When Society Catcalled Me To Wait

This morning, my officemate  A— called me over to her desk to show me a fine specimen of a CV.

The photo showed a beautiful bespectacled Romanian woman with her arms crossed. With just one look, she exuded confidence, strength, and a don’t-you-wish-you-were-half-as-good-as-me vibe.

She finished her bachelor’s degree in her native Romania; she pursued her master’s degree in Spain; her work experience spanned two continents (resulting to her fluency in three languages); and she was a travel blogger managing her own website.

All these and more compiled in 2 well-structured pages.

“THIS is what employers are looking for,” A— praised. “You can pattern your CV after hers. I’ll give you a print out.”

This same colleague of mine has not fallen short on encouragements ever since I joined the office staff a few months back.

She said that as a former recruitment agent for SM Shoemart and Araneta Group, she saw in me, “Oh, what’s the word?”

“Potential?” I rolled my eyes.

“Exactly,” she said solemnly.

It wasn’t the first time I found myself wishing I was in another, much more accomplished woman’s thousand-dirham shoes.

I’m the kind of person who gets discouraged easily. When I was in school, I kicked the habit of comparing my test scores with those of my classmates early on. I found that I did best when I competed with one person and one person only – myself.

As long as I stirred clear off of possible occasions of envy, I could concentrate on reading a novella, writing a blog, and working on an online course in peace. But when someone thrusts Miss Omni-Fudging-Brilliant at you, you can’t simply whistle-walk away. You stop and ask yourself what the hell you’ve been doing with your life.

Early mornings at the office are quiet. People move slow – sip their coffee slow, photocopy documents slow, check their social media accounts slow. When I finish all of that, I open a minimized window of my favorite image of the Holy Family (the Baroque masterpiece of Juan Simón Gutiérrez) and pray the Morning Offering.

Upon recommendation of a most trusted friend back home, I started reading Amoris Laetitia. Amoris Laetitia is an apostolic exhortation written by Pope Francis following the Synods on the Family, the first synod I showed the remotest interest in, because it promised to face Twenty-First Century family problems head on.

As a child of a quote-and-quote broken family, I have always had problems with the Church’s teaching (or lack thereof) of my “situation,” which is far from being unique in the least. For starters, when I learned that divorced and/or separated Catholics cannot receive Holy Communion, I was suddenly faced with the prospect of telling my parents not to receive Holy Communion. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not against the Church’s teaching on this, but I’m not a fan of it either.

Call it serendipity but today I came upon a passage in Chapter 2 of Amoris Laetitia which struck me enough to flesh out a blog about it: “… We live in a culture which pressures young people not to start a family, because they lack possibilities for the future. Yet this same culture presents others with so many options that they too are dissuaded from starting a family.” (Amoris Laetitia 40)

This rings especially true for Filipinas living in Dubai who are pressured into prioritizing career over family. By the time they reach their late 30s and early 40s, it’s either A or B – a choice that will define them for the rest of their lives.

A— (of this blog’s first paragraph fame) styled herself as a career-oriented woman. At the age of 25, she turned down the marriage proposal of a much older suitor who offered her a quiet life in a southern province. Contrary to her family’s expectations, A—, the youngest of the family, moved to Dubai to climb the career ladder further. She worked as an administrative secretary and assistant for several of the biggest firms in the country and lived a self-fulfilled life until the age of 38 when she realized she wanted to become a mother after all. She quickly jumped into a relationship with a much younger man who eventually became the father of her child. Finding herself pregnant out of wedlock (a crime punishable by U.A.E. law), she was forced to resign from her top position and return home to the Philippines. After years of struggling to make the relationship work, A—finally gave up her serial womanizing of a boyfriend and contented herself with raising her son alone.

B— is now 38. Everyone knows B—is nearing her 40th birthday, but not everyone knows that she is an NBSB (a dreaded abbreviation for “No Boyfriend Since Birth”). Much like A—, B— has been living a self-fulfilled life in the many years she has called Dubai her adoptive home. That is, up until recently when, like A—, B— realized that she was done with pursuing her career and is ready to settle down and have a family instead. B— struck up a friendship with her company’s Human Resources Head. That friendship blossomed into romance, the likes of which B— had only dreamed of her whole life. The problem is, Mr. Head of HR is already engaged to his long distance girlfriend of 10 years, and despite all of that, he still has the balls to woo B—. He’s charming. She’s distracted and desperate. She thinks that this is her last shot at motherhood.

C— is 50. She had made her choice long ago. C—continues to live a self-fulfilled life as an unmarried and childless woman. More recently, C— took up her Master’s Degree in a university in Abu Dhabi.

“In some countries, many young persons ‘postpone a wedding for economic reasons, work, or study. Some do so for other reasons, such as the influence of ideologies which devalue marriage and family, the desire to avoid the failures of other couples, the fear of something they consider too important and sacred, the social opportunities and economic benefits associated with simply living together, a purely emotional and romantic conception of love, the fear of losing their freedom and independence, and the rejection of something conceived as purely institutional and bureaucratic.” (Amoris Laetitia 40)

When I was in high school, the guidance counselor called us one by one to tell the class how we saw ourselves after 10 years. I was 15 then, and at that time, I had set my sights on getting accepted in a lesser-known (but very good) university far from home. So when it was my turn, I said that I wanted to be a published writer, making a decent living out of teaching and writing. My other classmates had far more glamorous aspirations, but what we all had in common was that we talked about our future careers – all except one girl anyway. She said she  wanted to be a good wife and mother.

And everybody laughed at her.

I remember how my laughter was quickly replaced by scorn. Why would a bright and talented girl like her want to settle down and pop babies at 25? She should be out there doing great things, anything besides becoming a slave to the patriarchy!

I was 15 then. I had only started “having ideas” about feminism, but more importantly, my parents had just separated the previous year. All of a sudden, everything I knew about marriage was a lie. Add a teenage romance or two gone wrong, I became convinced that not only was  marriage a lie but so was love. And everybody who fell for the lies were nothing short of idiots.

Well, what do you know. The girl’s an idiot after all, I thought. (Side note: She’s most certainly not an idiot.. She’s in law school right now, from where she will eventually graduate, pass the bar exam, and become the third female president of the Philippines.)

In the university, I became fascinated with feminism and, to a lesser extent, queer studies. I learned about Judith Butler’s theory on gender performativity, did a class report on Simone de Beauvoir, and wrote my literary criticism final paper on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

So for well over a decade, I numbered among the many self-proclaimed feminist naysayers of marriage. Marriage stood for everything I did not hope for my life to be: lack of freedom, financial dependence, lifetime commitment, unequal distribution of household chores, and the terror of the mundane – how do you live with the same person each day? What will you two talk about? How will you quiet secret murderous thoughts about each other???

And then everything changed.

I started to desire marriage.

This abrupt change in principle has much to do with falling in love, but way before the boy-meets-girl story even began, I had already considered the possibility of marriage – because I found God.

Marriage is a vocation. And so are single-blessedness and religious life. They are God’s calling.

When I first began to discern my vocation, I was impatient to hear God’s disembodied voice telling me that I was meant to marry or that I was meant to be a single blessed (I was stubbornly convinced I was not cut out to be a religious sister).

I thought it would be…convenient, to be called to be single. Such a life would enable me to do all the things my 15-year-old self aspired to be – writer, teacher, globetrotter, and Plato to J.K. Rowling’s Socrates — without the pederasty.

But I also knew that convincing myself that I was indeed called to be single (even though I wasn’t – not yet anyway) was not only a mark of disobedience against God but also an act of selfishness.

Besides, deep down, if I were really honest with myself, I wanted to get married.

My short experience in teaching left a deep impression on me.

One of the more unexpected sides to my job was sitting with the parents and discussing how their kids were at home and in school and how we could help them. This was called mentoring – and it had to be done at least twice a year. I was always anxious to schedule mentoring chats with parents, because I was nearer to their kids’ age than I was to theirs (and really, what did I know about parenting anyway?)

It helped that I was assigned to good parents. I mean the really really GOOD parents who go beyond the given moral-and-financial-support thing; they’re the ones who actually read their kids’ essays, watch 10 dance rehearsals in a row, cheer at interschool competitions, volunteer at school events, attend parent-teacher meetings… In short, they were there in every sense of the word.

Those Olympian-level parents motivated me to not just be the inspiring teacher I hoped to be in the classroom but even in the remote distant future for when I would become a parent myself.

Here’s an overdue epiphany on the side: That girl in high school was right. One way or another, most of us, no matter what our career choices may be, eventually aspire to marry and have kids.

On off-days at the office, A—and I would have private and personal conversations wherein she would switch roles from confidante to sister to mother, quick as a flash.

“Do not marry early” was her oddest unsolicited advice.

There were many times when she lamented the loss of her much older lover when she was the same age as I am now (or almost).

“Why?” I asked, if only to give her the benefit of the doubt.

And she went on to recite all the reasons why I shouldn’t, the exact same ones Pope Francis wrote about in Amoris Laetitia.

1. Economic reasons.

2. Work.

3. Study.

4. Ideologies which devalue marriage and family.

5. Failures of other couples.

6. Fear of something they consider too important and sacred.

7. Social opportunities.

8. Economic benefits.

9. Purely emotional and romantic conception of love.

10. Fear of losing freedom and independence.

11. Rejection of something conceived as purely institutional and bureaucratic.

I love this officemate of mine.

I know that she has the best of intentions, but then again, so do many older people who end up poisoning the minds of the youth to dissuade them from marrying early.

A— chose her own path, one which brought forth consequences both good and bad. I admire her strength and resilience as a woman, but it’s one thing for her to accept her mistakes and another thing to suggest that others go down the same path she did.

My two cents on this is that there is wisdom in waiting but folly in running away.

If, by chance, I meet THE ONE at, say, my early twenties, and I know from the deepest recesses of my soul that he is who he is (bone-of-my-bones, flesh-of-my-flesh, father-of-my-future-beautiful-children), then I won’t tell Prince Charming he came a little ahead of schedule. I won’t run away all because he came at a time when society catcalled me to wait.