A Woman w/ Everything

That was Jan. 19, 1948 when a woman gave birth to a baby girl on a certain place around Caypombo Sta. Maria Bulacan. That woman was named Alberta w/ her husband Analito Gimeno. This baby girl was later on named as Marta Gimeno.
Marta’s parent decided to send her to school around 1955, but because of financial problem she stopped her study at the age of 8 & stayed at home instead. She spent her childhood helping her mother on doing households. That was why it’s no wonder she said that she could already marry when she reached the age before her teen years. She could do all the chores for housekeeping at an early age except the ability to make good decisions. Later on, her mother gave birth to another offspring of six. In fact, they were supposed to be 8 including her if just the first one hadn’t died.
Several years had gone by over the house. The young Marta grew older until she reached the age enough to be married. The baby girl Alberta used to take care of had became a woman & also a wife since she had married w/ a man of good character named Pedro Sanchez.
They settled separately from Marta’s parents at Guyong Sta. Maria Bulacan; a simple married couple that later on became a very big family. Marta Gimeno-Sanchez gave birth to 9 children. The list of their names were as follows: first was named Margarita, followed by another girl named Gloria, then Eduardo, Lorna, Nelly, Vangie, Noemie, Eddie, & last was a girl named Jennifer.
This whole family exercised the traditional values of what a Filipino family must have: respect & love.
But on February 1988, a tragedy whipped melancholy in the whole family. Their father died because of tuberculosis. Pedro used to cigarette even before he met Marta. The complications of his disease had showed earlier that made his whole family to lure him from this vice but he insisted on doing this until the day he died.
The grieving family shouldn’t be forever. New days were still coming to give the family a new whole hope. Marta, in spite of Pedro’s death, had successfully guided her sons & daughters to a good life by herself.
As years gone by, some of them had married & some of them left the house. But they frequently visited their mother Marta & the remaining siblings that were still waiting for the right ones.
The offspring were not all college graduates. But one of them was. As years gone by the youngest of them all, Jennifer, had finally finished a college course and then married & moved w/ a guy named Carmelo Palad.
Some of Marta’s daughters & sons had chosen to live near their aging mother for company. In fact, Nelly, one of the unmarried daughters, had renovated the house to be suitable not only for her mother but also for herself & other siblings.
Today, Marta was w/ her second husband helping in making their sari-sari store a profit. They had a daughter named Marie who was, for the meantime, finding for a job to help her parents.
Marta’s first & second family were all around her making her life brighter &, most of all, contented. And this major woman in the story, after all, was my grandmother: a woman with everything.