How to become a maid at age 70

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By Edrian Dizon Tameta, 17

Senior High

Our Lady of Perpetual Succor College in Marikina City

Illustration by Mariclare Conde

To become a maid at age 70, you must start as a teen—but not too young to get your employer in trouble. Your name, age, and family are only constructs on paper—rewrite them if you must. Always defer to your masters and superiors, and never bite the hand that feeds you.

Follow these steps, and you will likely land a job in Marikina, a humble old town east of Manila, a fertile ground for the 1970s job market. Just avoid making the fatal mistake of suddenly leaving the roof you live under to search for greener pastures. You will certainly be shut out of the opportunity to escape a life lived paycheck-to-paycheck.

You will wake up each day before dawn in a cramped closet. Make sure to quickly prepare breakfast, as your master has business to attend to. His children have classes at a big-league school, and his wife has friends and associates to meet. Under your master’s roof, you are family—but also just one of many names on a tucked-away payroll. Make sure your service comes with the heart of a saint and the commitment of a monk. Forget everything you learned about the laws of the nation—their word is law, nothing more, nothing less.

You could be the perfect servant, the most selfless and obedient person there is. However, by your late 20s, your so-called family may let you go. To your masters, you will be just a commodity to be bought and disposed of once things go south, not a blood-relative worthy of a second thought. In the hustle and bustle of the city’s streets, finding your next step will not be child's play. It will be an endless cycle of rejection and disappointment.

Chances are, you will marry at 30—not for love or money, but for protection. Being a maiden this late will raise some eyebrows, and some heads may turn for the wrong reasons. No one will have your back. Once you have children, any prospect of a career is a flickering dream, torn to shreds by a universal gaze that will only accept you as a homemaker and nothing more. Indeed, that is all you have ever done in your life. Anything else is taboo in the world you are forced to be part of.

Life, however, is an unending river. You will either adapt to the current or sink to the bottom. The world may have dissipated your hopes, but those now lie in the little ones whose aspirations you ought to uphold. Your jobs may not have brought you the prestige or glamor expected of a woman in her youth, but they brought you wisdom befitting an elder watching over a burgeoning community.

If all goes well, you will have been a moral compass to your children by age 40. They are responsible, polite, and everything a parent would want. One may have waved the Philippines goodbye to become a nurse in the United States, tending to the sick on the other side of the world. Another may be working as a manager at a company in Saudi Arabia, climbing the corporate ladder step by step, hoping for a breakthrough when the moment comes. As the years go by, they will start having children of their own, thriving in a world that burdens them less and dignifies them in the way it should.

While they have achieved the comfort, wealth, and prestige that seemed alien to you when you started navigating your way out of poverty, they keep in touch with you through occasional letters, giving you a snapshot of their blossoming lives abroad. Not all is rosy at age 50, though. As the fire of their careers continues to blaze, their children are also the recipients of the letters, sharing the longing you feel for them every second of the day.

Without their parents, you will be the one to carry the yoke of parenthood at age 60. Although society may commend you for having raised the archetypal citizens, you receive no award or favor for accomplishing such a task. Sometimes, life will unexpectedly be unforgiving. With your grandchildren living in a world that operates at maximum speed, you find yourself stranded in stillness.

You try to raise them the same way you did their parents, but as their realities clash with yours, your care and guidance will fall on deaf ears. Whenever your children have the opportunity to come home and tend to their kids, they try their best to pass down your teachings. But alas, being a full-time parent is not part of their employment contract. Those special moments are bought on borrowed time. You have done your part to ensure they never experience the hardships you faced at their age, but you will still bear the brunt of society's growing dismissal of the values you once held true.

If you follow all these steps, you will likely spend your twilight years in the same position you were in at age 20, but without the pay or incentive. You will have served as a witness to how the world goes on by the second… or you may just have been reading from the testimonies of those who sacrificed their youth only to be taken for granted at the end of their lives. Either way, the choice is yours: Walk the expected path, or forge a path of your own, becoming the master of a future that bends to what is right.

Edrian Dizon Tameta, 17, has been a student journalist for six years and is currently the managing editor of Hayag Kalayaan, the Senior High School Department’s student publication at Our Lady of Perpetual Succor College in Marikina City, where he is an academic scholar. A participant in the 26th WordCup Philippines National Journalism Contest, Edrian continues to hone his craft for storytelling.

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