Bedtime Stories

  

 

A girl looking inside children class activities (photo taken by Baikong)

Magical fairies. Princess and Prince. Damsel in mistress. The knight in shining armor. Once upon a time. They lived happily ever after.

These are the typical characters in bedtime stories.

However, I grew up without bedtime stories told neither by my father nor my mother. I grew up without my imagination reinforced by storytelling of magical impossibilities. Bedtime stories didn’t run in the culture of my family. Moreover, it is not also traditional practice in our culture here in the South.

Within 24 years, I didn’t hear my parents ever said that life always end happily ever after nor they speak of distress ever after. I came to discover along my journey if bedtime stories really exist.

Once upon a time, I thought I almost had a perfect life. I thought I have the happiness someone is looking for. But it was all wrong. I realized that I can never be truly happy without knowing what difficulties and hardships means. Just like in bedtime stories, the heroine has to suffer distress, and so is the princess who possesses everything has to experience trials before they can turn to happily ever after chapter.

But my own story is unlike a bedtime story. I don’t need to wait for the last chapter of my life to grasp victory and happiness. In every trial I experienced and surpassed, I am indeed in bliss like no other in this world.

Bedtime stories can be manipulated. You can predict and manipulate what lies ahead. Rewind, fast forward, and pause if you wish. But in real life, the future is always a mystery, but the present is a gift to make most out of it.

I live in a relatively peaceful place, one hour away by car from the battlefield. Still, insurgencies are the stories I live with.

More so with children at war who has to sleep with a story that their father caught in cross fires.

What does their mother do to comfort them to sleep whilst hearing and feeling the tremors caused by bomb attacks?

Do children at war still know about bedtime stories, and the heroes and heroine of the stories?

Do they believe in once upon a time and happily ever after?

Let them scribble and colour what they want. Their happy ending wish is not to become king and queen of a splendid castle. They just want simple things in life.

They want education, food, toys, complete family, justice and peace.

These are the things many of us ignore and disregard. These are the things that some of us don’t give importance to. These are the things few of us thinks it’s a waste of time.

If children at war and their mothers in Mindanao can manipulate the life story ending like bedtime stories, they would end it with their dreams coming true.

If only I am a fairy with magical powers, I will give millions of children wishes coming true. But I am only an ordinary person without magical powers. I only have the will to make them feel that happiness is still within reach even just for a simple way. If sitting down with them with my own life story can inspire and give them hope, it is something that I am very much willing to share.

I am a child like them, too, born and raised in era of conflict in the South. I have Big Dreams similar to them. But it didn’t stop from dreaming. With the discipline and determination, I am almost there to live happily ever after. I believe that dreams are meant to come true if you believe in it and in yourself.

I believe.

There might be no magical fairies and knight in shining armor. But there is once upon a time and they lived happily ever after. I believe in it, if you choose your path rightly and if you believe that change is possible.

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