His black hair waterfalled to his waist. His scent, frangipani and coconut, transported me. He said he remembered my eyes. Blue. “It was déjà vu.”
We first met in 1985 at an ESOL Christmas party. He attended as an English student, I as a tutor.
He said his previous girlfriend, Swiss, whom he had met in the Philippines, had asked him to travel with her to a country called “New Zealand”, and had offered to pay his fare. I located the Philippines archipelago on a world map before our first picnic date in the Botanical Gardens.
Within 18 months, aged 32, I decided to marry him because I couldn’t bear to see him leave. At 28, he married me because his temporary visa was about to expire and he wanted to stay.
Nine of us gathered in the Wellington Registry of Births, Deaths, and Marriages. He wore black trousers with a gunmetal-grey medieval blouse. He had drawn the design, purchased the polyester-silk, and given it to a tailor in the Philippines on our first trip there together.
I wore a body-hugging white cotton jodhpuri suit from Narnia, under a red calf-length tunic woven with vertical stripes of gold, green, and purple to a fringed hem. I had purchased the tunic before we met from a hilltribe community at an outdoor market in Chiang Mai. Their table of wares was butted up against another displaying fetuses in glass jars at different stages of development. I accessorised the outfit with a snake belt made of beaten brass and a fake gold filigree necklace.
Distance and affordability meant his parents could not come. My father, near but distant, would not.
As we exchanged rings, I held out my right hand. “Put it on the right hand,” my mother called in the she-will-always-be-my-child tone. “No,” I said, “I’m left-handed.” He is ambidextrous. He held out his left hand.
We posed for a professional photographer friend and a brother-in-law in a public herbarium, then celebrated with a homemade pre-prepped nuptial feast in our one-bed Mt Victoria flat. There are no formal shots. One film didn’t wind on. The other developed as clear blanks.
When learning the tango, I can follow a pro but I can't follow him. He expects me to lead.
One sweat-hot day, while walking a narrow and windy bush track along the banks of the Whanganui River, he walked ahead, chest bare. A man approached from the other direction. They passed each other without verbal exchange. To me, following bare-breasted, the same passerby said, “There are children behind.”
He claims the night, fearless. I reclaim it.
My complexion signals universal privilege. Where does privilege end and equal-human rights begin?
He is never ashamed to occupy space with his body. I sometimes confuse the shame my body engenders with personal shame.
“We won’t have any of that here,” says the women’s clothing store manager when I pop a nipple into the mouth of my screaming newborn.
I’m an introverted sort of shy. Small talk bores me. His confidence enables him to make small talk big. I am not sure of myself. He is. However, I have seen him unsure and helpless when questioned by officials.
“He won’t leave me alone,” he told me at Manila Airport Arrivals when bugged by a uniformed airport security person. “He wants pasalubong.” That’s the Filipino tradition for travellers to bring gifts home from abroad. I stepped toward him and reached out my hand. “Come on.” The guard averted his eyes, released his prey. I saw how my white skin both privileges and alienates. I saw how its effect in the world manifests a white lie.
Skin is the largest human organ. When his body system communicates dis-ease his skin itches and weeps, whereas my heart drum speeds up, and it hurts to breathe.
I play with the sound of words. He plays with guitars and strings and a self-made cajon.
Deep communication, meaning making, warms my soul. It confuses him. He feels more comfortable singing a love song like “Green Eyes” by Coldplay. Sometimes, he changes the “green” to my blue.
He rarely utilises his ability to read to the full, even destination signs, although he worked as a signwriter for 30-something years.
I observe and read people and things, even letterboxes, to see if their sum is my secret spiritual number.
People like him. He doesn’t seem to try. I feel I am not easy to like. This belief can be triggered by a frown. But, often now, I can turn that thought around. Others’ negative expressions are not always about me.
When he creates something new, he begins by trying to reinvent the wheel. I say, “That was done by the Sumerians in the fourth millennium BC.”
Once, he offered to convert my first massage table, a second-hand fixed-height one with gatelegs. I said I wanted a modern cable style with adjustable legs, like the ones his friend made for the massage school I attended. Tensioned cables balance weight and the table’s joints don’t squeak.
The contraption he repurposed from my old table took weeks to complete. It comprised numerous small pieces of wood which he carefully sanded. The finished product reminded me of a robot dog with moving parts. I offered him a shiatsu. A chorus of yelps from the table’s abundant wing-nutted joints was the sort of relaxation I wouldn’t expect clients to pay for.
He works without expectation. I work expecting a return.
In the visual arts, he wows over realism. I appreciate the abstract.
He draws slowly, looking at subject, then page, then subject again, to make a detailed and accurate likeness. I paint with abandon, layer upon layer, in swathes, finishing when the composition looks balanced, which is sometimes years, sometimes never.
When visitors come, they go straight to that one drawing of me he finished years ago, and say, “How amazing!” They say nothing about my large photographs of altered landscapes, which also hang on our walls.
In the art of cleaning, he is less accurate. I clean every second or third full moon, or when I see accumulations of dust and crumbs pile in corners of our living room. Between us, this regime works, though I make sure to tell him how thoroughly I have cleaned.
When our children were young, he left home every weekday to work in order to pay the mortgage. I worked inside as mother-carer, accountant, and cook, and outside, part-time. Then, when it came to cleaning, the division of labour struck me as unfair. I complained to my mother once. “He’s a man,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Are vulvas designed for mopping floors?”
I used to scream and hurl plates. He doesn’t anger easily, except in response to mine. Then he fires back putdowns in a repetitive fashion like a stressed rooster. I can’t stand the action of cleaning up the mess that my anger creates.
He prefers to eat meat most days, with a side of vegetables. He deep-fries chicken skin in oil to make it tastier. I prefer vegetables with a side of meat, eating flesh without skin a couple of times a week.
He grew up on a staple of rice. I grew up on wheat and potatoes within rooms with doors, on sections with fence lines, in a nuclear family system, feeling separate, and popular on inconsistent occasions.
He lived on bamboo floors in a house with one room, separated from his parents, but loved, in a system of kinship where grandparents, parents and siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins shared resources, whether they lived nearby or not.
He buys more than everyone can absorb. I spend so there’s a bit more than enough. Neither of us tolerate waste.
He lit his grandmother’s cooking fires every night from the age of six. I lit my first fire as a girl guide aged 13.
I value formal learning. He scorns it, saying, “The world is my teacher.”
I belonged in the classroom at primary school, college, and university.
He belonged on the back of his caribou, riding through muddy rice fields until he left school in the sixth grade. His younger sisters stayed on at school.
I question. After we bought our first house, I questioned a proposed rates hike at a public meeting. The mayor, who had been my landlord, said, “You ask awkward questions.” Would he have said that if I was a man? Jane Goodall said, “It actually doesn’t take much to be considered a difficult woman. That’s why there are so many of us.”
The only person he questions is me. And though he hasn’t questioned why I protest in solidarity with Palestine, he could. Would it make a difference? No. He prefers the sort of peace you don’t have to fight for. However, when threatened, he will retaliate.
He arrived in Aotearoa as a migrant, I via my mother’s womb.
He identifies as Filipino.
A fifth generation Pākehā, I whakapapa to Scotland, the Netherlands, England, Ireland, and Australia.
He is fluent in Ilocano, Tagalog, Cebuano, and English. I speak only English and secondary school French.
Spain colonised his ancestors’ islands for 333 years. From 1865, my ancestors colonised these islands, the land of the tangata whenua, Māori.
“Where do you come from?” I am seldom asked this question. He often is. “I don’t mind,” he says. Born in Aotearoa, our children mind. They mind.
The word “identity” comes from the Latin root idem, which means “the same”. When they are with me, strangers ask, “Where are your children?” When they are with him, strangers never ask.
In an ionic chemical bond, opposites attract. The different charges complete each other and fill the spaces which, in the other, may be absent or short. I see our marriage as a commitment to build a bridge, span by span, between our differences: our bodies, our upbringings, between the conferral of privileges, and between people, lands, and worlds, in our time.
He says, “A bridge can be destroyed.”
I say, “Everything ends. An individual life. A life together. A bridge extends the connection.”
He says, “Marriage is a commitment to care for my family. To run away is not an option.”
We are less different than a bird to a butterfly, a monarch to the red admiral, the kahukura.
We are less different than the kauri to teak, oak or eucalyptus.
We are less different than an African to an Indian elephant, than a brown bear to a polar bear.
We are less different than the bottlenose dolphin to some subspecies of whale, though we are all mammals; that word from the Latin mamma, meaning “breast”.
Our personhood is more similar than the personhood the Earth Council Alliance accorded to whales in that neither of us gather and take carbon to the bottom of the sea.
We are similar in that we belong to the most common and most widespread species of primate and the last surviving species of the genus Homo, a species that has gone forth, been fruitful, multiplied, and subdued over three-quarters of Earth’s surface.
We have adopted aspects of each other’s culture by virtue of having lived more than half our lives, so far, together.
We have participated in millions of days and in eating more than that in meals together. We have lived in five flats and houses and one van and cared for two children, two black cats and four Red Shaver chickens. We have zoomed all over these two islands in four cars, three vans, and one motorcycle.
We are similar in that we have both done our best, with available skills, to nurture our children. That shared love enfolds us.
We have learned by attempt that domination divides us.
Our marriage is a bridge between bodies of land, of each other. It connects our different parts, creates a new whole. We built this bridge with our children, span by span. We built it as a commitment to care.
“We are family,” he says, “to run away is not an option. That’s like running away from my shadow.”
Works Cited
Ginzburg, Natalia. “He and I.” The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present, edited by Phillip Lopate, Anchor Books Edition, New York, 1995, pp. 423-430.
Goodall, Jane. www.inspiringquotesbywomen.com. Accessed 31 July 2024.