Our hosts here in beautiful Halsa, Norway, are my husband’s former wife’s mother, Guri, and her second husband, John. I felt included at once. The scenery is excellent. And with the best sides of human nature, wow, what a real fairytale to blog about!
A few days after our arrival, we were invited to my husband’s former wife’s youngest sister, Hildur. She works with refugee issues in the community center and lives in her childhood home, an old farm she has renovated at the end of a narrow fjord about 30 km from us. We joined Guri and John, and halfway, they stopped at a wooden church where my husband’s oldest son was baptized and his former wife was buried.
Guri wanted to check the grave of her parents to see if maintenance was needed. I was suddenly surrounded by long family history. I felt included most naturally, and we continued to Hildur’s house after some minutes.
One of the first things I asked her was if she was a feminist. The question was maybe a little odd because my husband interrupted that feminism is a normal thing in Scandinavian countries. She showed me a closet full of fixing tools—no need for a man there, I see :)—and she added that she might be too independent for most of the men she meets.
Norwegian women are known to be free. Now I have a great chance to study that up close. One of the first things my husband told me was that he did not want to marry a Filipina because they tend to be submissive. I told him I was educated, had never done much housework, and could not cook. He looked surprised and said: “Good, you might have the potential to be an independent woman. It will be hard because you will not gain independence by letting your mother or maids always serve you. You have to learn to handle all the basic aspects of life. You have to learn to build up and support people around you and not always put them down if they act differently. But if you want to try, I will help you.”
So here I am, enjoying beautiful landscapes and learning more about the independence and freedom developed through hard struggles in the first world. The more I know, the more I understand that I have to be open to new ideas and assertive enough to advance, with my loyalty and the good qualities of my Filipino soul intact.
