Happily alone

Today is my 71st birthday. Yes, yes, thank you for your greetings but let’s face it  — I am old. I can tell when I’m getting up from a chair, or getting out of the car, something in the way my muscles protest that verifies I am growing old. How do I preoccupy myself these days? I try to clear my trunks of thread and knit. I am a good knitter and am very happy doing that.

Every morning I write in my journal and sometimes there are things revealed to me. This morning I realized that I was growing old like my grandmother and her younger sister. They both hated going to parties. I am the same. When I must go I enter alone, grab a glass of wine, say hello to the people I know, then disappear. I am home before anyone misses me. I love going out with my close friends for lunch and occasional shopping but I dislike big parties, big crowds.  Just like my grandmothers, who were my surrogate mothers, as my mother was working in offices fulltime while I was growing up.

But I knew my grandmothers when they were old by the standards then. They were in their 50s when I was born but I loved being with them. Lola Ching, my maternal grandmother, loved to sew on her sewing machine. Her younger sister, Lola Dede, my other favorite grandmother, loved to cross-stitch. She subscribed to La Familia, the Spanish magazine of the 1950s and picked up her patterns from there. Then she cross-stitched them on her linen dresses.

So you see as I grew up I saw women who enjoyed their crafts and no men to keep them busy. My grandfather died during World War II and my granduncle, or my Daddy Toot, Lola Dede’s husband, died when I was 15.

I caught a glimpse of domesticity from my Lola Dede and my Daddy Toot. At age 50 they lived in separate rooms. When they had fights they would shout at each other and not talk to each other for days. Lola Dede was a dutiful wife who kept the house in good order, cooked wonderful food, gardened, had her dogs instead of children, and cross-stitched. Daddy Toot was the typical Filipino husband who had a social life outside of the home, which rarely involved Lola Dede. Were they happy in their later years? I often asked myself. I don’t think so.

When Lola Dede was slowly dying she pulled me to her bedside and said, “You have had enough men. You have your children to raise. You have a job that earns you enough money. Forget about the men. Just concentrate on your life.”  She did not look at me while saying this, meaning it probably embarrassed her, but it was the wisest advice I every received in my life. I was very grateful.

Now I realize that the difference between my grandmothers and me is that I am more honest and in a sense more talkative. Sometimes they would be talking but when I entered the room they would stop. Lola Ching would never say anything though I would see her staring into space frequently. I am certain now she was replaying her life and the pains she suffered, maybe wanting to tell some things to some people but not to her granddaughter. Let her make her mistakes and learn from them, she must have thought.

Yes, I learned from my mistakes. One of the wise guys who didn’t like my column last week called me an old maid. I laughed out loud. If all old maids had a life as full of adventure as mine was, there would be so many more happy women in the world.

I am grateful that times have changed, that women are more free now, that now they work and earn their own money and believe less in sticking to their marriage like my grandmothers did. They stuck because they needed the material support and were willing to turn a blind eye to all the common transgressions — infidelity, financial debts, lack of consideration, taking for granted, none of which I find tolerable.  I just wish that when I was old enough to make friends with my grandmothers they had been more honest with me about what marriage finally was to them — an arrangement where you agreed (because initially you were blinded by romance and the promised eternity of it) to end up as his housekeeper, who keeps the house in good order, raises the children, celebrates all the occasions with a happy smile and pretends not to know of his mistresses.

So now I’m 71, old yes, getting older by the day, but proud that I never could do that for a long time. So I am growing old alone but believe it or not I’m very happy because of it.

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