Women's Best of Two Worlds: Career and Marriage

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My mom, Dr. Maura B. Fonollera (she's in heaven already), wrote a book for women.  A copy of the book was gathering dust in our bookshelf, so I decided to blow the dust and browse the pages.


I read the book in bits and pieces and some nourishing morsels of information can be found; and I would like to share with all of you, especially to all the "moms" out there.

The copyright date on the book was 1994, so she was probably working on this book much earlier. The book was actually sold in National Bookstore, but book sales were not as fast as her other books. The topic was probably way ahead of its time.  Now I feel that the book title is more relevant.

In Chapter 1 of the book, she said that "The pursuit of marriage and career is strewn with complicated webs of predicaments at interminable stages sometimes jarring even the most stable relationships. Old values come in stand against newly reached marital agreements to follow non-conventional paths such as the wife pursuing a career. Before any decision is reached, the wife is engulfed in a torrent of sacrifices in her search for that veritable heaven called self-fulfillment. Oftentimes, it puts the wife into a vexatious position of surmounting formidable cliffs to get husband's acceptance.  The first cliff is "male machismo", the entrenched and treacherous male pride producing great agility and sure-footed determination on the part of the wife in the art of persuasion. There are jagged rocks of dissent and protruding precipices of unwillingness on the husband's part.  Only self-willed women are apt to conquer these obstacles."

On the next paragraph she added that "The second barrier is finding the substitute for mother's arms in the care of the children.  Surely, the unique motherly love and caring are not substitutable.  But the structure of Philippine society has made this love sharing service available through the domestic help and institutionalized "yaya". The crucial decision here is the trust reposed on this cradle rocker upon whom is delegated the task of "whoever rocks the cradle rocks the world."

These are some of the excerpts in my Mom's book.  I'd like to share more of the rich morsels of content, and probably have the book re-printed for ordering online.  But I'll have to get the permission of my siblings.


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