When you came in sight, I got that old feeling
The moment that you danced by, I felt a thrill
And when you caught my eye, my heart stood still.
Once again I seemed to feel that old yearning
And I knew the spark of love was still burning
There’ll be no new romance for me, it’s foolish to start
While that old feeling is still in my heart.
– An old love song from the ’50s
How are you?" her e-mail asked. "Generally fine," I said, "but sometimes I wonder how much longer I have to do this," meaning everything and nothing.
"I know," she said, "somehow ‘old feeling’ doesn’t mean the same thing anymore..." So insightful, this friend of mine. Immediately she saw it was an I’m-feeling-old-day. I tried to recall the lyrics of that song (above) then agreed with her in my heart. "Old feeling" just doesn’t mean what it used to.
The photograph in this column is seven years old. It commemorates one moment in time when the lights, make-up and pose came together brilliantly, like a flash of lightning across an emerald sky. I will stop using it when someone holds a gun to my head. I suspect this is the way I would have wanted to look. I can’t remember if I ever really looked like this.
My mother who lives in Vancouver asked over the phone, "How old are you now?" I could not remember. I had to find a calculator to compute my age – a year older than I think. All these age issues are up and dancing the can-can because this week was the birthday of my first child. She turned 39. This time next year I will have a 40-year-old daughter? How did this happen?
I tried to recall her birth. I went into labor sometime between midnight and 5 a.m. I just kept going to the bathroom, didn’t know what was happening, noticed after a while that my stomach got hard at what seemed like regular intervals. Maybe those were contractions. So I timed them. By 7 a.m., they came every 10 minutes. We were told to go to the Manila Doctors Hospital. I remember a moment going up the stairs when I glanced at my husband and thought, How handsome he is. I had forgotten for so long. Now it hits me like a photograph from a forgotten album.
1 p.m. My contractions were still 10 minutes apart! I couldn’t get out of the labor room, where I shouldn’t have gone yet in the first place, but I didn’t know any better. I finally gave birth at 10:45 p.m. Everyone in the labor room with me gave birth ahead of me. It was very painful, but in the end I was asleep. I remember waking up in a ward later. My young husband was upset that the hospital had no private room yet but they would move me to one as soon as they could. We had a baby girl, he said. She was in the nursery. Later they would bring her, but first I must sleep. There was so much tenderness in him that night. How strange that I remember it now.
I think there is no moment more beautiful in a marriage than when the first child is born and it is perfect. Bringing life into the world is such a god-like act, awesome and humbling in its grace. We felt part of a miracle. I remember it as a perfect moment – young handsome husband, very young beautiful wife, a perfect beautiful baby. It was the photo opp to beat all photo opps, our one moment of glory before reality came to chip away at our dreams.
My daughters were so much smarter, so much better at giving birth. In their time there were books, classes, videos. They trained for their births. They were authorities long before their babies were born. I didn’t know mucus plugs from water bags. They flinched when I told them I smoked and drank during all pregnancies, danced the boogie too. Then finally I was anaesthetized and they were pulled out with high forceps. Talking natural delivery and home births just put me in a state of panic. Knowing this my daughters keep me out of their delivery plans. I get useful when the baby is out. I am fantastic with infants. I know how to burp and bathe and change them. I love dancing them to sleep. All babies bring me back to that magical moment when I discovered a special gift: I could bake perfect babies.
Now my eldest is 39. I am much older. There are days when I feel age in every bone of my body, the body that’s stuck on the computer chair editing, writing, earning a living still. I am grateful that the mind is agile even if heavy with content, even if sometimes I fear it will burst with impatience when someone brings me a problem. See, there isn’t a problem I haven’t seen, not one I cannot solve but if I solve other people’s problems, I deprive them of the necessary process and they don’t learn. So I restrain myself and I feel like bursting.
The heart hurts too remembering the pain and empathizing but one must feel the pain or there is no learning. Live and let live. Learn and let learn. Those are old feelings.
So, how are we, old friends? Today we put a new spin on an old song. Romance? Sorry, it’s Kinotakara night. Have to patch up my old feelings. Maybe tomorrow I’ll feel brand new, particularly fine, and that will mean everything and nothing again.