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"Welcome to the WHWS Center. Please take a few moments to send us your contact information (see below) and any comments you may have on the content and format of this site. We appreciate your input, encourage questions, and hope you find what you've been looking and wishing for. Relax, you're home
Who We Are
Who are we? Daughters of Eve. Some of us, pretty faces, all of us beautiful. Many of us mothers and grandmothers. Some of us living solo.
Share Your Story
Tell your story. Talk about all the significant moments, maybe the significant women, in your life, or talk about one moment, or one person who made a difference. .
Our Favorite Things
After telling your personal story, you can start to build a GATHERING (gather meaning to collect, to assemble, to reap), an integration of the pieces of your true self.
A time and place to sit and think about everything it means to be a woman in spirit, mind, body, and heart. To recall important moments. To ask questions and seek answers. To read a book or write a poem. To make music or dance. To raise children and hug grandchildren. To shop for favorite things. To play games. To be happy or sad, accepted or rejected, loved or reviled, and to find the means in spite of everything, to be okay, really okay.
God may be a man but he has the heart of a woman
Through the years, I have felt this power, this force we call love, but I didn’t quite see it for what it really was at first. The term “love” has become highly inadequate. It can’t begin to say what it should. So has the word “wife,” actually, a term some of us associate with second class citizens who tend to stay home. And yet a wife is the center of her home, the anchor, the nurturer, the bulwark. So, just so you know, HOLY WIFE in the blog title, isn’t me. It’s God. And this blog is as much about God as it is about love. And if at this point, you think that’s an overused concept, it’s too late for an argument. I’m not sure if it’s heresy to refer to God in the feminine. But here’s what I think. Much of the little wisdom and generosity that I have ever claimed for myself came as a result of my being a wife and a mother. And so I thought, since the images of God are redundantly male –God the Father and Jesus specifically—I will speak of my experience of Him as a gentleness that speaks to a woman’s heart. And that’s the reason for the title of this blog—God is the Holy Wife, not me. Let’s get that question out of the way. God may be a man but He has the heart of a woman.
MY STORY
I’ve always thought of God in simple, easy words like good, or kind, or loving. Not the catechism’s words like almighty or omnipotent. Even as a child, I was sure He was something else, besides omnipotent I mean, a term which even now makes me think of vast spaces in distant lands. It didn’t seem like He was that far away from me, at least not then.. I was five when I started kindergarten at a Catholic girls’ school in Manila, the city where I was born. I was a fearful child—actually refused to go to kindergarten, and threw a fit whenever it was mentioned. I finally agreed to go, but only because my Lola (grandmother) promised to come with me and stay all day, every day, for six months. She became a fixture in our classroom doorway—I guess the nuns allowed it. My grandmother was widowed early after an assassin shot my grandfather in a political incident, but that’s a different story. She then went to live with her brother, a successful dentist in Manila, and raised her daughters there. Her older daughter Ester was my mother, and when she married, Lola came to live with us. I remember my Ma was always busy with housework, so I became Lola’s little girl. My fear of going to school must have been a case of separation anxiety but people didn’t know about that then.
There were other scary things too. I had night terrors that started as soon as the lights went out in the room I shared with my sister. We had moved to a larger home by then, where instead of sharing a room with my mother, my sister and I got a new room to ourselves. I remember creeping out of bed, and moving slowly in the dark to my mother’s room to wake her. It took all the courage I had to walk the seventeen steps that led to her door. I even made up violent ear aches that had her sitting with me through many nights. I guess that was my first remembered experience of love, my ma coming to comfort me at night and my grandmother staying in school all day.. Much later as an adult, I realized what the night terrors had been. They were panic attacks. I think now, that the panic was a kind of knowing, a dread of things to come, my body already preparing itself for the darkness, even while the energy of extraordinary love waited in the wings.
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My Other Stories:
The Gallery
The Gallery
Here are some images that can inspire you, and get you started on your journey of self-discovery. As you surf our website and the web, and you still use a mouse pad like I do, these images make fine mousepads. You can also frame the images and hang them over your computer desk. Enjoy! (Our online store is open)
WHWS Calendar 2023
Here’s a great start to the new year, the first ever WHWS 12-month calendar with exclusive images and inspirational quotes. Order one now!
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