In Her Eyes

Erika Sheena Serrano

They looked like a happy family. No one would believe otherwise if they happen to see Evelyn, Ronald and their little girl Julia in their spacious living room two days before Christmas. They were celebrating the traditional Noche Buena in advance and the little girl was happy that she had both parents by her side looking at her as she opened her gifts. What she doesn’t know is that after she sleeps her father would go home to his real wife and kids to spend the Noche Buena on the actual day the world celebrates this joyous occasion as if they don’t exist and as if that day never happened.

Evelyn, is a 44 year old woman who had been a mistress for the past 20 years. She was 18 years old when she fell in love with her partner, Ronald. They had two daughters and she would have continued being his mistress if she had not found out that he had a new mistress installed in some house in Quezon City.

She said, “ I couldn’t stomach the fact that he took another mistress after me. I have his wife to contend with and now another mistress. I simply could not take it any more and so I left and took the kids with me.”

She related that she was not aware that he has a wife when they first started going out. She was a who went to Manila to study college. She wanted to work part time to help her family and so she applied as a book keeper at a small scale company in Escolta Manila. That was when she met Ronald. They became friends and then soon after lovers. He was the world to her. Then she got pregnant and that was when she found out that he was married with one child to his wife. Still,she decided to move in with him and they cohabitated for twenty years.

Evelyn believed that he would leave his wife someday and marry her. That dream never came true. Twenty years passed and she remained a mistress. She was available to his every whim yet he wasn’t able to give her the one thing that she needs - a lasting commitment.

There are a lot of women out their similar to Evelyn yet not all mistress stories happened because of love. Agnes, 32, is also a mistress. She had been with her partner, Charlie for almost 10 years. Her story was different because her relationship with her husband was not borne out of love but out of her financial needs.

She said that, “I’ve learned to love him over the years but it wasn’t the reason why we started this relationship.”

Charlie was 15 years older than Agnes. She was his maid so she knew about his family and kids. When he started giving advances, she gave in. She thought that he could help her and her family and she was right. He gave her a house in Valenzuela , where they had been living since 1997.

Sister Mary Ann of Welcome House, an institution that houses unwed mothers as well as counseling explains her side of this issue. She had handled cases like this before when she started being the local coordinator of this place and she concluded that in a situation such as this, the woman is always the victim.

Sis Mary Ann admits that we have a double standard in our society. The burden of the insults goes to the woman and not to the man for duping the girl with lies and promising everything to her. Her experience as a missionary in different pars of Asia had taught her that it doesn’t matter which culture a woman belongs to, they are still seen as the bad person in a situation like this.

Another factor that we should look at ,Sister Mary Ann believes, is the financial dependency of women to the man. Women often succumb to the mistress set-up because of their financial crisis and men who are financially stable use their economic power to trap the woman in this set-up.

Friedrich Engels, one of the famous political thinkers of our time, supports Sister Mary Ann’s conclusion. He also believes that it is financial dependency or rather the idea of “private property” which pushes the women to prostitute herself to one man who is her husband. He explained why women in earlier history had married for money instead of love. In this situation, the unmarried woman usurps the place of the wife to gain financially which places her under the thumb of the man to do with whatever he pleases.

The woman then becomes a possession, something which the man could play with or throw away at his own discretion.

In the eyes of society, the evelyns’ and the agness’ are the villains. They are the husband stealer, the whores who spread their legs to somebody’s husband for money and the wife pretender who could never come close to ever becoming the wife. But in her eyes, she can do no wrong for she is the victim. The victim of the love which is doomed to fail and the victim of poverty which pushes her to prostitution This is their story. This is their life. This is their tragedy. ■