Like her, unlike her
April 27, 2002 | 12:00am
Are you really retired?" friends ask in incredulous tones, implying that a woman like me never retires, or maybe that I’m too young to retire, or maybe expressing my own point of view that one should never retire, one should just move on to different things. When I explain that they say, "So then what do you really do?" Many things.
One of those things is ponder my family, the sweep of generations. I sit quietly alone in my room, exactly like my grandmother used to do. I stare into space exactly like she did. I think of the women in my family, colorful, unique and textured like pearls strung together by fate and blood, each one glowing and floating differently from the next but each one a vital part of the necklace. Thus I grow in acceptance, appreciation and love for myself and these women whose lives serve as benchmarks for their descendants. We measure against them. I am like her in these aspects, unlike her in others.
At a recent Rizal family get-together, my aunt offered, "I brought wine." Though we are from different generations and our fathers not related, we both inherited a taste for distilled spirits from the other side of our families. So, when the occasion arises, we drink and together stonewall the disapproving gazes of our relatives, usually our children. "Do you know where Lola Biang (Maria Rizal) is buried?" I asked her.
"Yes, with my mother," she said. "Do you know that she was ‘the unschooled one’? She didn’t like to study." I had to smile. I thought about how many in my generation dropped out of college. It was our thing. I got my master’s degree on the eve of retirement, prompting my first cousin to remark, "You’re like my mom (my mother’s sister) who got her law degree past 60." So, it’s not just grandmom and mom that we compare with, we need to think of aunts too. The aunt-niece relationship is a special gift. My aunt in Canada just decided to blow her prepaid phonecard talking to me. I felt: She loves me!
But our most famous relative is Maria Rizal, Lola Biang. She was the first single parent we knew about in our family. Maybe there are others but her descendants are the most outspoken. Our great-grandmother left her financially irresponsible charming husband to become a successful entrepreneur who provided for her own children, a theme that repeats down the generations. Trying to count her female descendants who did and are still doing the same thing, down to great-great-grandchildren, one runs out of fingers and toes. We, women descended from Maria Rizal, are strong-willed, strong-minded survivors of domestic battles. Many of us are very successful, many not formally educated. All of us are very proud of our heritage even in the face of strong criticism.
Lola Biang must have been quite a controversial figure. To this day there are many claimants to kinship with her. Some go to the National Historical Commission. Others just make the claim in society. The descendants of her estranged husband claim relationship to Rizal through her but her direct descendants, who know in their personal histories what a woman goes through when her ex-husband does not support his children, deny them that connection: No, you are related to her husband, not to her. You are not Rizal. You don’t have her blood, her DNA. We are adamant about that, genetically protecting the ground our great-grandmother worked so hard to gain. We are born with this territoriality in the pits of our stomachs. We will probably die with it but not before we pass it on to our progeny who will protect it the same way.
My mother, who describes herself as Daddy’s (Maria Rizal’s son) Girl, is an extrovert where her mother was an introvert. I am a functional extrovert – when I work – but an introvert when I play, just like my grandmother who raised me while my mother was working and extroverting. More and more I find myself walking like my grandmother, who was tall and patrician, who in her later years developed a slight stoop as she shuffled around the house. Sometimes I hear myself sounding like my mother and I ask myself, "Who was that?" It was not I. It was my mother in me. They have a name for that in psychology: parental introject, the father or mother I have created in my head, who lives in me and censors me, who may or may not accurately reflect the views and feelings of my real father or mother, who may have little to do with reality.
We have these ambiguities, these love/hates, these confusions. They are natural. I love my mother. I hate that I sometimes sound like her because it’s like I have no identity. If I am me and not my mother, why do I sound like her? My mother loves me but hates that I am sometimes so obviously like her mother. Maybe she thinks, if she is my daughter, then why is she more like my mother than like me?
My daughters have strong points of view about their parts that are like me. They naturally and rightfully wish to be unlike me. To help them I recommended therapy. It was the most courageous act of parenting I every undertook. In the therapeutic process they first blame their parents, more accurately their parental introjects, for everything that went wrong with them then ever so slowly come to terms with that. I feel it, waves of affection and hostility, tides of love and hate ebbing and flowing, down the generations, long before ours, long after we’re gone. It is the way of all flesh, of all families.
So I nourish my remaining maternal instincts by taking care of carp. I go out on the bridge over my pond and call out, "Babies, breakfast." They swim up close to my feet. I don’t know if it’s my voice or the sound of bread dropping on water. I talk to them as my maid watches, amused. "One of these days they’ll answer me and I’ll lose my mind," I tell her.
Last Sunday one of my daughters visited and noted that I was wearing a carp-colored outfit. "You really are their mommy," she said. Ooops! Are they like or unlike me? I wonder how my great-grandmother would feel about having carp for great-great-grandchildren. I think she would approve. I think she more than anyone knows the empty space they fill.
Thank you for your overwhleming response to last week’s column. Please continue sending your comments to lilypad@skyinet.net
One of those things is ponder my family, the sweep of generations. I sit quietly alone in my room, exactly like my grandmother used to do. I stare into space exactly like she did. I think of the women in my family, colorful, unique and textured like pearls strung together by fate and blood, each one glowing and floating differently from the next but each one a vital part of the necklace. Thus I grow in acceptance, appreciation and love for myself and these women whose lives serve as benchmarks for their descendants. We measure against them. I am like her in these aspects, unlike her in others.
At a recent Rizal family get-together, my aunt offered, "I brought wine." Though we are from different generations and our fathers not related, we both inherited a taste for distilled spirits from the other side of our families. So, when the occasion arises, we drink and together stonewall the disapproving gazes of our relatives, usually our children. "Do you know where Lola Biang (Maria Rizal) is buried?" I asked her.
"Yes, with my mother," she said. "Do you know that she was ‘the unschooled one’? She didn’t like to study." I had to smile. I thought about how many in my generation dropped out of college. It was our thing. I got my master’s degree on the eve of retirement, prompting my first cousin to remark, "You’re like my mom (my mother’s sister) who got her law degree past 60." So, it’s not just grandmom and mom that we compare with, we need to think of aunts too. The aunt-niece relationship is a special gift. My aunt in Canada just decided to blow her prepaid phonecard talking to me. I felt: She loves me!
But our most famous relative is Maria Rizal, Lola Biang. She was the first single parent we knew about in our family. Maybe there are others but her descendants are the most outspoken. Our great-grandmother left her financially irresponsible charming husband to become a successful entrepreneur who provided for her own children, a theme that repeats down the generations. Trying to count her female descendants who did and are still doing the same thing, down to great-great-grandchildren, one runs out of fingers and toes. We, women descended from Maria Rizal, are strong-willed, strong-minded survivors of domestic battles. Many of us are very successful, many not formally educated. All of us are very proud of our heritage even in the face of strong criticism.
Lola Biang must have been quite a controversial figure. To this day there are many claimants to kinship with her. Some go to the National Historical Commission. Others just make the claim in society. The descendants of her estranged husband claim relationship to Rizal through her but her direct descendants, who know in their personal histories what a woman goes through when her ex-husband does not support his children, deny them that connection: No, you are related to her husband, not to her. You are not Rizal. You don’t have her blood, her DNA. We are adamant about that, genetically protecting the ground our great-grandmother worked so hard to gain. We are born with this territoriality in the pits of our stomachs. We will probably die with it but not before we pass it on to our progeny who will protect it the same way.
My mother, who describes herself as Daddy’s (Maria Rizal’s son) Girl, is an extrovert where her mother was an introvert. I am a functional extrovert – when I work – but an introvert when I play, just like my grandmother who raised me while my mother was working and extroverting. More and more I find myself walking like my grandmother, who was tall and patrician, who in her later years developed a slight stoop as she shuffled around the house. Sometimes I hear myself sounding like my mother and I ask myself, "Who was that?" It was not I. It was my mother in me. They have a name for that in psychology: parental introject, the father or mother I have created in my head, who lives in me and censors me, who may or may not accurately reflect the views and feelings of my real father or mother, who may have little to do with reality.
We have these ambiguities, these love/hates, these confusions. They are natural. I love my mother. I hate that I sometimes sound like her because it’s like I have no identity. If I am me and not my mother, why do I sound like her? My mother loves me but hates that I am sometimes so obviously like her mother. Maybe she thinks, if she is my daughter, then why is she more like my mother than like me?
My daughters have strong points of view about their parts that are like me. They naturally and rightfully wish to be unlike me. To help them I recommended therapy. It was the most courageous act of parenting I every undertook. In the therapeutic process they first blame their parents, more accurately their parental introjects, for everything that went wrong with them then ever so slowly come to terms with that. I feel it, waves of affection and hostility, tides of love and hate ebbing and flowing, down the generations, long before ours, long after we’re gone. It is the way of all flesh, of all families.
So I nourish my remaining maternal instincts by taking care of carp. I go out on the bridge over my pond and call out, "Babies, breakfast." They swim up close to my feet. I don’t know if it’s my voice or the sound of bread dropping on water. I talk to them as my maid watches, amused. "One of these days they’ll answer me and I’ll lose my mind," I tell her.
Last Sunday one of my daughters visited and noted that I was wearing a carp-colored outfit. "You really are their mommy," she said. Ooops! Are they like or unlike me? I wonder how my great-grandmother would feel about having carp for great-great-grandchildren. I think she would approve. I think she more than anyone knows the empty space they fill.
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