But what have they done?
Women have always been deemed unworthy of being written about unless they have accomplished something “of great importance” or unless they are daughters or wives of important men. In fact, when I shared this idea of writing about the women in my family in a class composed of mostly women, one of them actually asked, “But what have they done to make people want to read about them?” By “what have they done,” I suppose she meant “what significant contribution have they made to society” such as inventing banana ketchup, among other things (Maria Orosa) or being the first woman accepted into Harvard Medical School (Fe del Mundo) or – to give a more current example – became an influencer with millions of followers on Instagram or Tiktok. But I’ve long discovered that raising children, particularly girls, in this unceasingly hostile world is something of significant importance. It’s the foundation of all societies and without well-functioning women, the world as we know it would collapse into chaos. So here are brief sketches of some of the women who helped raise me.
Anita
She fascinated me more than my own mother. For a child of nine, that in itself is a grave offense to confess. So I have never allowed myself to say it, until now. She is my father’s only sister, and she was everything my mother was not. She wore heeled shoes and short dresses. She put on make up. She hosted lunches and dinners for her friends who always seemed glad to make the long trip to Malabon. Her friends have written books and held high positions in institutions and were all intelligent and interesting. She went to graduate school at Stanford and worked in Paris. She was gone for months at a time when she took assignments to destinations like Tajikistan and Kyrgyztan, places that sounded so exotic, I had to look them up in the atlas. She didn’t know how to cook. Once when she stayed with me at our house while my parents were away, she suggested that we make breakfast food for dinner. We scrambled eggs with onions, lightly fried a can of sausages, and microwaved sliced bread. We ate all of it except for the bread, which turned hard as rocks minutes after she took it out of the microwave.
Everyone called her Ate – from her younger brother to the children of her brothers to the children of her brothers’ children. This often raised eyebrows whenever there were guests and they hear my three-year-old twin nephews calling out, “Ate! Ate!” to their senior citizen grandaunt. But then the guests also hear the toddlers calling her three older siblings Kuya, Diko, and Sangko, so they lower their eyebrows soon enough.
She was always hatching plans to coax me out of my shell because I was a painfully shy and timid child. In fourth grade, she encouraged me to join the Girl Scouts, which I did, and for a year, I dutifully attended seminars and events held at school. In fifth grade, she suggested that I take part in the kids’ choir at the Immaculate Conception Parish and so for two years, I was one of the Little Lambs of the Altar and we were in charge of singing at the Saturday novena and anticipated mass, as well as doing the collection during offertory. It was also around that time, during summer break, when she told me to apply for a junior newscaster job at the local cable channel because a cousin’s cousin was doing it and said it was fun. That was one thing I really couldn’t bring myself to doing, and she didn’t bring it up again. She did expose me to finer things, though.
When I was eleven, she bought me a ticket to my first ever stage play. It was a musical called “Magnificat” and it was about the life of Mary. She took me with her to the Saturday afternoon anticipated mass, after which she endorsed me to the care of a family friend who was seeing the play at the Meralco Theater, too. When I got home that night, I got an earful from my mother who apparently looked for me after the mass only to be told that I was off to see a play in Pasig City.
When I was twelve, she brought me to the Ayala Museum, bought me a ticket, and told me to explore the museum and look at the dioramas by myself for as long as I liked and she would just see me at the exit.
She has always allowed me to raid her personal library, and when I was thirteen, she gave me her copies of Kerima Polotan’s Author’s Choice and Adventures in a Forgotten Country, which I read over and over for the next several years, until the binding came loose and the pages started to crumble and I had to buy the new edition.
She never married and throughout my childhood, she would borrow me from my parents for a week or two during summer breaks and in those weeks, I would sleep in her bed and ask her all of my questions and trade stories with her and live in her house, which was barely 400 meters away from where I actually lived. One time, she told me: “Alis tayo isang araw, May. Sasakay lang tayo ng bus, tapos wala tayong pagsasabihan kung saan tayo pupunta. Pero bago pa sila totoong mag-alala, uuwi na tayo.”
After I came back from college, I would pay her weekly visits and at some point, we formed an informal subgroup within the family. We call ourselves The Martin Singles and this includes Ate, an unmarried female cousin with a teenage son, two gay cousins in their 40s, and me. We go out to lunch three or four times a year to catch up on each other’s lives and of course, talk about the rest of the family. I have legally stopped being single two years ago and we have since brought my husband into the group, but the name stuck.
Whenever people ask her why she never married, she would often reply, “Wala namang lumigaw sa akin.” And once, when somebody asked her if she was happy with her life as a single woman, she said, “I am happy. But I wouldn’t recommend it to others.”
She may be unmarried, but she has never lived alone in her big house. She lived with her parents until they died after a long and quiet life. She now lives with her youngest brother who separated from his wife decades ago, and she has also chosen to take over the upbringing of my cousin’s three sons while he and his wife spend long hours at work.
At 71, she is still interested in good movies and plays and books and she still makes it a point to meet with her friends, even if she has to go all the way to Batangas to do so. But on most days, she gets up at four AM, eats breakfast, reads up on the news and current events, does some chores, eats lunch, cares for the children when they get home from school, eats dinner at five PM, goes up to her room at six, reads a few chapters or watches a couple of TV shows, then falls asleep.
Sometimes, I still think of asking her to go on that sudden, secret bus ride. But I have a feeling that she no longer wants to go. #
Elisa
Being sent to her home with a bag full of clothes meant only two things: either it was the beginning of summer break or I was afflicted with something contagious and needed to be quarantined. As a consequence, some of my early memories of her are associated with chicken pox, mumps, and battling boredom as well as mosquitoes during the notorious seven-hour blackouts that plagued Metro Manila in the 90s. She gave me everything I needed and more, but staying with her often felt like survival training.
Her bed was made of narrow wooden planks topped with a banig woven with an image of San Juanico Bridge. At night, she unfurls a red kulambo over the bed and that was the closest thing I had to sleeping in a tent. Her husband slept on a rattan sofa bed with its own kulambo on the other side of the room. They allowed themselves one electric fan each. Hers was a stand fan with rusty propeller blades while his was a desk fan with a missing face, tied with old garters to a metal stool to prevent it from crashing to the floor because it wobbled whenever it was turned on. A curtain, not a door, separated their room from the dining area. Over time, I was able to tell from the other side of the curtain which fan was being used in the room based on the noise it made. She lived right across the river and whenever tides rose, the water would spill into the house but it never rose high enough to reach the bed. Even so, it was easy to see why mattresses – or anything upholstered, for that matter – were an impractical option in that house.
For someone who once made a living from the river and has lived all her life right next to one, she certainly had a complicated relationship with the water. The tides rose and fell, following the cycle of the moon. Whenever the tide is set to rise, she would sit on her chair with her trusty panlimas (a device she fashioned out of a flat wooden stick and a plastic liter container of Caltex gasoline) and wait like a sentry. She would closely watch the gaps between the tiles on her kitchen floor for the telling drops that turn into puddles until they take over the entire floor and merge with the water on the street. While this is happening, she would do everything she can to rid her house of the flood by scooping it out, liter by liter, and dumping it outside the back door. It was a chore of Sisyphean proportions because water always goes back to where it came and all one has to do is wait and perhaps, wipe away some errant puddles that refused to leave. But she always approached it with such firm albeit cranky resolve that I never questioned her about it.
There was one time, though, when the flood brought her a live bangus. It was swimming on the kitchen floor, and with one swift motion, she triumphantly grabbed it with her two hands and that evening, we ate it for dinner. It wasn’t the first animal I saw her kill. She tended some native chickens in her backyard – she cordoned off a small section, covered it with a net, and left the chickens there. I was not allowed inside the net, but she did allow me to watch them from outside. One morning, she went into the coop, caught one chicken after two tries, and brought it to the kitchen sink where a small plate of uncooked rice sat. With the skill of a seasoned huntress, she slit the hen’s throat with one swift motion, catching all the blood using the small plate without spilling a drop. Later, she would cook the rice drenched in hen’s blood in boiling water and eat it while my grandfather and I ate tinola.
It was not in her nature to be wasteful and she always found ways to make use of every single item in her fridge. She once served fried lumpia for dinner and when I tore it open with my fork, a piece of liver came out with bits of mongo sprouts. Upon further investigation, I found elbow macaroni in there, too. My eyes widened with horror, but an older cousin just laughed and said that we should just call the dish Lola’s Lumpia Leftover Surprise.
She didn’t believe in bath soap or dishwashing soap. As far as soaps go, she only ever bought one kind – detergent bars. She would do the laundry in the walled off section of the small front yard. For this task, she would be wearing a garterized cotton tapis that looked like a shapeless tube dress. She would fill two of those metal basins with corrugated edges with water, one for the clothes, and the other for me. She would allow me to soak and play in the batya while she did the laundry. After she hangs the clothes to dry, she would bathe right there using Ajax on her hair and skin. She also used the soap on me once, but I must have had a rash afterwards because I had proper bath soap and shampoo the rest of the time. She lived with such simplicity that it was almost primal – not in an innocent, pure sense, but in a raw, almost savage sense.
Recently, my mother told me about one night, many, many years ago when she was solely her mother’s daughter and not somebody’s wife. That night, a woman and a young boy went to their home. They wanted to talk with my grandmother to ask her to let my grandfather go so that her son could have his father. She is said to have told my grandmother, “Sa amin na lang si Nardo.” I don’t think my grandfather adequately warned his mistress about his wife. If he did, I’m certain she wouldn’t have done what she did. My mother said it happened very quickly, but various expletives were hurled and my grandmother pounced on the woman, grabbed and pulled her by the hair and hit whatever and wherever she could until the woman and her son fled. It took a while to calm my grandmother down, and when she finally did, she found that the woman’s hairclip was still in her clenched fist.
She must have mellowed significantly with age because apart from the utilitarian way of life I had with her, she was a doting grandmother to me. She responded to my every whim when I was sick, even crushing the medicine tablets and mixing it with a tablespoon of water because I had difficulty swallowing them whole. She would give me and an older cousin some money and send us off to her sister’s store nearby so we could buy candies and chips. Once, I said, “Meringue nga po.” I used the English pronunciation, mə-ˈraŋ, instead of the Filipino pronunciation, me-reng-gue, and it sent my grandmother’s sister into a panic, and she replied, “Ano? May Meralco?!” Apparently, every other household there had illegal electrical connections. I thought I was going to get a scolding, but my grandmother just laughed.
Predictably, she outlived her husband by several years, but she was barely there towards the end, forgetting to turn off the stove, wandering about the house, muttering to herself. For a while, she was passed around among her four children, depending on who can manage to watch over and care for her best. She ended up living with a widowed daughter and a few years later, she died of natural causes. My mother and her three siblings have been talking about tearing down their mother’s empty house for the past two years before it completely succumbs to termites and other parasites, but they couldn’t seem to bring themselves to do so. #
Arcadia
She was the perfect homemaker. She prepared large, hearty meals three times a day for her husband and five children, and later, also for her children’s wives and their children. She was a remarkable cook, which became a burden to her sons’ wives because her sons have been known to say, “Hindi ganito ang luto ng Nanay” when tasting a dish their wives slaved over. The wives, on their part, would either silently sulk or brazenly state, “Hindi mo ako nanay.”
She was also unfailingly kind to her daughters-in-law when they came to live with her and their husbands during the first years of marriage. She taught them how to make certain dishes, among other things, and she treated them as if they were her own daughters, although she has been accused of having a favorite daughter-in-law more than once.
She knew how to make neat, uniform stitches and she mended her family’s clothes with no trace. She also embroidered her husband’s and sons’ undershirts with their nicknames in graceful script using blue thread.
The plants in her small garden were also thriving. This garden served as the burial ground for a couple of old pets that died and this may have helped fertilize the land, but most of the garden’s success is due to her careful tending. Her sampaguita grew so well, in fact, that it hugged the wall and spread itself on much of the roof. When we were young, she would send me and my cousins clambering onto the roof with a bilao to pick sampaguita buds. She used a needle and thread to string the flowers together to make fragrant garlands for the various religious images in her home. She would often ask me to put the thread through the needle, and when I got a little older, she let me string the flowers together by myself, but she still got to decide which garland went to which image. She was always partial to Impong Maria, the brown-skinned, kinky-haired La Immaculada Concepcion of the Aglipayan Church whom she is devoted to.
If she was not at home, she was most likely at church. The Iglesia Filipina Independiente has a strong presence in Malabon and she and her husband were among its eldest and most devout members. Her husband as well as her eldest son were part of the Maginoo ni Aglipay while she was one of the blue-clad, scapular-wearing Damas de Honor. She tried to attend all the important processions, and when she couldn’t, she opened the gate and all the windows of her home, lit candles, and prayed as the procession went by. However, this piousness was not able to subdue the competitive feeling she had against the Roman Catholic Church whom she called “Ang mga Romano,” [“The Romans”] which somehow added a villainous tinge to the term. During important days in the Liturgical Calendar such as Good Friday or the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, three processions from three different churches would pass by her house – one Aglipayan, and two Catholic ones. She would often gauge the success of a procession based on its length because a longer procession meant that it had more devotees. My older cousins would tease her whenever the Catholic processions were obviously longer, and she would always say, “Puro naman mga estudyante!”
She never got angry or raised her voice, even when my boy cousins who lived with her were getting into all sorts of trouble in school. She often humored their requests, even if it meant changing the menu at the last minute. I remember her laughingly saying to one of my cousins, “O, sige. Sinigang na baka. You’re the boss, I’m the busabos!”
I am the youngest of my generation, which means that I also had the briefest time with her, but I remember even the little things about her. She couldn’t stand the smell of Enervon-C and ripe mangoes. She made it a point to wear polka dots every New Year’s Eve. Whenever she cooked hot dogs, she would declare that each child only gets one piece each, but she would pull me aside to tell me that I could have two, if I wanted. She had asthma and she would smile at me even while using her nebulizer to let me know that she was all right. She always ate her meals with her husband whenever he was home, and they shared one bed until the very end. Before they retired for the night, she would turn on the TV in their room and watch some shows while her husband would turn on the transistor radio he kept on his bedside table and listen to it until he fell asleep. I often walked into their room to find the TV and the radio on while both of them were asleep. But they always stirred and opened their eyes whenever I turned the electronics off, as if they were awake the whole time. #
Tags: herstory, Mother's Day, mothers, wives, women
poised for flight 