The Parent’s Instruction Sheet.
After living in a dormitory all of our four years in high school, my friend Hazel and I had gotten quite familiar with the Parent’s Instruction Sheet a.k.a. the PIS. As the name implies, this document contains a list of instructions that the parents or guardians of students living in a dormitory have provided for the dorm manager, to whom they have entrusted their children. In UP’s Kalayaan, where most of the residents are underage, the PIS is in a questionnaire form. There is a list of questions that is answerable by a YES or NO that the parents fill up regarding what their children can or cannot do while they lived in the dorm.
My mother answered my high school PIS with me and at 12 years old I was able persuade her to give me a very liberal PIS. She had answered all the questions with a YES, merely qualifying some items like - weekends with people other than my guardian with a ‘with guardian’s permission’ (meaning I would have to inform my guardian first about spending the weekend elsewhere). By the time I was 14 years old, all items were answered with an unqualified YES.
UP had a different set of questions but because I had gotten used to being able to do whatever I want, within the house rules, I was surprised to find out that my mom (answering the PIS with Hazel’s mother) had answered NO to a couple of items.
Even if freshman undergrad is close to a decade ago and I don’t remember what items were in the PIS, I distinctly remember what I wasn’t allowed to do. These were, after all, going to rule my activities or rather the exceptions to the freedoms I had gotten used to. Baffled by the sudden restrictions, I asked my mother what I wasn’t allowed to do. However, unlike the Legalistic Child, I also asked why I couldn’t do the things she said I couldn’t.
I was not allowed to join rallies and demonstrations. This item was not in my high school PIS but UP, being the school that it is, had provided for that eventuality in their PIS. This was a big thing and I think that our parents were just worried that we were idealistic enough and easily persuaded to join in such activities without thinking of the possible consequences of such a choice, we were after all just 16. I didn’t agree with them but there being no issue I was passionate about at that time, I didn’t argue. I figured if there was an issue I felt I needed to stand up for, I fell strongly enough about it to go against my parents ‘rules’.
The second item was innocuous enough which made it more surprising and harder to understand. I was not allowed to leave the dorm before 6am. When asked about it, my mom merely replied that she couldn’t think of any reason for me to be out that early, ergo the rule. It sounded so arbitrary and very reminiscent of the times I lived at home.
As children when my brothers and I questioned some of the rules my mom made, she had always answered “Because I said so” not wanting or not knowing how to explain to us why we were not allowed to do certain things. And as she was the mom, that was the rule - even if we don’t understand it. However, because I was no longer a child, I was also no longer satisfied with answers like that. I tried to look for scenarios, no matter how far fetched wherein I would need to be out that early. The best and most plausible I could come up with, the distress of the restriction stifling my creativity was jogging. I asked what if Hazel and I wanted to go jogging at 5:30 in the morning. The answer I got sadly was to wait until 6am when the dorm doors officially open.
