Separada

THE WORD CONJURES AMBIVALENT feelings, at best. There’s pity, mixed with unspoken derision one reserves only for those whom one considers a failure. Then, there’s wonder and awe, coupled with the silent thought, “How does she get through the lonely nights?” There’s discomfort, most of the time, the kind of discomfort akin to what one feels when somebody tells you somebody close to them just died. What do you say next? How do you react? Especially when that somebody who told you isn’t exactly a close friend, but neither a passing acquaintance.

These feelings convey what people think about separated women in a country where there is no divorce, and an annulment case costs more than a wedding. Unless one carefully watches it, one can get sucked into the prevailing mindset, and lose sight of what one is really about.

I learned that the painful way the first few weeks and months after I left my husband and marriage last year. When people asked how I was, and I told them of my new “civil status”—which was actually more barbaric than civil at that time—I got all these varied and mixed responses, but the general notion conveyed was that I was some kind of a loser, or worse, with some sort of a communicable disease or something.

The first few times, I grew quite depressed after these encounters without knowing why. It took a lot of self-reflection and diary writing to finally come to the insight that, hey, these negative thoughts and feelings were all coming from these people and not from my own self exactly.

I remembered a Nike ad in a women’s magazine I read which blurbed: “Your life is made up of what people say about you, and what you say about your self.” I had the growing suspicion that most of us lead lives that are made up entirely of what people say about us.

My leaving my marriage was my formal statement about what I wanted to say about its true state in my case, and about how my own self could not go on living a sham anymore. So when I say I am separated, I say it with pride and reclaimed honor, like I have earned a Purple Heart for a battle long and nobly fought and won. And when somebody would say, “Tsk, tsk… ooooh, it’s too bad, dearie…. I’ll pray for you, God will bring you back together someday”, I cringe in horror with the silent thought, “God forbid!”

Actually, people did not know that when they reacted to my state in any of those ambivalent feelings earlier described, during those early weeks and months of confusion and imbibed depression, I was actually singing and dancing inside, joyful at being so free and powerful to handcraft my own life as I saw fit at last—until they’d burst my balloons. Now, after having arrived at that precious Nike insight as it applied to my life, I am simply amused, chuckling at their earnest confusion, and even more entertained at some others’ self-righteous hypocrisy. Haha.

Just recently, while having dinner with my kids at home, my 10-year-old daughter intimated at how she thinks she is like this Will character in Witch magazine, because like Will, she is also inventive and a leader. She said Will’s mom is even like me. And I said, “How’s that?” And she said, “Alone.” I looked at her questioningly.

And she beamed, “Brave kind of alone.”

Now that’s one definition I can wholeheartedly embrace! *

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Ed’s note- Jean Lee C. Patindol is 35 years old, separated, and happily lives with her three wonderful children aged 10, 5 and 2. Although her training and background is in business and economics, her first and lifelong love and passion is literature and writing. A former editor-in-chief of a campus publication, she teaches at a local university in Bacolod City, Philippines. She will be writing a new column for us on women’s issues starting this month.