What is this thing called motherhood?

The harrowing endless repetition of dirty nappies, awakening in the middle of the night to fretful cries, not having even 15 minutes to myself on some days, and being so tired that I don’t even know who I am sometimes.

It is also the honour of being at the beck and call of this wondrous person, a sort of spiritual repetition where you are called to serve at the altar every morning, and challenged to fulfill the same duties over and over again with equal or greater amounts of love, care, and devotion.

Often I don’t know who I am, but maybe the here and now is more important than the ideas of who I am that I have attached myself to. Yes, I’m a strong independent woman with a career, but the baby needs feeding and changing right now. The here and now holds more weight.

Sometimes, I feel like my heart is going to explode just looking at her and I know that I would just die without her. All this while she sleeps peacefully, unknowing that her mama has grappled with so many overwhelming feelings in just 3 weeks. I’m drowning in feelings. I’m a zombie. I’m more alive than I’ve ever been.

motherhood

“How is motherhood?”, ask your friends who don’t have children. My standard answer is to paint a picture of a cuddle-filled existence that manages to be fulfilling even with very little sleep and having to change a hundred dirty nappies per day. And while that is one part of the picture, it leaves the other 80% out.

Here is a real answer: motherhood is fragile. Your body has taken a beating from the birth. While I found that I was prepared enough to endure birth without pain-relief, I was unprepared for how long and slow postpartum recovery would be. Labor is, after all, just one day out of your life. I felt strong as I mounted each contraction. But I felt fragile and helpless after the birth when 2 weeks later my knees were still wobbling, I couldn’t sit up by myself, I could barely walk, and I had this new, unfamiliar body covered in aches and pains. They say postpartum recovery takes 6 weeks. I’m only about half-way through.

Motherhood is fragile and early parenthood is full of doubt and perceived parenting failures that can shatter you and reduce you to a blubbering mess. One such ‘failure’ was when my newborn lost too much weight in her first few days of life due to a delay in milk supply. While I knew intellectually that this was not a 'failure’ on my part, it certainly felt like one. I was crushed and felt like I couldn’t fulfil my basic duty which was to provide for her. As I bottle-fed her with formula to get her weight back on track, I would collapse into emotional sobs even while knowing that I was probably seeing things completely out of perspective. “She’s starving! My body has failed her!”, I cried as my husband tried to console me.

Motherhood is feeling sorry for yourself because you’re exhausted, unwashed, and barely have time to even put on a complete set of clothing (which results in you being half-naked the whole day)… then feeling guilty about it. How selfish of me to feel any amount of self-pity, you think. I should be acting like a mature adult by now.

Still, you cry sometimes simply because you have to. You cry when you see your partner have free time to enjoy hobbies, and again feel guilty for that tiny, niggling bit of resentment you feel… even if he does his more than his equal share of caring for you and the baby. You cry because you’re the one who has to get up several times a night to breastfeed, a role your partner cannot take on.

You cry because so much is on you, you, YOU. You’re the mom. You carried this child in your womb for 9 months, and you know deep down inside that you mean the world to this tiny, little person who can sometimes only be comforted by YOUR heartbeat, YOUR smell, and the sound of YOUR voice, not anybody else’s. Only you are able to read the meaning of every subtle variation in your baby’s different cries. This child is reliant on you more than anybody else in the universe.

Motherhood is fragile because your heart is truly wide open for the first time in your life. You cry because you sometimes look at your baby and feel a love and wonder that threatens to overwhelm you completely. And you know that all the hardship is not only worth it, but also temporary. Things will change, your baby will grow and need you less and less, and each time you’ll wish that she still needed you just as much.

Look, my darling, we’ve made love

One of the most deeply spiritual moments of my life happened in a sitting position, on the toilet bowl, pants down. Beside my foot stood a little paper cup of fresh pee; in my trembling hand, an oracle: a pregnancy test with a very definite blue cross beginning to emerge in its little window like a prophesy from above. It took a few seconds for me to realise that a cross meant ‘positive’, but when it hit me, I surprised myself by collapsing into hysterical sobs. 

I was alone in our apartment, and had you witnessed the sight of me hugging my knees and weeping uncontrollably on the bathroom mat, you would have thought I was in distress. What I’ve learned is that profound joy and profound grief look very much alike. They both evoke a primal reaction so powerful, it feels like a force of nature ripping through your body. 

 I have tried my best to recount what happened in the space of those few mystic seconds within seeing that little blue cross. In my mind’s eye, a big mirror was held up to my soul, and in it I saw an image of somebody bigger and more expansive than anything I’d ever been called to be. At the top of my head, a portal opened up revealing an infinite path that stretched behind me into the past and before me into the future. In both directions, the path disappeared into the unfathomable blackness of space and time. Through this portal, life came unto me, and through this portal came a great cry from deep down into the depths of creation, the cry of the first life on earth. That mighty cry manifested through my diminutive, little body as racking sobs, the purest sense of joy I have ever felt. And despite my having emancipated myself from my religious upbringing years ago, those famous biblical words uttered by the Angel Gabriel echoed in my mind: “Unto you a child is born.“ 

 I understood for the first time what it meant to be called on a mission. I faced that mirror again and asked myself: am I really worthy of being a mother? What kind of human being do I want to be? Can I really embody that larger-than-life image of myself in the mirror? By the time I picked myself up from the bathroom floor, I knew that I was now taking my first few steps on a completely different life path. I was on my way to becoming, and there was no looking back. 

 For a day, I kept the news entirely to myself, my precious secret seed, my tiny, point of light in the darkness. My little one, I was the first to know of your beating heart, just as my mother was the first to know of mine. When I later delivered the news to my husband, I became too emotional to be eloquent. It was only later when I found the right words. If I could relive the moment, I would have told him, “Look, my darling, we’ve made love.”

I like being married. I guess I’m one of those people who enjoy belonging to somebody. Knowing I’m a member of an exclusive club of two gives me complete freedom to love and be loved.

I had to learn to accept the freedom of being loved. There are so many bits of myself that I’d rather hide. There’s a lot of myself that I have trouble accepting, parts of me so carefully concealed that they almost never see the light of day. 

I bend and contort myself in order to hide these stains and broken bits, a position that I didn’t know was so difficult to hold until I began to live in such intimate quarters with another person. But with gentle coaxing, I’ve learned to give myself permission to drop my fatigued spirit and just be loved. 

the garden

I’ve been home in Manila for exactly three days now, and it has been sweet. I’ve spent my time mainly in my parent’s bright, airy house, in the quiet, leafy suburb I grew up in. 

I spend long, leisurely mornings and afternoons watching the light change on the leaves of my mom’s lush, tropical garden. At a certain time of day, the leaves look incandescent, illuminated from the inside. After another hour, the light concentrates itself into little points that dance at the tip of each leaf. 

I like watching the creeper vine make it’s slow ascent up the mossy all, its large, saucer-shaped leaves overlapping like crochet lace. 

I get lost in the motley variety of shapes, colours, sizes, and vein networks of each plant.

With a coffee in hand, and wearing a pair of borrowed tsinelas, this is all I need.

 I know no boredom. I am in no need of distraction. I’m content to let my mind and spirit play without any expected outcome. Within the bounds of this walled garden, my mind finds the nourishment to begin sprouting new little leaves.

There is a walled garden that lies deep in my subconscious. It is an old garden, suspended in a glorious tropical afternoon.  In this garden, I am always a child. I can play in this garden, but I cannot live there. There are times that I wander so far from it, that I lose the path. Sometimes, I go for so long without visiting that I forget that it exists. 

But on this trip home, I’m happy to have found my way back. 

hate in petty metaphors (this is not a love letter)

This is written in the spirit of cheap pop songs:

Your excuses are like badly made paper planes.

Your promises are like fake money.

Your love is room-temperature soup.

Your heart is  a weather report, inaccurate and subject to change for no reason whatsoever.

Trying to love you is like a website that never loads all the way, no matter how many times you hit refresh.

You treat my emotions like a toddler handles breakable objects.

I feel like a home-cooked breakfast that has gone cold because you got caught up in a phone call, or were reading something on the internet.

And lastly, I think your hair is stupid.

The end.

— From my collection of un-published break-up entries, circa 2011. I never meant to publish them. But re-reading them nearly 4 years after, I find them too good not to publish. 

orphans

There are ten of them. Ten pink orphans, swaddled in plastic, bound by a nylon bow, deposited on my doorstep and unaccompanied by a note.

I think of the 5 minutes it took you to purchase them, already assembled and pre-wrapped, a 25-dollar substitute for the time and attention you can’t give me. Ten dull and slightly wilted stand-ins for the apology you are unable to deliver.

How can such sweet, innocent things deliver such a hard kick to the stomach?

Ten tulips, swathed in plastic and bound with a nylon bow. You don’t see that it’s not your plastic-wrapped tricks that I want, not the things your money can buy me in five minutes. But five minutes of your warmth and sincerity, of your physical presence, of a heart-felt apology would be worth a thousand of these flowers.

In the meantime, what shall I do with these poor orphans left to my care? Though initially tempted to turn them out into the street, they are gentle, innocent things. Already they are beginning to open, and it was not their wish to be used as a pawn in this game of sorry.

I may be angry, but I’m not heartless. They can stay and they shall have a place to bloom. They will remind me that a man can’t give what he never had to begin with. I am no longer the woman who waits for you. 

- This was an old entry written in 2011. I never published it because it was too revealing then. Publishing it now because it doesn’t mean anything anymore :-)

what’s in a name?

This morning, Ala Paredes walked out of her apartment. But she would not be coming back again. 

This was not a conscious realisation at that time. I was too focused on getting to the Roads and Transport Authority office at a good, early time before it got too crowded. 

I carried a red, plastic envelope with my original marriage certificate issued from Canberra nearly seven months ago. 

I had been delaying changing my name for several reasons. Our honeymoon was to be in a few months time and I didn’t want to scramble around renewing my passport so soon before leaving, just so it could have my married name on it. 

Second, I knew that changing my name would mean diving headfirst into a lengthy, frustrating bureaucratic maze. There was so much to consider. To borrow a quote from Boromir from “The Lord of the Rings”: “One does not simply walk into the Registry of Births and Deaths and emerge on the other side with a new name that will magically appear on your passport, driver’s license, bank accounts, and medical and tax records”. (Ok, that quote was a little bit longer than planned)

Nay. These are different departments that do not speak or collaborate with each other. I must knock on each door myself bearing a folder with the right set of required documentation, which varies slightly with each department. After the wedding, I was far too busy to navigate that labyrinth.

Finally, I am no slave to tradition (or so I like to think), and neither is my husband. He even encouraged me to keep my name as it was. I was under no pressure from him, and didn’t even bother changing my last name on my Facebook profile. 

So why change my last name at all? Well… I foresee a family in my future, and I would like all of us to live under the same roof and have the same last name. Like the Flintstones. The Jetsons. The Adams Family. Like my family. 

I know that families come in all sorts of variations, what with step-relatives, half-relatives, and de facto relationships, and it’s not really necessary to all have the same last name. But I would like my future family to all stand under the same name umbrella. (So maybe that means that I actually am a slave to tradition.) 

I had made up my mind. “I will take your last name”, I told my husband. “Okay, if you want to”, he replied. Nothing more was said. 

But it took a few months to even find the time to revise my driver’s license, the first step in legally changing my name. My waiting soon turned to frustration. And yet, when I finally found myself face-to-face with the clerk at the Roads and Transport Office, I was suddenly paralysed with fear at the finality of it all. 

“So you want me to drop ‘Paredes’ and put in your husband’s last name, right?”, he asked me. A standard question. My mouth opened to give him a standard answer, but the anticipated “yes” did not materialise. Instead, I stared at him dumbly. 

“Um…”, he said, sensing my hesitation. 

“Um…”, I said, “can you give me a moment to think about it?”

“Of course”, he said. 

I knew I didn’t have much time to think. His hand was on the mouse, and the cursor was on the “submit name change” button. 

Drop my maiden name… the name I’ve had for more than three decades, the only name I’ve ever had. Why was I back-stepping? Women shed their maiden names and replace it with that of their husbands all the time. I would not be the first. A woman leaves her house when she marries and joins her husband’s house… right?

I harbour no doubts about building a house, a life, with my husband. But I couldn’t seem to swallow the thought of my legal identity completely dissolving into his. I pictured what would become of Ala Paredes if I discarded her… she would become a ghost, an identity without a person to inhabit. She would wander around a desolate underworld of forsaken identities, calling back to me unheard. In moments of future regret, I would maybe hear her cries in the distance, wondering if I were imagining it. 

Paredes… what’s in a name? Seven letters, three syllables. The airy, tip-toeing “pah”, the voluptuous rolled “R” in the “reh” (like a wolf baring its teeth), punctuated by a bouyant, pirouetting “des”. 

Those three sounds are my link to a lineage that I am proud of, my living relatives; the accomplished grandfather I never met because he died in a plane crash with a Philippine president; my father and his artistic contribution to society. My last name has cultural value which I am lucky to inherit and still hope to deserve one day. 

But that’s not all. Ala Paredes once wrote a blog that was widely-read for at least six years. It was Ala Paredes who worked hard, pouring her blood and sweat into being an artist. It was Ala Paredes who moved out of home, decided who she wanted to be, built her own life, and became independent on her own terms. It would be a great injustice to wipe Ala Paredes clean from the records as if she didn’t exist. 

This intense thought process took all of one minute. I told the clerk not to drop my maiden name, but to instead give it a special place right before my husband’s last name. I would legally use both. And no hyphen, please. 

“Ok”, he said. “And should I change your status from ‘Miss’ to ‘Mrs.’?”

And in one click of the mouse, it was done. I walked away with a new, and really, really long last name. (Paredes has 7 letters, and my husband’s last name has 10… whew!)

I later relayed news of my name change to my mother, who seemed startled, as if she didn’t know it was coming. “Did you drop Paredes?”, she asked.

I told her that I originally meant to but back-stepped at the last minute. “I just couldn’t”, I told her. 

“Good choice”, she said. Then, a pause. “I wish I had had more time to think about it when I got married more than 30 years ago. In the Philippines, you automatically take on your husband’s name. But for you, it would be wrong to give up an identity you’ve had for 32 years.”

Ditto. 

And Ala Paredes B_ _ _  walked through the door of her apartment for the very first time.  

burps and farts: living together

A friend of mine expressed her anxiety over her boyfriend’s impending moving-in date into her small apartment. He’d already been living there unofficially, at least on weekends. But in a couple of weeks time, he would be moving all his stuff into her place without renewing his own lease. 

“I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep”, she told me. While he slept like a baby, she ruminated all night, thinking about the inevitable falling away of romance and mystery that comes when two people share a bed and bathroom together; the burps, the farts, the wrinkled garters on faded old underwear. 

I remember experiencing similar panic attacks in the lead-up to my own moving-in date with my then-boyfriend (currently my husband) about a year ago. We had been dating for nearly 3 years at that time, and had lived a stone’s throw away from each other from the very beginning of our relationship. The fact that we were neighbours actually played a pivotal role in our coming together. Prior to my moving into his neighbourhood, we were merely distant acquaintances. We ran into each other on the street on the day I moved in. In a neighbourly gesture, he lent me a can opened the next day when I realised I didn’t own one. Those sociologists who decreed that proximity and familiarity breed attraction were certainly right. We started dating before long. 

He lived a leisurely, 10-minute walk away, and we traversed that straight line between our apartments, going back and forth countless times. A few days at his place, a few days at mine… it was like living together, but with the option of having separate sanctuaries to retreat to when we felt like we needed time away. 

This was something I took for granted… until two weeks before the scheduled moving-in day when I had already packed all my kitchen stuff, and was deciding which set of sheets to bring with me. It dawned on me that I would never, ever have my own room ever again, not even my own bed… ever. 

Never again would I have the luxury of having my own solitary space that I could decorate in any way I pleased. From then on, every decision, from what colour to paint the wall to the pattern on the doona covers, was going to have to be a democratic one. 

And of course there was the glaring question: if I wanted to be alone in his tiny, shoe-box sized, one-bedroom apartment, where would I go??? There wasn’t going to be an escape. As a person who has always valued her privacy, the very thought of being trapped in a concrete box with someone, even the love of my life, was enough to make my heart race and my palms sweat.

Clearly, moving in was going to be very different from the long sleep-overs we had been having the past couple of years. In those final days before I moved in, I was cranky and stressed. I blamed it on my new job, while hiding the fact that I was very secretly freaking out, like a volcanic eruption deep under the ocean. The one mantra that gave me the courage to push through with the move was: “If it doesn’t work out, I can always move back out.”

I’d like to make it clear that at the time I moved in, I fully intended for my relationship to work out for the longterm, and I was already a fully committed life-partner. I just need that mantra to give me the courage I needed then, a reminder that should things fail miserably, there was always a get-out-jail card, a last resort escape hatch.  And FYI, I haven’t ever regretted my decision. 

My friend has every right to be fearful…. it’s been a year since I moved in and it’s true that some common laws of decency (particularly those that have to do with gaseous secretions) are already facing extinction. You learn the smell of your partner’s sweaty gym clothes, and dirty socks. You see each other in house clothes… not the ones you wear when you’re expecting people over. Out come the faded old underwear with wrinkly garters, the ones with the holes on them. The unwashed hair.  The toenail clippings. 

But when you have to share a concrete box with someone, you also learn intimacy. These less-than-alluring things are the bait that lures you down the path to a deeper experience of accepting another person. Your relationship becomes less about putting on a show, and more about making yourself vulnerable. 

You find that physical attraction has very little to do with how much time you spend putting make up on or what cologne they wear. Your partner can still think you are dead sexy even when you are wearing your ugliest old sweater and the leggings you would never leave the house in.

You begin to choose your battles. You learn when to give each other attention, and when to leave each other alone. You train yourself to speak in a gentle, neutral tone, especially when you are tempted not to. You learn to impersonally let your partner’s bad moods run its course, like one who watches a storm non-judgementally. 

You learn that when you sleep beside someone every night, you sometimes can’t feel where your body ends and theirs begins. You begin to take up only half the bed, even when they’re out of town on a work trip. You wake up in the middle of the night when there is a change in the rhythm of their breathing.  

You make their total well-being your business. You take on a personal interest in whether or not your partner sleeps well, eats well, and lives well. Not only will you learn highly classified information about each other’s bodily functions, you will make it your business to know. And eventually, you will mirror each other. 

The other day, my husband and I saw a same-sex couple walking down the street, two old men in their 70s, hair white as snow, who were essentially wearing the same thing. Both wore pull-overs with the collar sticking out, pressed slacks, and smart leather shoes. They both wore aviator sunglasses and wore the same bowler hat. Even with a head’s difference in height, they walked with the same brittle gait, as if some of their joints needed greasing. They had enough closeness between them to suggest a romantic partnership, and just enough distance to suggest that they had been together a very long time. My husband and I marvelled at them, at this couple who had essentially become the same person over the decades.

How do two people achieve this? When entrenched in the mundane, the familiar, and the downright repulsive, how do you not lose site of the other’s singular quality of being mysterious, unknowable, infinite?  I’m hoping that the mystery doesn’t ever disappear, that it only becomes deeper after the first burps have been belched and the cheese has been cut. 

Boredom so often follows contentment. Contentment (or at least its low-grade substitute, comfort) is not meant to be a fixture. It is like a sunbeam… never lingering, just passing through. We cannot hold it forever in our hands. 

Here I am once again, feeling that itch that comes after enjoying a prolonged period of having almost everything I need. 

A good, no, a great job that fulfills me and gives me a bit more than I need to live on? Check. 

Material comfort (with just a little bit of excess)? Check.

A good apartment, in a vibrant, trendy, eclectic neighborhood with plenty of good restaurants, and amazing coffee at every turn? 

A relatively peaceful life with no toxic relationships? Check, check, check. 

…

I think I’m ready for the unpredictable again. 

On Finding Happiness

I’ve struggled to put into words how happy my heart has been. Coming from a dark period that lasted a few years, I couldn’t conceive back then what being here would be like, this meadow of yellow flowers in spring. That is what my heart is like. 

 My dark period was a thicket in the forest. I was trapped in the dense overgrowth of my unfulfilled dreams, my regrets, my bitter resentments, all the should’ve-beens and could’ve-beens. I lingered in that sunless place because I felt life owed me those dreams, that it was my birthright, and if I stayed long enough, life would deliver the promised goods. Replacing my old dreams with new ones seemed traitorous. I stayed even though many exit pathways beckoned to me because I was afraid. 

But after one too many mornings of waking up and feeling like my own life was slowly asphyxiating me, I finally made a resolution to leave that dark thicket. I didn’t know what happiness looked like, or how to get there. All I knew was that it was a place that existed. Somewhere. I didn’t care how long it would take me to find it. I just knew that happiness wasn’t going to find me there. I would have to go and find it. 

 Was I afraid? Yes. The thicket, however grey and solitary, was a place of safety. If I ventured out of it, there was a possibility of ending up somewhere I didn’t like, or worse, being lost forever. But I knew that to stay would be the equivalent of early death. So I gathered up the scant amount of courage I had, and chose the path that looked most promising. 

Looking back, life really does change in small steps. I often felt like I was in the middle of nowhere, but every step got me further and further away, and closer to where I needed to go. Life changes subtly, going from shade to shade so unnoticeably that you can only see the change in hindsight. My courage increased with every step, and with that courage came joy. I was wide open and vulnerable. I was walking uncharted territory. I was fully alive and in the moment. One day I looked around me and realised I had arrived at my destination without knowing the precise moment when. 

 This is the story of how I decided to quit my job, slow down, start prioritising my relationships, and change my career. I’ve been a teacher for almost a year now, and I love it more than I ever thought I would. I took a risk and married a wonderful man who keeps me centred and fills my heat with warmth.

Did I ever dream that my life would be so full of love and appreciation? Did I ever think I could simply be loved, instead of resorting to all the wrong ways to win love and approval? Did I ever dare to dream that I was capable of doing great good for others, even though I am, and always will be flawed? 

These were not things I could conceive of before, due to my vanity and limited thinking. I used to desire recognition and wealth for its own sake. I strove to gain admiration from others, not appreciation. No wonder I felt like I was never enough. I had confused admiration with love. I had confused wealth with contentment. 

Who I actually am is better than who I thought I was supposed to be. The present moment is more luminous and real than any other life I once imagined for myself. 

I haven’t entirely abandoned my dreams, but I have a clearer purpose and a purer intention to guide me towards them. One must have something to strive for after all. 

But for now, it is glorious springtime in my heart.  

things i wish i had

To get myself writing again, I do a writing exercise every day using a topic assigned to me by Random Topic Generator:

I wish I had a house. An old barn fitted with skylights. Exposed beams painted white. A loft bedroom with a sloping roof and a wooden chest. 

A sunny room for me to paint and write. Some lovely trees and flowers to look at. 

A beautiful desk, and a patch of sunlight to sip some tea in. 

Warm socks and a nice melody to hum.