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Epilogue

My Labor of Love

“To my mom and my sisters. I’m up here…I have worked hard, recognizing your struggles to get me up here! Trust I will keep on challenging myself to grow into a strong man that you have helped raised.” –Personal Statement, UCLA Samahang Pilipino Graduation Ceremony (2008)

“I keep reminding you that I am here, I’ll always love you. Because knowing that in your life, you had a mother that is so strong and that so loves you guys, that no matter what… you can come to me and we can work out our problems.” –Rema,

My mother is my first love and my first teacher of life where I have learned both the harsh realities of the world as well as the beauty that is to be found in the tensions and contradictions of our everyday lives. Initially it may seem that the impression of being a momma’s boy might be assumed to frame my relationship with my mother, but I would like to reclaim this title in my position as a scholar in the realm of academia and rearticulate it within the context of acknowledging the courage, resistance, love, and compassion of my own mother through times of adversity and trauma as well as in times of triumph and happiness while raising me and my sisters. From crying alone at night behind closed doors to bills piling up, rent being due, and child support not coming in with mouths still left to feed, I have seen my mother through extreme amounts of physical and emotional stress. Added on with the experience of being a Filipina and an immigrant woman of color in the United States, she has survived and thrived while raising three children.

By listening to my own mother’s narrative as well as listening to the narratives of the other mothers in this process, this research project has been a rewarding yet painful process. It is from this project where I have realized unsaid words, unnoticed gestures, and unacknowledged thoughts of my own mother. I realize how much the institution of motherhood has caused me to dehumanize my own mother in her attempts to care for me to confront the daily struggles of life that she knows all too well. From acknowledging the unnoticed, I also understand my process of growing up where my mother had to deal with so much beyond raising her children. As I reflect on my painful experience dealing with issues of anger towards my father for leaving as well as navigating my way as an inner city youth and a second generation Pinoy, I realize my mother was right there helping me understand the world around me. Even with confronting issues of self worth as a queer Pinoy which has been a significant aspect of my life that I still continue to face in my day to day adult life, my mother reminds me processes of learning new ways to be myself because she has always done it herself as a Filipina, a mother, and as a woman. Through it all, my mother has witnessed it all as much as I have witnessed her struggles and it is through this understanding where I see my identity as a Pinoy emerging from my experiences with my own mother.

From this personal narrative and reflecting upon this greater meaningful project, the question, “What does it mean to be a son of a Filipina single mother?” becomes a significant question that has yet to be fully answered by the sons of the women that I have gotten the chance to know. As a Pinoy son of a single mother, I begin to call our epistemology into existence because for too long we have been living in pain of confronting a world that has given up on us. There is this pain of abandonment that haunts our psyche and tells us to man up or don’t exist at all. It is this very pain that causes us to sell short our internal wealth, to resort to unhealthy coping mechanisms, and brings us to the point of feeling we need to be the man of the house. It is a pain that we feel when we have to go through our internal struggles of self worth before we can even battle the struggles of our everyday lives that remind us that we were never meant to survive at all. We struggle with ourselves to become men on our own terms and to truly love who we are first just as our mothers have done for themselves.

Although there is this pain of being sons of our mothers, hope and possibility become significant factors to our everyday acts of becoming men. Tupac Shakur, fellow son of a single mother, explains in his 1995 single Dear Mama,

“I finally understand

for a woman it ain’t easy tryin to raise a man

You always was committed

A poor single mother on welfare, tell me how ya did it

There’s no way I can pay you back

But the plan is to show you that I understand

You are appreciated”

I speak with Tupac Shakur as he expresses his own being in relation to his mother. Acknowledging his mother’s history and struggle informs his identity and purpose of his life’s work. For sons of Filipina single mothers, the potential of becoming men in understanding the violence of patriarchy, the pains of colonialism, and the dehumanization of our communities becomes our stage where we must heal from and begin to produce ourselves into existence with our mothers’ intentions, our sisters’ voices, and our fellow brothers who feel they have to go through this pain alone.

It is with this pain and hope that as a son of a Filipina single mother, I move to grow and build a self that is kind, that is patient, that is understanding, and that wants to live within a world of love and emotion because it is where I am able to love myself and come into being as a man that counters notions of cold masculinity and selfish boastful intentions. I am a voice and a body that has been struggling to be understood for so long. To reclaim myself from this pain is my strength. To share these scars and to heal with hope with others in the struggle gives me purpose and allows me to not give up this fight not only for myself, but for our mothers, our sisters, and my fellow brothers who I cry for because I am them everyday.