Red toenails

A small beauty parlor opened in my new neighborhood. I decided to have a manicure and pedicure, something I had not done since I fired my manicurist earlier this year.  She began as my masseuse and manicurist. Then she graduated to a cleaning lady, masseuse and manicurist, until she felt she had every right to tell me what to do with my home. Plus, she broke a lot of things I liked. So I finally threw her out. That was five or six months ago. Since then only I have cut my finger and toenails. So on a whim I went next door and had my toenails painted red, another thing I have not done in ages.

They brought me a stack of new magazines to read, all local versions of foreign brands. I picked up one and decided to scan it. I breathed in sharply. This magazine was pretty risqué, I thought. It talked about how many men a woman in her 20s should have, how she should enjoy her nights out. It surprised me that we should have such topics in our local magazines. Are our young people now so free?

Then I thought back to when I first read this magazine. I was also in my 20s, married with three little daughters. I was dumb enough to have gotten married at 18 to a husband who was a decade older than me and I was feeling restless, taken for granted, unloved, unimportant, ignored. One day, while shopping, this American magazine caught my eye and I bought it.

This was in the ‘60s and the magazine spoke of my problems, wrote about wives in America who one day just walked out of their back doors and never returned. They then became hippies, lived in communes, whatever they did, they did not stay married and over the short term did not marry again.  It described marriage as a trap or a cage, something women could not escape from easily.  What they did not say was that husbands never wanted to listen to their wive’s problems or only pretended to then went back to their old habits.

That realization made me see I had no reason to be shocked. This magazine was directed to women in their 20s and 30s. The main issue during my time was the trap marriage had created for many women. The issue of today is sexuality.  Your body produces tons of hormones to push you into creating babies while you’re young. Our disadvantage in the Philippines is nobody tells us that, at least not in my day. Today I am telling you. In your 20s and 30s, your issue is procreation, which means heightened sexuality.

For women mid-life crises occur when you’re in your middle 30s. That’s when many of us make messes of our lives without understanding why. For men, mid-life crisis happens it their 40s. Women do it ahead of them. Nobody told us that either. So now I’m telling you. In your middle 30s you will be tempted to throw everything away and reinvent yourself. But first you have to fall flat on your face.  You think that’s funny? I think it’s very funny now, as I look at my mid-life crisis in hindsight. Then it wasn’t funny at all. Then it was a salad of pain and pleasure.

When I was in my mid-30s my daughters were teens and giving me all sorts of problems. A cousin, whose advice I sought, said, “Why don’t you tell them to follow our example? First we got married then we could do anything.”  A statement that had us both breaking up with laughter.  But life I have found is always like that, always so full of irony broken up by lots of laughter.

In your 40s you get more sane and start seriously rebuilding yourself and your life becomes more or less what you want it to be but never again as intense and as scattered — yes, simultaneously — as it was in your 20s and 30s. You are smarter now. You recognize your options and you make better choices. Your career, if you have one, takes the front seat and drives your life.  So you build steadily, little by little, day by day.

Until finally you get old, stray into a beauty parlor, pick up a magazine and realize (not without a bit of envy) that women have changed, are more liberated now and you remember that you had something to do with the breaking of the old rules.  You broke them yourself. You write about having broken the rules and survived.

My eyes stray down to my newly-painted red toenails. Another very sharp breath! Omigod, those are my mother’s feet! No really, especially my right foot looks exactly like my mother’s foot. For the longest time she wore red nail polish on her toes. Does this mean I am walking in my mother’s footsteps?

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