“A lot of students have been protesting lately,” you asked during a phone call on the eve of Mother’s Day. It didn’t matter that you phrased your question as if it were just a mere observation that need not be answered. What mattered, at least at that time, was that I be honest with you and tell you where I have been the past week. I wanted to bypass your attempt at confrontation and greet you just to get it over with. 

Because what else could I tell you without our conversation turning sour again, Ma? And yet, even if you’re the last person who’d be happy to hear about my whereabouts, I still yearn to tell you the truth. 

I wanted to tell you that your rushed list of instructions for my safekeeping is of no use here. What use can it be when it’s the state that wages a war against the youth, Ma? Of the 611 victims of Marcos Jr.’s drug war killings, the youngest was a child who was only six years old. What colloquial language must I use to conceal the fact that your longing to finally meet the daughter you left at the age of six intersects with the grief of a bereaved parent who lost their child of the same age. 

I wanted to tell you how envious I am of my peers learning to speak their mother’s mother tongue. How could I tell you that, when you seem to have forgotten your own language out of a need to speak a foreign one. Even in our phone call, I hear you speak in a language I can never accustom myself to understand without guilt—the voice of an immigrant uprooted from their homeland. 

The youth of today’s generation are enraged, and rightfully so, Ma. Thirty-seven children are orphaned every day in Gaza. More than 10,000 women have been killed in the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023. Women and children in Sudan have been killed and displaced since November last year by the military. What compels us to dissent stems from our concrete grasp of longstanding systems put in place to perpetuate such violence.

Mothers raise us to know sympathy and respect. Yet they are the first to be abandoned amid the widespread attacks against all life. So how can our anger not be justified when those who first teach us the core tenets of what makes us human are the very ones deprived of them by those in power?

I did not know what else to tell you but the truth.

“We have all the reasons to,” I simply answered. And we left the topic at that, momentarily. We recognize the silent exchange between us: that I respect your instinctive worries, and that you sympathize with my decision to persist. Since we are cut from the same cloth, I know you must have noticed it was not a sentence of dismissal but of a promise. So much for phone conversations. ●