Years from now, the life of a woman need not be so constrained. My daughter will have more chances in life than her grandmother, or mother, or aunts, ever had.

by Danilova Molintas

	Andromeda [painting by Kitty Tanaguchi]

DONATELA is a lyrical Italian name, and when I reach past the pain and bitterness of my childhood, I can see how perfectly it fits my beautiful mother. For many women, beauty begins fading quickly almost as soon as the first flush of youth ends. But my mother, who just turned 70 this year, has been lucky, because there are still more than traces of the physical radiance and attractiveness she once possessed, most of her well-chiseled features on a Castilaloy face defying time and a past filled with heartaches.

None of us among her six daughters inherited her looks. As children, we used to resent her beauty, not in envy, but because, as her beauty did begin show signs of wear, she became bitter and cruel and distant-as if her beauty was the final thing she had to give up for us her eight children (I have two brothers), in exchange for which she got a roller-coaster relationship with an abusive, alcoholic husband and friendlessness in the backwaters of Benguet province.

It was a life that was not fully of her choice. And it is a life I sometimes reflect on as I bring up my young daughter, as I try to see what kind of future awaits her, as I try to look for lessons that she can use once she starts making her own way into the world.

My mother would often tell us, as we watched news on channel 9 in the 70s, how the newscaster Harry Gasser had been one of her suitors, how there were many other swains vying for her attention, and how ill-fated she was to have married my father. Yet on other nights she would tell us of how she actually planned to enter the convent (the Pink Sisters) but then my father had run after her and tore up her papers, and forced her to marry him. In this, and in many other ways, my mother was a walking contradiction, on one hand hating the life she had, but on the other enticed and flattered by my father's passionate jealousy, which was a sure sign of his madness and clearly the very thing that imprisoned her in the life she so despised. Perhaps it was this lack of clarity, more than anything else, that in the end doomed her.

But I suppose any other Filipina raised in a saradong Katoliko family in the 40s and 50s, and then confronted with such sudden and horrifying twists of fate, would have been, at the very least, befuddled.

Twenty or so years after, when I almost took the same path as my mother (as some of my sisters eventually did), and found myself in an abusive relationship, I realized how confused one turns out to be when repeatedly abused. Like a rope thrown to someone falling off a cliff, someone had lent me a book, The Community Secret, which chronicled the lives of women who were able to escape abusive relationships — and detailed the confusion and lethargy that they had to work through to survive and escape. That book brought me clarity and led me toward the path to safety.

Surely, domestic violence still exists, but at least today, there are places where one can go for help. And while there is so much yet to do to fully end domestic abuse and all other forms of violence against women, today these issues are recognized. In my mother's time, it was taboo to even speak of them; women who insisted on doing so were not only ignored, but also soon became subjected to public humiliation and even further victimization.

Secrecy was the order of the day, but keeping quiet about the abuse was a separate, excruciating torture all on its own — and those who did were eventually consumed by its toxicity. As time passed and my mother was forced by family and society to keep her situation a secret, she eventually weakened and turned her anger and bitterness against us.

Today six years after I made the final journey away from the town of my daughter's father, where I was told by his family that while they were aware of his abuse, they still believed it was my gasat — the Igorot term for fate — to live with it, I still cannot fully grasp how horrible and how spirit-shattering it must have been for my mother to make that same journey, again and again, back to her parents, with more and more kids in tow each time, only to be told repeatedly to turn back and return to her marriage, because this was sacred and which no man could rend asunder.

As time passed, my mother stopped even trying to escape. Married at 21, she had 14 pregnancies, among them three miscarriages and two that resulted in infants who died shortly after childbirth, and in another child who died of convulsions as a baby. All these happened almost in succession as she approached her 40s and until her overworked uterus could no longer carry any babies. Throughout it all, there were also my father's alcoholism and the grinding poverty brought about by his inability to keep a job or rise through the ranks, despite his great intelligence, plus the bitterness of my politically famous and celebrated grandparents, who refused to make amends with their only son who had chosen to marry outside of the tribe.

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