Waray is what my wife is, and therefore half of what my three daughters are. That fact has become not just a numerical equation but an emotional situation that effectively negates any perceived advantages I may have come to expect, as a pure Cebuano father living in Cebu.
Actually, I realized only now, after Sir Johnny Mercado reminded me in his own column in another paper, that this business of being married has a way of becoming so matter-of-fact when you have been married 20 years, that you sort of get jolted whenever you get reminded.
Sir Johnny enumerated last Sunday a healthy dose of situations in marriage that, viewed with detachment, may seem funny and humorous until they leap out at you as something that you yourself experienced.
Sir Johnny apparently felt the urge to write about marriage because it is June, good-naturedly giving way to the popular notion that it is the month for weddings even if the figures say otherwise, the most number of marriages worldwide being said to occur in January.
My own marriage happened on an April morning in Tacloban City, an event many people will remember because it was sort of a communal thing, it having been made possible in large part by the participation and contribution of friends, relations and officemates. But the real story here is that I actually almost did not get married to my wife. I nearly backed out. And who wouldn't, given the circumstances? You know what the woman I was to marry told me shortly before the wedding? "When we get married 'waray na iyot-iyot.'"
Jesus Christ! I was up on queer street. There I was in 1985, already 31, by the standards of my Baby Boomer generation already almost way past prime, being told by the 20-year-old virgin ( he he he ) I was so eager to marry, that when we got married "waray na iyot-iyot."
Look guys, I am a Cebuano. You know what that means. Why, the thing she does not want to do when we get married is the very life of mankind itself. People go to war for it, for God's sake. I never realized marriage was such sorrow and punishment even before the wedding.
Yet, to my surprise, the darn woman seemed genuinely confounded by my incredulity. She could not understand why her proposition, which appeared to be perfectly logical to her, would be taken as an act of belligerence by me. It was getting so confusing.
So we rewound to where we were before that explosive declaration. We were discussing the rather innocuous topic of cooking, prompted by my confession to having a weak stomach and which made me picky with my food. As the baby in the family, she never learned to cook.
But being feisty, like most Waray women are, she promised to be the good wife and learn to cook, on condition that I will just have to bear her cooking during the first days, or weeks, or even months. In her own words --- when we got married "waray na iyot-iyot."
Ahhh. So that was it. The angst subsided. We finally got to what she really meant. As it turned out, "waray na iyot-iyot" in Waray actually means "wala nay arte-arte" in Cebuano. What tweedled my twat in Cebuano was actually rather tame in Waray. Whew, what a relief.
To me, that was the defining moment of my 20-year-marriage. It has occurred to me that if I can hurdle such a potentially mentally destructive if not life-threatening situation, then I can take on whatever crisis that life may litter my path later.
And so it was that marriage has become rather tame for me. To be sure I have faced many great challenges. But nothing compares to the crisis faced by a man who just got told by his wife-to-be that after they get married "waray na iyot-iyot."