Pure. Obedient. Self-sacrificing.

I became a journalist instead.

I have stood at the frontlines where sexuality, faith, and survival collide.

This is what I saw.

At the airport, Filipino migrant mothers carry their hopes of a decent life in a plastic folder containing her employment contract, her government clearances, and her passport. There is no one to see her off. Her children may not even know she was leaving for abroad–simply, painfully–because she could not bear to say goodbye.

In the Middle East, sprawling villas serve as prisons with chandeliers for the domestic workers who scrub, cook, and wipe to keep them clean. In the actual prisons, women are jailed together with their newborn babies because unmarried sex is a crime.

In a church in Manila, the devout kneel at the altar next to the bar girl lighting a candle before going home at the end of her shift.

In these essays, I take you to another frontline to show you how I felt.

This is where reporting meets reflection.

My own.

When the notebook is closed and the recorder is turned off

Journalism’s mandate is to expose wrongdoing, demand accountability, and force a reckoning of power. Its nature is adversarial because justice requires a line to be drawn between the perpetrator and the wronged-–the victim. Its armor is an organized record of proof lined up as statistical data, vetted sources, and state records.

For all that my published reportage could contain, this is what it could not always hold.

These are the moments when I stayed after the recorder was turned off and my checklist of questions was set aside.

The moment on a cold evening in The Hague when, over coffee, Cora asked me about my love life and felt more like my mother than a human trafficking survivor. (Of course, the question was followed by Cora’s trademark pragmatic relationship advice, “You’re going to fall in love anyway, pick the one with a job, with papers!”)

The moment when Margie Holmes, the woman credited for single-handedly initiating an entire nation into sex education shared that in high school, she felt like a wall flower. Her classmates were always buzzing and comparing notes about the boys who they spent hours on the phone with–telebabad. Meanwhile, her phone remained silent. I thought about my own high school days when boys were the subject of my marathon phone sessions with my girl friends. I talked about boys a lot but I wasn’t one of the girls they talked to.

The moment in a hospital room in Cebu, where the woman they called Lilibeth was waiting to die. Her body had been ravaged by AIDS-related complications. It would all be over in a few days. Two men watched over Lilibeth then. One was her boyfriend and former drug dealer. The other was a religious brother who held her hand as he prayed over her.

The hardest question to ask

These pages laid out as a Trinity of Chapters, are an attempt to share with you the moments when my investigations became emotional inquiries that traced the social fractures used to justify the othering of these women as migrant mothers, rebels, and women of negotiable affection.

At the frontlines where sexuality, faith, and survival collide the aspiration to be a good woman, a good mother faces off with the reality of survival. The line that separates identity and reality is blurred not by morality but by power.

As a reporter, my job is to ask a lot of questions. But the hardest question was the one I often asked myself: Why?

These women look like me. We have the same brown skin and the same round nose. These women sound like me. We have the same simple wish of being held in regard as a good woman.

Why is it that their life is so different from mine?

If you sat with them at the frontlines as I had, would you ask yourself the same?

Come read with me.

The Other Mary

motherhood, faith, sexuality

Survival.