【Written by Lillian McDonald】
At the age of fifteen, I made the mistake of having sex with a boy. My mother found him in my bed at about two am. I threw him out my first story window and waited anxiously for my mother to verbally accost me. Never in my life had I done something this bad, let alone get caught red handed. I could not even begin to imagine how I would be punished. Could my mother ship me off to a convent? Maybe she would march me down to St. Cecelia’s to talk with the priest. God, that sounded terrible. None of these things happened. I got away with a small grounding, my life, and a lot of embarrassment.
No parent likes it when their child grows up. No parent likes to find someone of the opposite gender in their child’s bed. No parent wants to accept that their child is no longer in their control. However, there is a certain point in which every parent must accept it. It is coming of age here in America, but in a household headed by a Filipino mother, it is a warzone.
Generally, Filipinos in the United States immigrated to the country in times of war. That is how my Lolo and Lola ended up in the states. My Lola was a nurse, and my Lolo served in the Navy. This mode of immigration created one major phenomenon in military communities called a mail order bride. Filipina women were catcalled and treated like sex workers; this was humiliating to our culture. To reclaim ethnic self-respect, and in accordance with the religious identities of the majority of Filipinos, there became an emphasis on Filipina chastity. Many were encouraged to marry their kind because marrying a white man against the backdrop of sex work and “mail order bride” never looked very good.
In the article “‘We Don’t Sleep around like White Girls Do’: Family, Culture, and Gender in Filipina American Lives,” Espiritu states, “the construction of the “ideal” Filipina- as family-oriented and chaste- can be read as an effort to reclaim the morality of the community” (427). On a study of how the values of chastity in Catholic Filipino upbringings influenced women’s experiences with sex, Delgado-Infante and Ofreneo pose the question: “How does a young Filipina woman say that ‘I have sexual desires’ and ‘I am still a good girl’ at the same time?” The way young Filipinas are taught to view sex is too black and white for such a complex subject. Do not do it – if you do, you fail God and yourself. You become a sinner, a failure, and a stain in the family tree. This practice is not fair or easy to adhere to. I was a girl growing up in America who wanted to be cool like my peers; it was inevitable that I was going to have to let down my mother and her cultural values a little.
Chastity. A concept so simple – waiting until marriage – is much more complicated, especially within the Filipino community. Between women and men, the burden is not shared equally. The woman is supposed to ignore the man’s advances and her own desires, and if she fails, she is the one that suffers the most. For a woman raised with Filipino and/or Catholic ideals, it is not just having sex with a man you are not married to, to many it is an “emotional sacrifice” as “women lose what is most prized [with]in women by society. And this makes them feel that they have made the ultimate sacrifice for their male partners” (Delgado-Infante). There is so much on the line here: an extra lost point for being a woman, Catholic, and Filipino. If we are keeping score, I am at negative three.
Women give in because men claim it shows that they love them and the primary issue is what occurs in the aftermath. They are judged for it, becoming the hottest topic of gossip at Filipino family gatherings – broadcasting women’s “failures,” laughing at their “losses.” On the other side, a woman has lost respect because of it and is overtaken by a sense of loss that their partner, the man, can never imagine. It is much more pleasant for men, while women experience pain, remorse, guilt, and a blend of more indescribable emotions. For women, “that physical manifestation is of something torn, something lost, something that was taken … but for men … they don’t lose anything … it’s already an indication of how deep the act is compared to men and women” (Delgado-Infante). These women cannot win. They are up against contradicting social pressures and to follow one side is to let down the others. You can not pick just one side: listen to your parents and cultural values and fail socially or forget about what you were taught and make the mistakes teenagers make. I wanted to fit in and be a normal teenager. I had sex because that is what teenagers did, and then I was made to feel like complete shit by my mother.
So, who do I turn to? Who do I confide these feelings in? The loving and supporting God that I am supposed to believe in? Nope, I hated that guy.
Around eighty-five percent of Filipinos are Roman Catholic, including my family and me (Lagman). I remember going to church as a child, and this lasted all the way up until I left for college. Every weekend, my family of six would painstakingly make our way to Mass. On Wednesdays, I would attend Youth Group. In the car, I’d say the Rosary, and finally during every struggle or problem, I was told God would be there for me. Where was he?
Bahala na means “leave it to God,” and my mother swears by this belief. When it came to problems, whether it was being unable to find your jacket, being worried about an upcoming exam, or something big, my mother would always encourage me to turn to God. She would say things like “pray to saint Anthony” when I could not find something and “just trust in God’s plan” when I was freaking out about college. It was infuriating. Give me a real solution. Tell me where my glasses went. Tell me how to get though a breakup. Please! To this day, it is like this with everything.
God is a celebrity in the Filipino community. They like to turn to their faith to guide them through life’s challenges. There is an article, “Leaving it to God,” which states,
“For hundreds of years, Filipino Catholics have drawn strength from a wide variety of Catholic and Christian practices and attitudes to help them manage daily challenges and hardships. Based on Scripture and Church teachings, many Filipino Catholics dutifully attend mass and services so that they can incorporate virtues into their daily life.” (Lagman, 450)
When interviewing my mother, I asked her why her faith was so strong and why she believed in this madness. She told me, “Asking God to be present in that struggle or unknown is so that I know God is carrying this burden with me. I am not by myself. I am not alone.”
Filipinos see religion in a different way than the majority of people. It is their life. It is what gives them life. I never believed in God enough to see that. I was angry with how my mom preached all these outdated and impractical ideas to me, thinking it could work, when, historically, it never did. When talking to my mother, I learned it is what got her through hardship, and it was the only way she knew how to help me. She believed faith would carry her children through life when she failed.
These practices and beliefs come together to shape the ideal Filipina woman. The one that is better than the white woman they have been trying to disaffiliate with. The white woman known to sleep around, expose her thighs and chest, and who never made it to Sunday Mass. As a girl in a first-generation immigrant Filipino household, my mother was raised on these principles. She grew up taking piano lessons, doing chores, listening to her parents, going to a Jesuit college, and became the most perfect Filipina woman. She made her home warm and inviting, made sure there was always hot food, hung crucifixes on each doorway, attended mass piously, and then she tried to raise her children in accordance with these values. Then came me.
I am not the ideal Filipina daughter. You might have expected this.
I have never liked going to church. I had countless boyfriends in high school. I stayed out late. I lied. Yet, my mother is still very proud of me; she is my number one fan. Now I call her multiple times a week just because I want to talk to her, but I did not always feel this way.
Like all teenagers, I wanted my mother to mind her own business. And she never did. She was everywhere. Always asking me where I was going and who I was going with. Asking for their mom’s number even when I was legally considered an adult. Constantly reminding me to turn the location of my phone on to stalk my every move. I want to thank her especially for one text in particular that read: “Your boyfriend is welcome in our home, but just not under the covers.” While all this drama about where I was and who I was with was particularly annoying and created a bunch of mental anguish for me, it was all my mother knew how to do. Filipina mothers are known to “police their daughters’ behaviors in order to safeguard their sexual innocence and virginity” (Espiritu, 428). And I can no longer blame her for this.
I resented my mother for the way I was raised, the constant going to church and do not talk to boys’ lectures. I left home almost three months ago for college. I moved across the country and finally got the space to breathe after eighteen years under an overbearing matriarch. I’ve started to learn more about my culture, particularly my mother. Why she acts this way despite me hating it and her knowing I hate it. Why is she not capable of being normal like my friends’ moms? I learned she does it not only because of the way she was raised, but simply because she loves me, and this is how Filipina women are taught to show their love. Love through food, faith, and the constant policing of your daughter.
I grew up not only caught between American and Filipino cultures, but also in a sexist double standard between expectations of men and women in the culture. I developed a hyperawareness towards gender roles and sexual identities, a hyperawareness that my brothers in my own family did not even have to consider, and that was unfair. These values lingered in the corner of my mind, the subconscious guiltiness of failing my duty as a woman, of breaking the binds of my religion, and most of all – disappointing my mother. I am a sex-having, alcohol-drinking, daisy duke-wearing overall nightmare of a daughter who sneaks around in the dark and despises every Sunday mass I am forced to attend. I am a disappointment.
This hurts. It still hurts, but I am starting to heal.
So how do I heal? How do I come to terms with disappointing my family and failing my religion. Because in this modern world, to hold fast to these traditional values, is to try to fit a camel through the eye of a needle. As one Filipino parent says, “I can’t stop it. It’s the way of life here in America” (Espiritu, 432). When asking my mom about raising me with these values she said defeatedly, “I tried, but it didn’t work.”
Ironically, my answer to this complex mush of Catholic guilt and outdated sexist cultural practices is religion. I think I might be starting to believe in God. Maybe it is not the exact god I was taught to believe in, the biblical one Catholics worship in a church, but I believe everything will all work out. I am starting to understand the phenomenon of bahala na. I am starting to call my mom and tell her all the things I always wanted to say. I am starting to understand that she is like me. She also grew up with a religious mom. She also had that high school boyfriend that her parents were not enthusiastic about. She also feels like a failure sometimes.
I like to think that my mom and I share a youthful rebellion against tradition. Yet, despite our rebellion, we regress to our roots. I hate the idea that drilling scripture through my skull and condescending comments regarding my scandalous outfit choices worked. But it did. Despite my best attempts and strong hearted claims, I am turning into a good Catholic Filipino daughter. And I am proud.
Bibliography
Delgado-Infante, Margarita Lia, and Mira Alexis Ofreneo. “Maintaining a ‘Good Girl’ Position: Young Filipina Women Constructing Sexual Agency in First Sex within Catholicism.” Feminism & Psychology, vol. 24, no. 3, 2014, pp. 390–407., https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353514530715.
Espiritu, Yen Le. “‘We Don’t Sleep around like White Girls Do’: Family, Culture, and Gender in Filipina American Lives.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 26, no. 2, 2001, pp. 415–440., https://doi.org/10.1086/495599.
Lagman, Regina A., et al. “‘Leaving It to God’ Religion and Spirituality among Filipina Immigrant Breast Cancer Survivors.” J Relig Health, vol. 53, no. 2, 2014, pp. 449–460., https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-012-9648-z.