The happily-married Michelle has her handsome husband’s blessings to return to her first love, acting. Like most enlightened spouses, he knows Michelle can combine career and motherhood (to their eight-month-old son Dustin) in a snap.
"She’s the type who can work outside the home and retain her femininity," a proud Christoph, seated beside the sleeping Dustin, said in an interview at Peninsula Hotel, where the couple is staying before flying back to Munich.
That’s what attracted him to Michelle in the first place. The reason he’d call her in Manila, all the way from France while on a business trip. Other women, he observed, would forgo their femininity in pursuit of a career.
But not Michelle, states Christoph. Like a typical Filipina, she will find fulfillment outside the home while not neglecting her role as wife and mother.
Christoph and Dustin are living proofs of Michelle’s tender loving care. Christoph, a high-ranking officer of a telecommunications firm in Germany (with a Manila-based office), looks hale and happy, thanks to Michelle’s sinigang (mixed with kakanggata), and sumptuous servings of Italian, Chinese, German and of course, Filipino food.
Dustin, born prematurely at five-and-a-half months on Dec. 29 (that’s why the staff at the hospital where he was born called him their "New Year Angel"), doesn’t look like he weighed a pitiful 1.2 pounds at birth.
Sitting on Michelle’s lap, he’d gorge on a banana (his favorite fruit, thanks to his mom), and satisfied, nod and close his eyes in blissful slumber. Michelle and Christoph’s made-in-Germany baby is like any typical infant with foreign blood – big, light-skinned, fair-haired, with Michelle’s black eyes smiling back at you.
Because he was born special (he spent five months in an incubator), little Dustin has strengthened his parents’ union more than he’ll ever know.
"We derived strength from each other," Michelle recalled those agonizing five months in the hospital. "I was at the chapel everyday (she and Christoph are Catholics). The doctors didn’t give him much of a chance to live."
But the miracle of faith and love worked wonders. Dustin grew big and strong until he was fit to go home, thanks to his parents’ vigilance and love.
"He’d perk up whenever we cracked jokes at the ICU (intensive care unit), where the mood is uniformly glum and serious. He brightened up the place. That’s why the nurses were holding on to him for as long as they can," reported Michelle.
After their five-month agony together – with relatives far away from them – Michelle and Christoph feel nothing can threaten their rock-solid union. No, not even if Christoph is away on a business trip "two-thirds of the year."
The loving husband doesn’t want his wife to get bored while minding Dustin all by her lonesome at home. So he has allowed her to submit her portfolio to a talent manager in Germany, and is open to Michelle resuming her showbiz career (well, sort of), by guesting in TV shows while they’re both in Manila (his office has tie-ups here, remember?).
Michelle can ask her Bulacan-based parents’ help to take care of Dustin while she’s out taping. But always, always, her priority is her family, which she and Christoph hope will be blessed some more with the addition of another baby – hopefully a girl, when Dustin is a bit bigger.
Michelle is the last to imagine she’ll marry a German and start a family in Germany.
As she said, "My dreams are typically Filipino." Translation: she thought her destiny lay in the Philippines, nowhere else.
Still, what she got is almost the real McCoy. Christoph’s large family is very Filipino: as close-knit as can be.
Christoph himself reminds Michelle of the perfect Filipino gentleman: ever-patient (they didn’t start dating until a year after they first met at a mutual friend’s party) and family-oriented.
In fact, what clinched it for Michelle was when Christoph introduced her to his parents in Germany. Right then and there, Michelle decided she had finally met Mr. Right.
Looking at their smiling faces across the table, one can’t help but say that yes, she couldn’t have been more right!