If you have watched the animated movie Ratatouille, you would know what I mean when I say that critics and having critics are not all that bad.  For one, critics provide perspective: a way of looking at things.  So with this blog, I would like to thank my critics wholeheartedly (that is, without bitterness and sarcasm) because your criticism, though biting, provide a good perspective.

The first ever critic I had was stern.  She was exacting and she was blunt.  When I come home from a date with my boyfriend and share with her my insights into his personality and character that affirm my love for him, my stern critic would say, “Lanly ka na lang ng Lanly, Lanly ka na lang ng Lanly, wala na bang ibang magaling na lalaki sa mundong ito kundi si Lanly?”  I was so taken aback by that outburst.  I was tempted to say to my stern critic, “Meron, kaso, pinakasalan mo na siya.  So ito ang magaling na lalaki sa mundo ko.  Okey?”  But I just shut up which was what she probably wanted me to do, anyway.

My second ever critic was harsh, not because his criticism was a personal attack, but because his criticism was motivated by his need to know: Why do you talk about him that way?  My harsh critic would ask me.  By extolling the character of the man you married, are you trying to convince yourself that you made the right choice? Ooooh, that hurt.  But again, my harsh critic may have hit a nerve but his perspective was worth the injury: it made me think.

My third critic is insightful.  She would say, when I get a call from my husband, and she is within earshot, “Is that your husband?  Why do you talk to him that way?”  This usually makes me stop and ask “What way?”  I seem, according to my insightful critic, to not be talking to my husband but to my boyfriend.  Why?  I wanted to know, how is a wife supposed to speak to her husband on the phone?  I don’t know, says my insightful critic, I just think that after 18 years of marriage, you wouldn’t seem so much like a high school girl suddenly called by her crush.

I have generated quite a stir with my last few blogs which have, in part, been about my husband and my married life.  I have read my blogs to my husband and even he said, “Why do you say these things?”  I looked him straight in the eye and asked him, are you offended?  Have I violated your privacy?  No, he said, I want to know why you say these things about me. Are they untrue?  I ask him.  He said no but he also wants to know why I write about him.

So the question asked itself: why do I say these things? Why do I write a blog and talk about my love life? Am I flaunting it? Am I bragging?  Or am I trying to convince myself?

1. The first rule in writing is: write what you know.  My love life and my marriage are things I know, which is why I write about it.
2. I write about it to leave a record of my life.  History is not just the story of extraordinary heroes it is the story of ordinary people, too.  What I write in my blog, especially when I recall events that happen in the past provide readers with insight into my past.  They see how people my age think and feel.  People in the future will read it and know what things were important to me when I wrote it.
3. In writing, I am forced to examine my life and make sense of it.  The unexamined life is not a life worth living, after all.
4. I write so that my children will know who their father was, who he is and how I saw him.   I want them to be able to tell their own children something when they are asked about their parents.  I know so many people who, long after their parents have passed away, meet friends or contemporaries of their parents and tell them stories about their parents that assault them with a perspective on who their parents were.  They come away shaking their heads reproaching themselves for not knowing who their parents were.
5. I write for my students who may or may not have good examples of what a good man is or a good woman ought to be.  They may have been orphaned at a young age; their parents may be too busy earning a living abroad; their parents may be absent from their lives while still present in this world; or their parents are just inattentive to their duty of modelling for their children the behaviour that would make them a good man or woman.
6. I write about love within marriage and conjugal love because I believe in conjugal love.  At a time when society disdains marriage, I think I should stand up for marriage.  It may be old fashioned to be married but marriage works for some.  Marriage works for me.

A more personal reason, my dear critics, why I write about my husband, my love life and my married life is I want to celebrate it.  I cannot make a movie about my husband’s life.  I may not be able to nominate him for Government Employee of the Year. But when I write about him, I celebrate his life and what his life means to me.

I rather feel like the woman who lost a gold coin.  She searched her whole house, she upended all the furniture and cleaned every nook and cranny until she found her lost coin. When she found it, she celebrated.  She told everyone who would listen how she had lost a coin and found it. It once was lost and now it’s found.

Lest you be unaware of the significance of this story, the woman’s coin here is a gold coin that is worn as a bracelet or as a headpiece by women in Israel.  These are usually wedding coins made into jewelry that the woman wears to announce her status as a married woman.  It is her husband’s wealth and she proudly wears it.  To lose one coin is to diminish her husband’s social status.  This is why her desperation in finding the coin is understandable and her joy and celebration in finding it, equally unsurprising. This is the same joy God has when a sinner repents: a sinner was once lost but the grace of God has found him.

Just in case you have not been following my blogs, my husband had an accident in 2007 (he slipped and fell in the house).  He suffered no fracture in his left foot this time but the tissue damage was serious.  It was serious enough to render him unable to go to the office for months.  This should not be surprising: my husband has polio in both his legs and slipping and falling are an occupational hazard.

What was scary about his accident was that his immobility for the few months caused his blood sugar and blood cholesterol to rise which triggered a heart crisis.  In 2008, he was a candidate for a triple heart by-pass surgery.  The only problem was, in order for him to have heart by-pass surgery, blood vessels from his legs would be harvested and this simply is not viable since his legs are weak  and atrophied from polio.  The prognosis was not good in 2008.  I thought I was going to lose him.

His heart condition is partly hereditary.  His father had three heart attacks and succumbed on his fourth.  His mother died of cardiac arrest.  His brother died also of cardiac arrest. He has a cousin who has had triple by-pass surgery.  A doctor has also said just last month that there are no real blockages in his heart.  Instead, the blood vessels in his heart are also atrophied because of the polio he had when he was just a baby.

So we did what we could.  He went on a diet.  We changed our lifestyle and eating habits.  His doctor put him on a lot of medication to clear out the build-up in his arteries, control his cholesterol and his sugar.  When he underwent a heart scan a year after this intensive drug therapy, his doctor was surprised to see that the pictures of his heart showed very little blood flow when his heart rate is raised. His heart was a ticking time bomb. He could have a heart attack at any time.

Instead of feeling scared, my husband and I were triumphant:  imagine, we said to ourselves, he should be dead by now by all parameters of medical science, but by the grace of God, he is still alive.  So we felt blessed.  His maintenance drugs have dwindled to just seven kinds every day.  He began with about seventeen.  So this is a significant improvement.

Last February, we had another scare.  His blood pressure spiked to 190/100 and this found us back in the emergency room.  He underwent a battery of tests but they could not determine what was causing the pain in his stomach that in turn caused his blood pressure to shoot up.  We went to the emergency room two more times after that and we have been going weekly to the doctor since May.

A more personal reason for me occurred just last week.  My blood pressure dropped to 83/56. My husband teased me: “Welcome to the mortal world, my dear.  I was beginning to think you were invincible.”  And it was a rude awakening for me.  My body has staged a mutiny against me!

You see, Alzheimer’s disease runs in my family.  My grandmother had it and my mother suffers from it.  My mother suffered from it because of a cardio-pulmonary crisis she suffered when she had an asthma attack.  Her asthma triggered a heart attack and the heart attack deprived her of oxygen in the brain: she lost all of her memories.  What memories she has are all jumbled up and lying in pieces everywhere. It occurred to me that the sudden blood pressure drop I experienced might prove to be a trigger for me to lose my memories or my life.

So, I admit, I write about my husband because I still can.  I write about my love life because I am so lucky to have one.  I write about my husband because I don’t want to forget.  I write about my husband because I would rather he read about how I feel for him now while he can enjoy it.  I do not want to write about my husband in a eulogy when he will no longer hear how much I love him.  I would rather say it now.

So, I say thank you to my critics.  Thank you for asking me why I write about these things.  Had you no asked me why, I would never have probed my mind why.  I do not write it to make people uncomfortable. I do not write it to make people look bad. I do not write to say that he is the only good man on the planet.  I write about him because he is my one God-given joy and I thought I should share it in this often joyless, loveless and hopeless world.

That’s why I say these things.