Work

I never worked for somebody I worked for myself from the beginning. But I start to---just opened the service because I had so many customers and I just realized I saved money better than nursing home, than nurse’s aide, and there was flexible hours, there was mother hours.  And I had the two children so it was easy for me to do this kind of the job.  But I got so many clients I don’t know what to do with them!  So I opened a cleaning service.

I like the path I chose. I’ve had a…wonderful opportunity to have about four careers when you think about it because I’ve been a nurse, I teach at the medical school so I’ve been a nurse, a lawyer, a teacher, a mother all of those…you know they’re all wonderful opportunities and I’m very happy that I’ve been able to do that.

I’m very proud that I did the one-woman show.  When I first started, I was afraid. You know the Deaf community can be very critical. They would criticize if I used too many songs in my show, if the show was boring, if they didn’t really get it, and the deaf community is a close-knit group.  And it’s very easy for the opinion of one to influence the entire group.  If they didn’t like my show, I would take it personally that they didn’t like me so that didn’t do a lot for my ego.  Then I had a conversation with myself and I told myself that’s a challenge for me.  If I want to be strong and develop confidence I have to just go ahead and do it anyway. It doesn’t matter if the deaf community likes me or don’t like me, this is my work, this is my art, I have to try.  So I am proud of the fact that I did do it, I’m proud of the accomplishments that I made from then to now. 

There are soooo many positives to working with the Deaf and hard of hearing community. There are tremendous opportunities to share knowledge and experiences. Everyone’s stories are just so different and interesting. Now I like to tell people how to live if they become Deaf or hard of hearing. Let them know the technologies and all the things they are able to do. That’s a great part of my job. Now I really like to inform them that they can live a full life as a Deaf or hard of hearing person. There are so many positive things about my job. I work with a great team of individuals that are just so skilled at what they do. People contact us every day with so many different questions and my staff is always able to answer them, quickly and efficiently. It’s such a supportive environment.

If you’re sure you can’t do it, ask God…

There’s actually nothing wrong with having an opinion, with having a point of view, and with letting other people know what it is and I still struggle with that often because I do want to be a people pleaser and that stems from like, middle child syndrome, therapist syndrome, wanting to just fix everything and make it better and if you can sort of, in some way lose yourself to save the rest of the world you’ll do it, which is another very big danger of my job. But, that’s not really what we’re meant to do as people, we should be somehow contributing to our community, to our families, to our careers, to whatever it is that we’re doing, don’t sell yourselves short.  It’s just, with the whole glass ceiling thing and women get paid 76 cents on the dollar compared to men, blah blah blah, what it really comes down to is - listen - you could moan and complain about it or you could demand change.

When I was studying French at Barnard I was going to be a translator for the UN. But at the time, there were fewer options for women, and it’s so exciting to see how many options women have now. I remember going to the bank for a mortgage that my first husband and I bought in 1969. The only way that a woman could qualify on a mortgage…had any collateral weight, was as a nurse or a teacher. Otherwise nothing. And the way the mortgage was written. It was written in the husband’s name, Et. Ux. meaning “and wife.” So, I had no name even.

Work is very important, because I feel like no matter what field people are in, you spend a lot of time at work, more so than with your family and friends. So I feel it’s very important to pick something you’re passionate about and that you enjoy, but I always think it’s important to have a balance and not have work kind of overtake everything. It can be difficult --  for me work is probably 75%, it’s a big chunk of what I’m doing -- but I think its important to find a balance.

I went to school at a time in my country when we were under a dictatorship. We were under the dictatorship of President Ferdinand Marcos at the time and I was studying at the Assumption High School and the Assumption College in Manila and the Assumption sisters were being very true to the charism of our foundress which was that our education and our faith had social consequences, that we couldn’t be living in a situation of great poverty and of great injustice without somehow doing something with our education to make that better and, and our faith also demanded that we do something to change the situation of the poor and of the unjust political system we were under, so I got very involved in social justice activities and when I was in my senior year in college, I got arrested by the military and I was put under military arrest for four months and I had to stop my schooling, clearly, [laughs] since I was under arrest and, and then afterwards when I was released, I had one more semester to go in college and I graduated, but my family requested that I leave the country for a while because they never knew when I left the house in the morning if I’d come back alive in the evening you know, with the fear that I’d just be picked up by the military again.