Women on Fire

By Lorna Kalaw-Tirol

Maybe this time we could be intimate, as in secrets—not necessarily of the boudoir, but as in dreams and fantasies, fears and angsts, above all, passions. What are the passions—the forces, the causes, the “special enthusiasms” (to borrow a phrase from life's passages guru Gail Sheehy)—that are driving women in their midlife? And if one of those passions happens to be sexual, how lucky can one get?

— From the Introduction

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anvil Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9789712733512

Book preview

Introduction

I LOVE your book, said a noted writer when we met shortly after Coming to Terms was released in March 1994, BUT it lacks something. There’s no sex! No passion!

The observation was not a criticism of the women in Coming to Terms. I had asked them simply to write about their midlife, a subject Filipino writers had never collectively explored in a book before, and they came up with introspective pieces that inspired Conrado de Quiros to exult, in his Foreword, Here is nakedness to the marrow of the soul.

A landmark book, the Manila Critics Circle said in citing Coming to Terms as the best anthology for 1994. By writing about the realities and possibilities of midlife for women, the writers broke new ground. They were thrilled to be told by complete strangers that the book was helping them to deal with their own midlife and even to enjoy it. Not a few women said they kept their copy of the book on their bedside table and turned to it again and again.

Last year, with Coming to Terms going into its third printing and more and more women asking if they could expect a sequel, I felt it was time to go one midlifing step further. I wanted a book that would address the observation the noted writer had made two years before. Maybe this time we could be intimate, as in secrets, not necessarily of the boudoir, but dreams and fantasies, fears and angsts, above all, passions. What are the passions — the forces, the causes, the special enthusiams (to borrow a phrase from life’s passages guru Gail Sheehy) — that are driving women in their midlife? And if one of those passions happens to be sexual, how lucky can a book editor get?

That early, I had a title for the new book: Women on Fire.

It wasn’t easy getting enough women to commit themselves to the kind of book I had in mind. Women of passion, I found out, are inevitably, indubitably, incredibly busy women. They are forever on the move, within the country and outside it — teaching, advocating, lawyering, writing, painting, sculpting, meditating, acting, running a company or an NGO, praying, nurturing, loving. They reminded me of a line from Sheehy’s New Passages: That’s what passion is all about: allowing yourself to get lost in something.

I had to be patient, and wait.

The final count: eleven essayists and a poet. Each one is a woman I have long admired, in some cases from a distance, for her tremendous intellectual and artistic gifts, her boundless pursuits, her daring spirit, her generous energy.

Marilen Abesamis, my college classmate for two years in the Sixties, was a remarkably sensitive writer even then. She would have gone on to a brilliant career in journalism if a higher cause had not beckoned.

Cristina Jayme Montiel was my student in English composition and literature in her senior year of high school; she edited the school paper and wrote beautiful letters. Today, with a turbulent past behind her and a Ph.D. after her name, she is rediscovering her poetic self.

The Reverend Dr. Elizabeth Tapia I had read about years ago but met only last December at a book launching in which she spoke with such passion of feminism and the spiritual calling.

Many of the writers have more familiar bylines. Barbara (Tweetums) Gonzalez heads a top-rated advertising agency but is better known to readers as the bedimpled woman whose Reality Check column makes the Philippine Daily Inquirer’s lifestyle section scintillate on Sundays. Two of her columns are reprinted in this book. Award winning essayist and journalist Sylvia L. Mayuga has been scaling mountains, literally and figuratively, since opting to become a fierce advocate for the environment in the Nineties.

Babeth Lolarga will probably be known henceforth as the country’s sexiest poet, all because she dutifully obliged my request for a sexy and passionate poem.

Julie Lluch is writer and artist both, in each calling exceptional. It is her prized sculpture, House on Fire, which graces the cover of this book.

Writer and artist, too, plus corporate woman, is Maria Victoria Rufino, whose glamorous photographs in the print media mask a seriousness and depth not usually associated with the social elite.

Boots Anson Roa springs a surprise on those who have boxed her into the Miss Goody-Two-Shoes stereotype, although the wholesome image, her fans should be assured, is intact, and for real.

Narzalina Lim, activist and advocate, was born with a rebellious streak which she explains in an engaging narration of her fascinating family history.

Katrina Legarda underwent a profound conversion between the time she agreed to be a part of this book and the time she was to sit down to finalize her essay. An eleven-year-old girl was raped, allegedly by a member of Congress, and Katrina was asked to help out in the child’s fight for justice. The case has changed Katrina’s life forever.

Finally, Solita (Winnie) Monsod, whose manuscript, the last to come in, was worth the long months of anxious waiting. Her essay is exuberant, witty and wise as only Winnie Monsod — in advanced middle age, she emphasizes — can be.

So here these 12 remarkable women are, freely and unabashedly writing about the passions that inflame their midlife.

Let them set you ablaze.

Lorna Kalaw-Tirol

Let me thank all the people who made this book possible: Marilen Abesamis, Tweetums Gonzalez, Katrina Legarda, Narz Lim, Julie Lluch, Babeth Lolarga, Sylvia Mayuga, Winnie Monsod, Tina Montiel, Boots Anson Roa, Marivic Rufino and Eliz Tapia; Karina Bolasco and Ani Habúlan of Anvil; Cynthia D. Davila and Josefa R. Curia of Orogem. That we all happen to be women is pure and wonderful serendipity.

Let me also thank Eric Torres of the Ateneo Art Gallery for permission to use Julie Lluch’s House on Fire on the cover.

My Father’s Daughter

MARILEN ABESAMIS

MY FATHER ought to have been a priest, but shortly before he was to have made his vows, my extremely religious grandparents died. And as soon as this happened, he bolted the seminary in search of a wife.

Since my father had something of a healer in him, he chose to be a doctor and later wooed my mother, age 19, at the side of a provincial hospital bed.

My father’s religious asceticism and his medical profession combined to make him something of a madman. He was by the door of the church at five in the morning, sometimes before the acolyte was. He walked three miles daily, evidently to unburden—for my mother always teetered on the edge of a breakdown—but to secular friends he said it was great exercise.

For all the walking he did, he needed only two pairs of shoes, carefully chosen from the store Ang Tibay, which lived true to its name. He replaced not the pair, only the soles when the shoes wore thin.

He also had this quirk about entertaining: he forbade us to string festive lights when celebrating a feast or an anniversary, for fear we would unnecessarily hurt the feelings of the needy. As far as I knew, all the neighbors were wealthier than we, so it wasn’t clear who it was he feared offending.

So we grew up deeply averse to flaunting but feeling obliged to give, rather generously, because the wealthy-looking people around us might in truth be more needy than we.

Relatives came to be treated for free (and naturally, many claimed to be cured just by the sound of his footsteps at their door). They came back in droves, with other friends, and brought whatever produce they had from the farm. We had plenty of food, but we were often short of cash.

My mother, who was used to a life of wealth and wistfully recounted the horse-drawn carriages of a gilded time, considered him an utter failure. She snubbed my father’s relatives, especially those to whom he parcelled some of his inherited land. In the quiet struggle between my mother and my father, I inevitably took my father’s side.

We were never poor, and we were never rich either. But because of the battering of social consciousness from my father, we found it important to identify with the poor. A preferential option for the poor is how my eldest brother, a Bible scholar, terms it. Meaning, we could have become billionaires — if only we had chosen to do business with the world rather than tried to save it.

MARTIAL LAW hit me when I was aspiring to do my master’s and working at a newspaper in New York. When Marcos shut down the media and the international phones, the shock of being unable to communicate with anyone in the homeland, and the imagined horrors of prison and garrison tanks made me crave intensely for home. Suddenly, the avenues and theatres of Manhattan looked so sterile. I wouldn’t be found dead in New York! I cried.

Goodbye, Youth! Goodbye, Fun! I was joining the rev, going to a war from which I might never return! I kissed my Jewish boyfriend goodbye, my workaholic deskmate at the office; I also kissed my steadfast one, my Chinese friend who could not see the point of it all. There was no money in a rev.

Even then a political storm was already brewing in the student expat community; so as a fitting despedida to New York, I joined a protest march to the embassy. The embassy staff did not know how to handle the situation: it was the first of a thousand protests that would unfold, but ours was the premiere demo on the East Coast. The US-based personnel, some of them our friends, nervously peered from the upstairs window at the crowd below.

Suddenly, as we sang and cheered, the gates heaved and a mad scramble ensued at the embassy door. I got tossed into the foyer, together with student leaders Ernie Ordonez and Rom Achacoso. I bit my tongue, dropped the placard Restore civil liberties! and came face to face with visiting columnist and joker Joe Guevara. The following morning, our names blazed in the Philippine newspapers and reached my Mom.

My mother was convinced that having thus made it to the national papers as a leader-demonstrator, I had become a Communist in the USA.

"My God, you are now an atis!" she cried. Atheist-activist-Communist was what she meant. Is this true? she shot at me as soon as I put my luggage down.

Of course not, I said, but I hardly reassured her. I meant it, but how could she understand? For three months later, I decided to marry the first ex-political prisoner I met — a creature of my mind, a romanticized hero of a relentless, crushing dictatorship.

I entrusted my fate into the hands of this friend, newly delivered from prison, somebody who, I believed, was deeply wounded for his faith and for love of motherland. I worshipped him, mainly because I also wanted so passionately to pay my dues. I felt I had missed out, having so uselessly cavorted and flirted with life on the streets of New York.

Mesmerized, I drew out all my savings from the US and sought his advice on how to spread this wealth. Together, we bought milk for mothers of the poorest prisoners, emptied cabinets for clothes to give the children, and promised jobs to distressed and lonely wives.

Where it was hard to find a job, we harassed friends to create them. Where the women were the no-read, no-write type, we set up our own noodle, pie and pizza shop. The mixed menu showed it wasn’t dead serious about profit, but the feel-good spirit overflowed.

I thought this was how a real partnership began — one impelled by a vision of a society more equitable and more humane. No matter what objections my mother raised, I insisted I had found my mission — and, how convenient, a bemedaled (meaning tortured) partner to boot.

Then one day, in a voice full of solicitousness and foreboding, my prince said the situation would get hot and ex-political prisoners might have to go underground.

I was not clear what this meant, but it felt like a gun pointed at my neck. I pictured myself abandoned, with my old classmates playing mahjong on weekends, and on workdays, doomed to the ordinariness of writing jingles for bonbons or tampons.

If I clasped him close, I thought, perhaps there would be no such thing as an underground swallowing up those who defied the times. Unabashed, I pressed him to marry me.

A few minutes before the garden wedding I had set (it was too rushed to arrange anything in church), my mother locked me in her embrace, then fell to her knees. Escape! she said. My poor mother, who was just beginning to manage on her own six years after my father’s death, implored me, Go! I’ll take care of the guests!

If I was taking on a dictatorship, I didn’t realize my mother had been plotting a more dangerous game. She pushed me toward the backdoor, fearing I didn’t understand the import of her plea. I blinked, then calmly walked into my Fate.

MY BRIDEGROOM was poor and an anonymous poet, but my mother’s instincts were right; he was a gift that was a bit premature. I thought she was railing against the poverty that would soon own me, and against the unorthodoxy that life with an unknown ex-political prisoner spelt.

But I did not wish to wait. Nor did I wish to emulate my aunt who, at 75, eloped to Hawaii with somebody who was running ripe at 85. (My aunt had known her groom all her life. And true enough, with all that wisdom behind her, that relationship lasted till their uneventful deaths, some 12 years later, spiced by occasional fits of jealousy on either side.)

As most everybody knows, people marry for the strangest reasons. Aside from that pure chemical imbalance that sends one’s head on a spin, mine included my father’s consciousness of the poor, a passion for poetry, and an urgency dictated by the uncertain times.

These reasons did not hold well enough, and after a decade of minor and major surprises, of fight and flight marital storms, of peace and belligerence, I became autistic.

I was speechless when I sat at dinner, I always walked three meters ahead of anybody, and I dreaded going home.

I built a world of my own and traveled in an inner landscape that would not unlock. It was only after a full decade that I decided to let go.

The one reassuring space I found throughout the frustrating attempts to rework a disastrous relationship, the one that saved me from myself as I contemplated meeting a truck head-on, or provoking a soldier at a darkened checkpoint, or blowing up a grenade, was service, to people more miserable than myself.

My father would have called it