This story originally appeared in the Philippine Daily Inquirer on April 6, 1999.
In my family, the males are expected to have nice and stable jobs while the females should finish college and be married off before they get past the childbearing age. When my female cousins reached 30 without a fiance, or a boyfriend, the aunts consistently hounded them with comments that were too cruel to be considered as concern. I thought that my family’s views regarding marriage were normal and inevitable.
As I grew up and witnessed what my cousins were going through, I pondered and reconsidered my position. There was definitely a lot more pressure on the females than on the males. Even language manifests the disparity among men and women when it comes to status and lifestyle. We cringe at the synonyms of bachelorette: old maid, spinster, hag, etc. The nearest I could come up with the word bachelor is hermit, and even that has a flavor of spirituality and pureness. It seems to connote a man who has shunned earthly pleasures to endeavor celestial pursuits.
My relatives’ recent success was marrying off my eldest female cousin, Mana Grasing. Mana Grasing was a couple of years away from her 40th birthday and she was doing well as an insurance agent. She was fairly successful in her career and I’ve always thought that she was a symbol of recalcitrance among her female relatives because she was able to dodge marriage for some time.
I was surprised when an ecstatic relative phoned my mother announcing that my cousin was marrying a man whose family was purported to be demented. The only explanation I could come up with was that my badgering aunts finally got to her. While my mom and I were having dinner that night, I asked her about my cousin’s impending wedding and hinted that the future groom had a degree of derangement and the family should be concerned about it. My mom was unperturbed and she looked at me like I said something absurd. ”How could you say that to a future cousin-in-law? If anything, you should wish your Mana Grasing and Mano Poldo luck,” my mom said. ”She will need more than luck,” I muttered, ”she’ll need the assistance of a psychiatrist.”
”How can a self-professed progressive thinker like you pass judgment on someone when he shows a slight degree of eccentricity?” mom sharply asked. At that moment, I could gladly point out that Poldo’s grandfather on his mother’s side and his older brother were both confined in a hospital in Mandaluyong for ”mental instability” and his mother occasionally collects kaning baboy from their neighbors to feed imaginary pigs in their backyard. This irrefutable information could hardly be considered as belonging to the boundaries of eccentricity and every progressive thinker would agree with me that insanity could be inherited. It is not a simple sickness but a genetic trait that could be passed from parent to child.
However, I decided to hit my mother where she is most sensitive. I told her that it was possible that Mana Grasing got fed up with their constant urgings. So even though Poldo was a remote candidate for Mr. Right, my poor cousin decided he would make do. After what I said, my mother stopped eating, carefully placed the flatware on her plate and looked straight at me. My heart pounded and I wish I could take back everything that I said. It was like an eerie silence before the final destruction; a calm before the storm. She called me by my Christian name and reprimanded me for forgetting to fold the laundry in succinct Visayan dialect.
When my mom’s anger cannot be contained or if you manage to box her in one corner, she would digress and remind you of the things you did not do–even those of two or three years ago. I decided not to give her my well-thought retaliation and I held my tongue. I knew what would come next if I pursued my inquisition: my mom would fake hypertension and she would burst into theatrics that it was a waste sending me to a university for I did not turn out to be a proper and deferential daughter.
Even though I know that her wailing was just a reenactment of last afternoon’s soap opera, I would still feel bad afterwards for throwing her equilibrium off. After that incident, I realized that it was no use talking to my mother about Mana Grasing’s nuptials or about her general views regarding marriage. Even if you give her logical and sound reasoning she would still elect to keep her predilections and beliefs. My mom and my aunts had always emphasized that marriage was important and they considered it as part of a cycle that should be completed by every woman in the family.
First, you finish college, then you become a wife and then you conceive children. For me however, I think that marriage should be viewed as a vocation–like priesthood or entering the convent. Not every man could become a priest and not every single individual should get married. Marriage is a personal commitment to yourself, your partner, the children you might want to have and it should not be forced upon you. The problem with my aunts is that they focus more on the marriage ceremony and not what comes after it. It is disconcerting that women are driven into a certain paradigm that was created for them by society and it builds a sense of desperation when one is unable to fit the mold. I think that there are a number of women who got married because they were given a need not their own.
Mana Grasing’s wedding was a colossal event. Almost all the relatives attended, even those residing in the province. News was, the eldest female niece was about to get married at last. Some even saw it as a miracle and a cause for hope. If Graciela, who was a few years away from menopause, can hook a guy, then so can anybody else. Graciela was able to catch the last trip–kismet! It was useless to point out that Mana Gracing was doing fine without a man and that her marriage to Poldo should not be a cause for celebration, it should be a cause for alarm.
You’d think that since we’re just about into the new millennium, our older relatives would be more open-minded. Constricting traditions and warped values very much pervade the society although they subtly intrude: like during dinnertime when we have our small conversations or during family reunions with all those innuendoes and sly remarks. I wanted to speak to Mana Grasing personally to tell her of my thoughts, but what could I possibly say that she did not already know? She was almost a couple of decades my senior and I was sure she had reasons for going through with the marriage. Maybe she wanted to settle down. Maybe she really loved Poldo. Maybe she did it to spite her mother and her aunts. She probably got sick of her relatives trying to marry her off she got a man from a loony bin to teach them a lesson. Besides, we were already inside the church and any objections that I had to the marriage were already moot and academic.
When I saw Mana Grasing readying outside the church, there was nothing I could do except to wave and give her a smile. Her silk gown cascaded against the wind as she waved back and I tried to guess her emotional state at the time. Was she happy? Was she worried? I could not tell. A lacy veil, that was probably used to hide her concern from us or our concern from her, masked her face. I knelt on the pew with my head bowed and I tried to pray. I offered a prayer for Mana Grasing who was about to enter a new life and wished that everybody was wrong about Poldo’s aberrant genes. I also prayed for myself because 10 years from now, it would be my turn to be hounded. I wondered what they would do to me if I stayed single for the rest of my life, lived in a reasonably priced one-room apartment and chose Persian cats for companions. I hoped I would have the strength to say, ”It’s my life. Butt out.”
