My Aunt Lydia makes the best cakes and pastries in our neighborhood. Hers are the fruitcakes circulated around the Scout area a week before Christmas Eve. Hers are the pancakes on Sunday afternoon; oatmeal cookies in the summer; puto and kutsinta on Saturdays; and maja blanca on special occasions.

My Aunt Lydia must have inherited my grandmother's marvelous cooking skills, and because she makes such great sweets, especially the processed ones, her nieces and nephews used to tease her for having a big belly.

Uh-huh. On with the belly series. For now, yes. I'm on a roll.  

It turns out that Aunt Lydia had uterine fibroids, or myoma, in her abdomen, which rendered her unable to bear children, even when she still had a few good years to go before reaching menopause. Caution: If you must see a photo, here's one.

She had married at 41, having devoted her energy to caring for my grandparents and all six of us cousins, while my parents and another aunt were at work.

Because she had lost the ability to bear children, her husband decided to leave her. An annulment is in progress, but I am glad to hear that she's been travelling and meeting new people. Alternatively, if a woman's husband has abandoned her for a minimum of seven years, the marriage shall be considered void by court order. Let me look for a link to that. Here are some sample annulment proceedings in the Philippines.

At 60 but looking 20 years younger, she welcomes the idea of dating other people with partial excitement. More on dating over sixty here. But she needs to have worked out her annulment, otherwise there's the adultery law which stipulates that women can be jailed for a maximum of six years when charged by their husbands. But some groups are working towards the eradication of the adultery law.

Recent reports have traced the cause of myoma-growth to foreign estrogens, or xenoestrogens, introduced into our bodies by way of insecticides and shampoo. Here's another new development: Xenoestrogens are also found in chickens and other greens (possibly from the insecticides). Many girls not quite in their teens, are beginning to experience puberty at, say, age 8. An article here and another here.

There is also the possibility that these same children whose body parts are growing faster than their emotions and experiences can handle shall also be prone to the same myomas.

"Gimme spots on my apples, but leave me the birds and the bees – please!
 Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone."

– Joni Mitchell, "Big Yellow Taxi"