I have officially entered a stage in my life where my relatives are now asking when I'll marry.
I'll be honest. I like the drama of being asked, I am given a reason to stir up stories or to use that opportunity to be closer to an older relative who is clearly from a different generation. However, I also feel a little disappointed at the display of their weakness.
Them urging me to marry is, mostly if not entirely, a reflection of their need to keep marriage valuable. Marriage, not long ago, defined the worth of a woman. And if women of my generation no longer uphold the value of marriage by running after it like some party piñata with prizes, then that could harm the ego and the very identity that the older generation of women treasured in their days. Deep down, I know most of the women in my family wouldn't choose to become mothers if they had the choice, which includes my own mother. (They obviously had a choice but the society was very harsh back then, and it still is, and one has to have a thick skin and an insurmountable amount of self-worth to not be destroyed by it.)
I don't like how they are too weak to find pride in their children, our generation of women, because their sacrifices of staying in abusive marriages where their husbands cheat on them and use them as doormats have finally paid off.
Best example, my maternal grandmother was full of potential, beauty and youth. She was well off, too. She was the daughter of a man who owned vast lands in Leyte and Cebu, enough to sustain countless generations.
All of these she had thrown away for my grandfather. Yet, he still had the audacity to cheat on her when she grew old and frail.
He had her when she was 19 and he was 27, he sucked the life off of her that she died at the young age of 50s. She wanted to become a nurse but every time she went back to school, my grandfather impregnated her. She wanted to give her children financial stability but my grandfather with his fragile masculinity challenged by a smarter and richer wife constantly cornered my grandmother to a stale mate. I truly believe that if she were the male in the relationship, she could have reached greater heights than what her husband had achieved. If my grandfather became a BIR asst. commissioner, I know she could have been a respectable medical practitioner whose legacy will reach her children. Unlike my grandfather whose legacy only stayed with him.
My grandfather isn't a villain, he was human. But all the credit of being called a family man should be given to our grandmother and not to him. His weakness conquered him, which ate him away and all the people who love him. When he passed away, most of us approached his casket with dry eyes and a smile. My grandmother has been dead for a long time but her name still makes people cry.
In my humble opinion, some of my cousins should stop sugar coating and should stop making an aesthetic out of our very emotionally, physically, and financially abusive patriarch. There is no shame in admitting that we are descendants of a weak and wounded human being who lashed out to those who loved him instead of healing his war trauma, what's shameful is painting him a label he was obviously not. He was not a family man. Our grandmother, Rolinda, was a family man. Not Themistocles, but Rolinda.
Don't get me wrong though, I want to become a matriarch, truly.
But I want to become a mother when I have the mental headspace, the emotional strength, the physical capability, and the financial stability while being married or in partnership with a secure grown up adult who will see me as his equal.
I'd rather bear no children and die without any legacy to pass on, than have children and have them inherit the very curses I worked hard to break.
I'd rather die alone and be found with my carcass partially eaten by my cats, than be stuck in a marriage where my partner doesn't treat me like a human being.
Marrying and having children is a blessing, but so is living a life without the need to hurt innocent souls and let them carry the baggage I fail and the ancestors before me have failed to cure.
