When you remember me, it means that you have carried something of who I am with you, that I have left some mark of who I am on who you are. It means that you can summon me back to your mind even though countless years and miles may stand between us. It means that if we meet again, you will know me. It means that even after I die, you can still see my face and hear my voice and speak to me in your heart.
For as long as you remember me, I am never entirely lost. When I’m feeling most ghost-like, it is your remembering me that helps remind me that I actually exist. When I’m feeling sad, it’s my consolation. When I’m feeling happy, it’s part of why I feel that way.
If you forget me, one of the ways I remember who I am will be gone. If you forget, part of who I am will be gone.

Frederick Buechner , Whistling in the Dark: A Doubter’s Dictionary

A trip around the sun. What have I learned from that journey?

Well, if I put my mind into it, I can accomplish almost anything. I built a house with no debt. Even though it’s small, it’s still mine.

I didn’t know it, but I realized I was a strong person to have withstood all the shit I’ve been through. My heart has endured so much that I wonder why it’s still beating.

I have voids somewhere inside me. They feel hollow and will never be filled up…but there are areas within me that have swollen so much with love to compensate for those voids that cannot be closed up.

My back hurts so much.

I am trying to come into terms with my not being able to get thinner. I need to accept that a woman like me who has polycystic ovarian syndrome will always have a battle with her weight.

Two years ago, I wrote here about self-preservation. Indeed, I’ve only been here for 5 months and yet I feel like I’m being hugged and protected whenever I come home. My world has become smaller as I retreated to my mother’s womb to be reborn. I have yet to emerge from my cocoon. I have yet to see who I will become.

And I’m about to take a driver’s license test today—a test I haven’t taken since I was 18 or about to turn 18. My 5-year driver’s license is about to expire in a few hours and I’m about to get a new one with 10-year validity.

However, I’m still figuring out how to navigate this LTO online portal.

Happy birthday to me. I’m old but I’m wiser. I don’t take shit anymore.

1) She had been seeing a professional from UP Manila (maybe as part of the university’s support for all faculty members during the lockdowns) but when F2F started, she fell off the wagon. It’s hard to commute from our town to PGH to see your counselor regularly—schedules and traffic situation are always fucked up. Our common friend told me she was very comfortable with the online setup, just like me.

2) The husband did not pick her up at work. She drove herself as per usual, parked the car not in her usual spot but somewhere it wouldn’t be easily found. When she didn’t come home when it was already dark, that’s when the husband asked friends where she was and then they formed a search party.

3) She might have done it right after a student knocked on her door for a consultation but she told the student to come back on Friday. When they found her in her office, she was already discolored so it might have been more than 5 hours.

4) They didn’t find her immediately because the lights in her office were off so no one would think she was there.

5) There was a note.

6) Some people (police maybe, the people who have read the police report) have spread the story that the spouses had a fight because the husband (a high school classmate of mine) has a third party.

I’m sorry, friend. It’s too much for a mother of a child, who may be under the spectrum, with an iffy husband whom you love to bits. All the pressures of being in the academe. And the support that you had was lost when the world tried to go back to “normal”.

I’m sorry the world is unfair to mothers like us who try to do it all. We can’t. We can’t have it all. Something has got to give.

The world has now less light.

After Twin I’s fever started to dissipate, her diarrhea stepped up so there was no way I could bring her to the clinic. She was in the bathroom every 30 mins. Then she had unbearable stomach aches. Confirmatory Covid antigen test is still negative.

This morning when she woke up she had stomach muscle spasms and then it’s gone. I still had the CBC and fecalysis just to make sure it’s not amoebiasis or I’m missing something. While I believe this is just stomach flu, I really cannot leave things to chance…

Meanwhile, Twin A’s MRI reading shows her insides are responding to the anti-TB meds and it seems like there is no thickening of the colon walls. No more scalloping of the liver. Lymph nodes shrunk, since the old CT showed the biggest was 2.1 cm.

I just learned this afternoon that a friend died by suicide late yesterday. She was the one who visited me in my house in July and we talked for 3.5 hrs about so many things. I gave a lecture in her class the previous semester. It became a college-wide lecture because they opened it up to other classes and even to graduate students. She and I talked about doing another one at the start of this semester but Twin A got sick so I wasn’t able to get back to her about the syllabus and about the schedule.

My brother and sister-in-law already knew last night but they didn’t want to tell me, maybe because I was already too exhausted taking care of my sick daughter.

A common friend told me about it this morning through FB messenger as I was about to get up from bed. I confirmed with my bff and she said the husband was picking up our friend after work but it was taking her so long. They found her office door locked so they had to force their way in. They found her in a creepy situation, already dead, that I don’t want to write it down here anymore.

She has been very sad for a couple of weeks now, my bff said. Anxiety was eating her up. As far as I know she wasn’t seeing any professional…maybe she didn’t recognize that she was going through a major depressive episode. Many people do not recognize this in themselves unless they are self-aware. When you don’t know you are depressed or could not put into words what you are going through, it’s difficult to seek help. People around you wouldn’t be able to help you because they wouldn’t know how deep is this depression or you’re just sad. There’s a big difference.

I can’t fathom her doing that when she’s so anxious about her only child. She’s so hands-on with her son and she homeschooled him for a long time before transitioning him this year to formal school. I don’t know how the child would fare now. 😞

That’s why we have to be kind to everyone. We don’t know what people are going through.

And to make things worse, I now see that two of the friends who chose suicide were writers. I know a lot of writers who are depressive or had been depressed. That’s why the stereotype of the drunk writers live on…because we self-medicate and use alcohol to numb the pain that comes with depression.

I don’t know, maybe because we live inside our heads most of the time? We are prone to digging into ouselves when we write? Just like painters or actors, we eviscerate ourselves whenever we do our craft?

I really don’t know.

Tomorrow I’ll just visit my friend in her wake.

Twin I is sick again, but this time it doesn’t look like respiratory tract infection. She doesn’t have colds and cough but she has consistent high grade fevers that don’t go away. I had to bring down her temp with sponge baths every two to four hours. I didn’t bring her yet to the clinic or hospital for blood tests because she was feeling so poor (she is complaining of headache) so I let her sleep first. As long as her fever doesn’t go over 39 degrees C, we can afford to wait until tomorrow. In the meantime, I tested her for Covid but so far she is negative. But I have to test her again after two days to make sure it wasn’t false negative.

We will have to do the IGRA test (as ordered by our PGH doctors) to make sure she didn’t get TB from her sister, a CBC test, and probably a dengue test.

I have a hunch this could be another case of UTI. 🤦🏻‍♀️

So I have this friend (the one who coined the term “human appliance”) who ranted to me yesterday that her surviving child, her four-year-old son, is being hurt by the “other woman”–the same one who got pregnant by her husband (now ex-husband but still legally married).

Wait whut, you say.

Again, again, again. So I wrote here last year—I think—about this friend, let’s call her N, who lost her daughter due to seizures since hospitals brimming with Covid cases couldn’t admit her child to the point that she was having seizures in the hospital parking lot and that cut off oxygen to her brain and rendered her brain dead. Her (ex) husband is a reporter not directly under me since he writes for a different title but sometimes I get to manage him, depending on circumstances. I knew them from way back, during our newspaper days.

Anyway, the (ex) husband has been playing around and gotten a young reporter pregnant and there you go…Fast-forward to the current situation, the father has joint custody of the boy and he has the child on weekends. Now the boy—a child that has yet to have acquire/learn malice—told his mom that Tita Y (the “other woman” that his father is now living with; the boy still doesn’t know the truth) has been hurting him. The child has been telling his playmates that Tita Y always hurts him.

And the father is siding with the abuser, gaslighting his legal wife by saying she is teaching their son how to lie.

OMG!!! The child is four years old! He is so innocent! The fact that this friend is allowing the father to have access to their son is evidence that she is being fair and has no motivation to teach her son to lie. What for?

I told her to talk to her lawyer and ask for a court order to keep full custody of the child.

Today she ranted again that she is asking for child support and she didn’t get any positive response. The father always has some excuse.

I told N that do not expect, or keep your expectations low to keep your sanity. Your mental health is more important and squeezing blood out of stone will only anger you and will keep you from moving on. Since he is not giving financial support, you have 100% right to keep the child from seeing the father. Besides, the boy is also being abused by the mistress. “Remember, there is no law in the Philippines that would punish a parent who does not give child support. Better keep your son with you before he forms core memories that involved physical abuse from the mistress. That will surely wound him for the rest of his life,” I told her.

I also told her to be 100% financially independent because life is unfair to solo mothers. Dead-beat fathers will remain so until the day they die. Besides, the father is not doing well at work; I just received this morning the performance metrics of the editorial department for APAC and I saw his name in yellow highlight, which was a warning.

I told N that I had always been financially independent so breaking away didn’t hurt my pocket that much. I had just transferred houses—but there was minimal disruption since the running of household was still the same as the ex didn’t have any contribution to child-rearing, aside from zero financial support, even when we were still figuratively under one roof (but he was seldom there anyway).

“You are capable of earning as much as you did before, or even more than your ex. Go build yourself up again. Dream again,” I said. “The best revenge is us living the best life we can.”

“Thank you, CallMeCreation. Seriously, I need someone to verbalize things that I already know that I should do but because I’m in the denial stage, I find it difficult to do,” N said.

Dream again, I urged her. My tiny house was just a doodle on my sketchpad while I was building a dream. The what if…Because I was hurting so much from my last relationship that I now regret. Who knew that a year and a half later it would become a real house? This house helped me build my life again, I told her. Build yours.

And my daughter, Twin I, forgot her art kit this morning so I was forced to drive to their school this morning and take it to her. 🤦‍♀️

Which was in a way good because it forced me to work earlier than usual. I started sending emails to people, chatting with people on multiple messaging apps (setting up appointments), and do some admin work. I received a rejection email *sigh* so I must scrounge for more people to interview. I only had four stories in September—which was excusable given the shit I went through the last two months. But this time I need to pick up the slack and work doubly hard. I already have two floating appointments in Singapore and I still don’t know yet whether it’s safe for me to fly out again. I need to meet our oncologist first next week so I would know if we are already cleared from her cancer watchlist or not.

Right now I’m working overtime as I am live editing a story from Dubai about a Malaysian regulatory issue. The reporter is having a hard time understanding what the story is about since he is from Dubai. I have a long night ahead of me.