap: confessing and then being ditched for what, 7 months? Let’s just say I have been scarred for life.

Guarded as I am, careful as I am, afraid as I am, I know the strength is in there somewhere. Like I said to myself before, it shouldn’t matter any more if it was mutual. If I keep hoping for something to happen, if I keep thinking and praying it was mutual, then what kind of love am I giving? It’s just as selfish and self-centered and conditional as any love can be, and him being himself (despite him sometimes being an ass or a jerk) deserves a kind of love that doesn’t hinge on being mutual. And saddly, I think that’s the truest love possible. You just give, but you save some for yourself, not hoping that he will eventually love you back; but you give hoping that the love you give is enough for him. Damn. EMO.

So after a month after that blue rose incident, I haven’t moved on. But then again, dreams are just that: dreams. It relies so much on our very own interpretation to have meaning. Its claws can burry itself deep down in our skin only if we let it. Much like our emotions, specifically liking and loving. Once you think, recognize or show someone how you feel, that is license for them to hurt you: whether they know it or not. Besides, whatever pain or gratification we feel because of like or love is self-inflicted.

Frustrating and annoying as it is, it just had to be a dream that would remind me how I feel. It’s not as shallow as it used to be, but it’s not the type of thing that would make you cry every night. I’m over that whole crying-crap because of unrequited love. As what we were told in Philosophy, unrequited love probably is the most genuine form of love. It’s not the fact that it’s unrequited love that it hurts. It hurts because the love is there even if you don’t want it to be there anymore.

So what exactly happened in that dream? He got himself a girlfriend and they kissed in front of me: and that was enought to send a searing pain, literally to my heart and wake me up. And that was enough to make me realize that it wasn’t over for me. Plus, it was as if he was doing it to purposely hurt me. There it was. One look, one kiss and everything came rushing back in. And annoying as it is, it’s not just your heart. Every cell in your body, every nerve is crying because of pain and there’s no cure for this sort of thing. You just have to suck it up.

Almost everybody has at least a parent, and all of us will go through childhood, make mistakes and grow up. But somewhere between being a child and growing up, we forget how we think children are supposed to be raised based on our very experience. And saddly, it’s not all the time that we take with us everything we learned from being raised by our parents and our own growing up. We go from one extreme to another: be exactly like our parents or the opposite. They say it’s a black-OR-white spectrum when it comes to things like these, but they shouldn’t be. Gray areas are supposed to be there because we have to find a way to coalesce our own experience in growing up with the expectations and stigma given to parents. So here are ground rules: they are not THE RULES, but we have to work around a certain framework.

I’m not a parent, but I am a daughter and I do have siblings pretty young enough to be considered as my children. So I have a little rough hand on raising children, and here’s what I think.

Parents should never pass on the responsibility of raising the rest of their children to the first born or whoever has the highest educational attainment. The point of bringing children to school is for them to learn to fend for themselves so that as a parent, you’ll know that they can make it on their own. For the first time, probably, their life is in their hands. Now, when there is an expectation that the eldest is supposed to provide for the education of the younger children, there is something going wrong. It’s not an obligation, but some parents make it imperative for the eldest to pay for all the expenses from the-day-after-graduation. First of all, it’s unfair. I know that there should be utang na loob, but think about it. The child is supposed to be thankful to the parent and that should be enough. If you expect your children to raise your other children, it’s like saying: “Oh yan ah. Pinag-aral kita dahil ikaw na magpapa-aral sa mga kapatid mo.” It doesn’t sound like this, but that’s the hidden message. It underlines this frustration: kaya ka pina-aral ng magulang mo ay para may makuha sila mula sayo or precisely para magka-utang na loob ka. It’s not the responsibility of the ate to make sure that her siblings finish schooling – this should be the parents’ responsibility. Parents should very well know that they are the ones who have that obligation to their children, and not their children to their siblings. It’s unfair, and they’re using utang na loob to make you do it their way. Parents owe this to their children. I have nothing against children volunteering to provide for the family, it’s just that it shouldn’t be an obligation and it shouldn’t appear to be one.

Parents need to be reminded that more than material wants and needs, it’s the psychological, emotional and spiritual wants and needs that have to be given all the time. Children are spoiled because parents think that material supplication can substitute those other needs. It doesn’t. When a child gets what he wants when he wants it, there is a stigma that the parents are just making bawi their absence in their children’s life. What happens is, children associate material satisfaction with their parents at the expense of really raising their children and being part of their lives.  Buying toys and expensive cars is not raising your children. To put it bluntly, I think parents are as if paying their children for them to recognize them as parents. Saddly, there is a disconnection. Even if some parents provide the best things for their children, they can’t trust you. Yes, give them money and spoil them, but it doesn’t mean that it’s you they’re going to run to when they have problems. It doesn’t mean that if you give them the most high-tech stuff for their birthday that you really know your children. Your house will merely turn into a boarding house. Your children become strangers and you become strangers to them. How can you honestly say that you’re a parent when your children don’t even know you and you don’t even know them? It’s like you put them up for adoption with financial support. It’s sad but this happens.

Parents should never make their children learn from their (parents) own mistakes. They say you learn from mistakes, but you can never learn from some one else’s mistakes. Until it hurts, until I experience it myself, until I fall and figure out how to stand up on my own, I will never learn. Even if parents say the famous line, papunta ka palang, pabalik na ako, you seriously have to ask the question, are we on the same road? Circumstances differ, experiences and personalities are different. Even if we assume that the situation is exactly the same down to the planetary alignment, people are unique and they respond differently to the same situation. Parents have that experience that enables them to know what will and will not hurt, but I won’t unless I stumble and fall. If I didn’t get burnt, I wouldn’t know that I shouldn’t play with fire. If I didn’t fail in an exam, I wouldn’t know that I should work hard to be better. If I didn’t get hurt from a relationship, I wouldn’t find the right one. It’s hard for parents to see their children fail, but without failure, without pain and without problems, they won’t be strong enough to fight for themselves. It’s our problems and mistakes that make us strong. If you’re already on top and given everything on a silver platter, things wouldn’t have any value to you anymore because you have no concept of hard work. If we didn’t fall, we won’t be able to stand up on our own. And as much as parents don’t want their children to fall, it’s the only way for them to stand up. How can they be strong if you trap them in a bubble?

Parents should learn that grades are just numbers on a piece of paper and not the ONLY thing your child is good for. Sometimes, parents overexert themselves in the academic life of their children. They say grades are everything, but they are not the only thing. No matter how smart your child may be, if he doesn’t know how to get along with other people and be independent, would it still matter? Parents, most of the time, impose these very high expectations of their children and it can be unreasonable. You expect them to get all A’s, to graduate with honors at the expense of what, their enjoyment? You learn a lot when in school, but more than just the names and dates and places, schools train children how to think, how to be critical, how to make sound judgement. If grades and all the details matter, ask your parents to define what an australopithecus is, how to manually solve for the square root of a number and what are go, grow and glow foods. I bet they can’t even remember that. So numbers are only numbers and they rely entirely on our interpretation for their meaning.

Parents may know what’s best for you, but they don’t always know what makes you happy. They do know what’s practical, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will ground you. Take for example college. They tend to make you choose the best course, whether it was IT or Computer Science in the 1990’s or Nursing in the 2000’s because it’s the highest paying job. They make you take up medicine or law because of the salary you’ll get, but what if you don’t enjoy it? What if you find out that it will not make you happy when it’s already too late? What if you end up doing something just because your parents made you do it? Sometimes, it’s just too late. And what’s more sad and frustrating is that some parents tell their children what they are supposed to want all their lives. If you give them that and raise them in that environment, they wouldn’t know what they really want for themselves when the time came you no longer give it to them. Always being told what they are supposed to want, parents live their children’s lives as opposed to letting their children live their own lives. Let them live their life the way they want it to be. In the end, it’s their life and they don’t owe it to you nor to anybody else but themselves to be good people. If they drink, smoke and do drugs, reprimand and guide them and don’t force everything on them. Let them realize that more than being a rebel and being “cool” and “in,” it is their  they are destroying, not yours.

Parents should learn that time will come when they should treat their children more as friends than subordinates. If you keep imposing this authority over them, they will definitely try to rebel. But, if you treat them as friends and make them feel secure and gain their trust, you’ll stay in their lives.

So here’s my two cents worth on parenting. I don’t know everything, but I know this much. And this is my opinion, but when you think about it, it makes sense.

So today is Good Friday marking almost the end of Holy Week.

And as much as I want to “re-launch” this blog with a light, fun and basically shallow entry, I won’t. I no longer want this blog to be as superficial and emotional as it used to be. So the entries for the past year are gone, except for me.

It is indeed Holy Week and tradition-wise, everything is put on hold. No work, no school, no malls, no nothing for a few days. It is the time to reflect on our lives and what we want and need for ourselves, but honestly, I don’t see the point. There is a point to what we do, but there are more important points we’ve missed. Most Catholics would say that this is the salvific act of Jesus Christ and without his death, there wouldn’t be Christianity.

I beg to differ.

Honestly, if his death is the act that would save us all, then why did they have to run away when he wasn’t even born yet? Couldn’t they have killed him in the natal sense and saved him suffering, time and effort and judgement? Shouldn’t have Mary just stayed put in Nazareth instead of going all the way to Bethlehem? That way, Judas wouldn’t have been a traitor, Jesus wouldn’t have been lost in the temple, wouldn’t have been in agony in the garden and wouldn’t have to be crucified and whole lot of people would have been saved from persecution. Seriously. Oh yes, ironic isn’t it?

It had to be something else. If his death meant saving us, then someone could’ve stabbed Mary and we’d be okay. The bottomline is, it wasn’t his death that saved us. His passion, death and resurrection were important, yes, but we’re missing something very significant. We’ve forgotten the most important part of our faith: Jesus’s life.

He saved us by reminding us that God loves us – sinners and poor people alike. God doesn’t punish us – that contradicts the very essence of our faith: God is all-knowing, all-loving and good. You see, back in Jesus’s time, they couldn’t explain psychosomatic illnesses. If you were under the impression that God is punishing you because of something your great-grandfather did, you would be treated as an outcast; and when someone like Jesus comes along and tells you that God loves you no matter what you do as long as you feel remorse, you’d be cured. When it comes down to it, that’s just what he did – reminded us of God whom we forgot. If God is omnipotent, omniscient and good, then he wouldn’t even think about punishing us: that contradicts everything.

Some time between his time and the present, we’ve shifted from focusing on what he did to who he is. Let me ask you: Did Jesus do the things he did because he was God or didn’t we just found out and affirmed that he is God after everything he did? Back then, when people gave him to the dogs, when people chose Barabas over him, did they know he was the Son of God? Had they known, they wouldn’t have done that. So it was his life and what he did that saved us.

So seriously, would it have mattered whether he was married or not? If he had brothers or not? If he had children or not? It shouldn’t have mattered back then and it shouldn’t matter now. We always praise and uplift his divinity at the cost of his humanity. To put it simply, if he was purely human, we are not saved and his death wouldn’t have meant anything to God - because he is in fact the only sacrifice God is going to accept; if he was purely divine, then our dignity wouldn’t have been raised to children of God because without his divinity, there wouldn’t have been any link to God.

Thinking about it, I still don’t understand why people make such a HUGE fuss over Holy Week. We forget the Ordinary Time: the time when he was actually out there saving people. Every day should be important to us Catholics, and we shouldn’t be extra holier on Holy Week or Advent. That’s not the point. He was born, yes. He died, yes. But between birth and death, Jesus did live and he had a life. And what he did with his life actually saved us. It saves us every single time. His life is his salvific act.

And the fact that the church overemphasizes his birth and death over his life – over what he did – is absurd. We forget his compassion for the poor, his love for what society didn’t even consider as people. It’s annoying and frustrating that we choose to put at a lower level his life under birth and death.

I can’t really blame the Church or the believers since some priests don’t even know and understand their Theology. I can’t blame anyone. It is frustrating to see my faith deteriorate just because people misunderstand it.

The bottomline is, when we look at a person’s tombstone, we see birth and death, but we remember what that person did for the time in between those dates. And Jesus is no exception. So Holy Week shouldn’t be an extra special holiday because as believers, we’re impelled to be good throught the year and not just on certain weeks and holidays.

Get it? Good.