Group 3 Fourth Mountain Revision

Fourth Mountain Revision: Part 3

by Arguelles, Canete, Aznar, Villagonzalo

I read Susan’s letter dated August 7, 1979:

Dear Mommy. I miss you. Come home. I love you Mommy. Quick because I have a tooth growing. You want to see me. I received your packages. Thank you. I am going to SPED Grade 1, Ipil-Ipil. Love, Susan and Paul.

Emotions always get to me when reading their letters. It was clear how hard it was for them to cope with our situation. Last time, Paul told me he could not relate to his classmates' problems because they were so different from his own, so he just listened to them. He actually wanted to leave the country. Susan, though, was handling things better than her brother. She was probably too young to recall our previous lives, but even so, her anguish was evident in the letters she wrote to me when she first began to write.

She wrote short notes with the help of Paul. In her letter dated August 2, 1979, she said:

Dear Mommy, I miss Mommy very much. I have a big surprise. It’s in the letter. I’m going to school at SPED at Grade 1 and not only that, I have a big, big surprise for you. You will like a secret. Love, Susan.

She wrote short notes with the help of Paul. In her letter dated August 2, 1979, she said: Dear Mommy, I miss Mommy very much. I have a big surprise. It’s in the letter. I’m going to school at SPED at Grade 1 and not only that, I have a big, big surprise for you. You will like a secret. Love, Susan.

“I wish I was with you right now, Mom,” said Paul in a letter he sent me in San Francisco. It was written early in May, 1979.

Out of all the letters I have received while I was here, this was the first that came from my son. I continued reading his letter as I tried fixing myself to a chair. I braced myself for what I was about to read. At this point in 1979, Paul had changed residences so many times, that this might have been the reason why he had motion sickness. Given this sense of impermanence, I can only imagine how he must have felt distanced from his peers- his problems were oceans apart from theirs. And for him to struggle without his mom by his side, ailed me. It made sense why this letter was his very first.

“If they ask about us, we’re fine,” he said.

It was hard to stomach reading my son trying to get it together for me when I was supposed to do that for him. Upon reading how he wished for me to write to them more often, I took a long hard pause as I gathered some strength to pack up my bag and come back to my children in Davao. I did not want to just write letters for them; letters are poor substitutes for my presence. It was not the letters that they desired so eagerly, it was their mom.

“Welcome home, Mama. I am so happy that you come home.”

I was thirty-three when I got to be reunited with my family. It took some getting used to for me and my children to get acquainted with me being truly present for them. I deserted my children so young, trying to escape the events of that New Year in 1978. It was all so violent for the three of us. But that was in the past. I have come to terms with what caused my tears to dry up. I have to seal these emotions, toughen up, and put my strong mother suit on. For my kids.

It was only twenty years later, at a pilgrimage to Marina shrines sometime in 1997 that tears found their way back to my eyes. The same year, I found the courage to challenge Boy’s appointment as Secretary of Agrarian Reform before the Commission on Appointment. More than that, it was my fighting rather than running away from what ailed me that sparked a successful milestone in my life just as much as the settlement I got from Boy.

How did I manage through a complicated life, stuck between my private struggles and the public eye, in a country where divorce was frowned upon? When I returned from San Francisco in late 1979, I had to deal with something big for my family—remarrying a foreign friend. I hoped it would let us live without people judging us in this country. However, I realized I didn’t want to get married again. One reason was that I didn’t want any more kids. Meanwhile, Paul and Susan excelled in school. Their extracurricular activities in song, dance, and class elections brought them joyful times with their classmates.

As time passed, Boy's story slipped away, like a fading dream in the morning light. Until one day, a faraway newspaper called The Straits Times mentioned him. It was December 29, 1979. The paper talked about the CPP-NPA-NDF with the headline saying, "Morales now leading Filipino Reds." It was about Horacio Morales who was 36 years old. The father of my kids. He became the leader of the Philippine Communist Party in the mountains of Central Luzon, taking over from Jose Maria Sison, who was arrested in November 1977.

From what I heard, life in Central Luzon buzzed with additional activities too. People gathered near the Quezon-Bicol border in October, chatting and discussing things. They were probably getting ready for something important, a big meeting called the Eighth Party Plenum, which happened in 1980. They decided to fight harder in the first stage of defense, to speed up their fight, they called the protracted people's war (PPW).

I just filed the news clipping away, allowing me and my children to rest our minds from matters we could not understand.