It is funny where we get our inspiration sometimes.
I had my monthly period recently, and while I was doing the nasty job of changing my sanitary napkin, I began to wonder whether the sanitary napkin was a necessity or a luxury. I told myself that it was definitely a necessity. Then I remembered an experience I had a long, long time ago that only my mother knew about.
I used to be very sickly as a child. No month would pass without me going down with fever. I had weak lungs and a weak heart. I could not stay out in the sun because I would “overheat” and develop fever after sundown. I could not play in dusty places because I would develop skin rashes within the hour. I was allergic to crustaceans and dried fish, and almost everything else in between. And I had a nose that never stopped running.
Doctors were not that many back then. Not in Maasin anyway. And I do not know how much faith people had in doctors at that time. I knew my mother had very little. She preferred bringing me to the “tambalan”, or quack doctor, who would prescribe “ilimnun” and administer chants.
“Ilimnun” was made of cuttings from different types of grass and weeds. You were to put a bunch of that in a pot and pour fresh boiling water, and then drink the concoction when it has cooled down a bit. I had all sorts of “ilimnun” all my life, supposedly one type for every illness. The quack doctor would bind a bunch of twigs and roots from different weeds, and wrap them in paper. If you had two ailments, she would put another bunch in another piece of paper. Then she’d tell you this paper is for this ailment, and that paper is for that, and that they are not to be mixed or interchanged. But I always wondered if the quack doctor was merely saying that, and the cuttings really came from the same plants. Who would really know. But I knew better than to tell that to my mom.
I was around 10 that time. I got sick again with God knows what. Like usual, my mother brought me to her favourite quack doctor, an old lady that lived in the outskirts of town. Her tiny shack was full, like usual. I tell you, she was popular. We waited right outside her door, together with a bunch of other people, because her living room was already overflowing.
We sat on a bamboo bench. Her shack had walls made of “sa-sa”. “Sa-sa” is made from bamboo halves cut in such a way that the entire half would spread flat and become walling material. The pieces would be held together by bamboo slits tied together.
The floor of her shack was dirt. Inside the shack, where feet had constantly trodden, the dirt had been compacted to almost like concrete. But outside her door, the dirt was loose. It was very fine and very dry dirt, the kind that would swirl in tiny cyclones in the wind. I remembered wanting to make sure it did not get onto my feet. It was the kind that would make your feet look like the feet of a dusty traveller.
While my eyes were glued to the dirt, I noticed a set of feet. They were bare, and the heels were calloused and cracked. The toes were dirty and well spread out, like feet that did not know what shoes were like. The skin was dark and wrinkled.
I followed the feet upward, and saw that they belonged to an older woman. She had black hair, and her face was dark and wrinkled from sun exposure. She barely looked at me. She was looking down at the dirt floor and barely looked up. Something about her look told me that she was self-conscious somehow.
Because I was short and there was not much else to see, my gaze fell on the dirt floor once more, and on the woman’s feet. The woman was wearing a “patadyong” that flowed to below her knees. A “patadyong” is a traditional skirt worn by women in the Visayas during the generation of my mother. At that time, the “patadyong” was not necessarily out of use, but it had become a signature skirt for those who had less in life.
The woman was standing the whole time and had her legs spread apart. She was constantly moving them, this leg one moment, the other the next, as if she was moving something in the dirt with her bare feet. At first, I thought that she was merely playing with the dirt. Until I saw was looked to me like a drop of blood coming from between her legs.
As I looked, the woman moved her foot and covered the red blot with dirt. A few moments later, another red drop came, and the woman hastily covered it with dirt like the first one. And then it occurred to me. This woman was menstruating, and she did not have any sanitary napkin on. Nay, she did not even have her underwear on.
I nudged at my mother and discreetly whispered to her what I was thinking. My mom observed the woman’s feet activity for a while, and she, too, came to the same conclusion.
More than thirty years later and I still remember that scene like it was yesterday. That woman was so poor she could not afford a sanitary napkin. God knows if she could even afford an underwear. Maybe the sanitary napkin was not even an issue because she had no underwear to attach it to. Maybe the sanitary napkin is a necessity to me and to many other women of child-bearing age. But to that woman who barely had anything, it was definitely a luxury.
When is a thing a necessity, and when is it a luxury? I realized that the issue is a lot more subjective than I thought it was.
To us who have a lot, the realm of necessity is wide. But to those who have less in life, it is very narrow. Everything outside of food becomes a luxury. Ironic. For the first time, I realized that the more we have in life, the more necessities we perceive. I bet that if we make an objective evaluation of our lives today, we will realize that there are many things we thought were necessities, but which really are not.
As for the sanitary napkin, I thanked it for the insight. As I put its package back into my shelf, I assured it that whether or not it was a necessity, I was definitely seeing it again next month.
