FOR as long as I have known her, my friend Brigada’s homecomings have always been marked by the discovery of one or more foibles of her nieces.

At one fiesta, a brother’s daughter failed to introduce the young man she was entertaining with friends at the hut adjoining the house. Imagining that Brigada’s ancestral home was full to the rafters with guests—in their barrio, homes opened doors so anyone could just walk in and pick up a plate—I wondered that she had time to notice the snub.

Brigada said the last time this impertinent chit remembered her manners was the day she turned five and Brigada brought a small cake sweating icing from the city.

In recent years, Brigada’s blood pressure has gone up and down over the diminishing pieces of cloth the nieces wear to the barrio dancing that caps the festivities on the eve of the fiesta.

When Brigada and her sisters were still maidens with willowy waists, I listened till late at night to them plan, engrossed to the last detail, over the cut and color of the dress they were saving for the “sastre” to sew and dieting to fit in for that evening’s “kalingawan.”

Now all Brigada can talk about is the tininess of the shorts each niece trots out to wear for what Brigada hesitates to call as dancing. After Brigada commented that she could already see one girl’s soul through a particularly wee piece, this niece responded by swinging her hips like a pendulum gone haywire.

Those shorts will precede the fall, Brigada darkly predicted.

But contrary to expectations, it was a grandniece—14, in first-year public high school, a government scholar, newly flowered—that became the youngest in their clan to be in the family way, unwed.

The child’s father is the girl’s classmate. How can children make a baby? my friend wailed.

Brigada and I believe in rising expectations: every generation is an improvement on the previous one. Our children are taller, healthier, smarter than us. Our grandchildren will even be better.

Only Brigada’s youngest sister finished high school. By toiling and saving, Brigada and her siblings have put more than one of theirs through college.

A college diploma opens a vista of options Brigada and her siblings never entered.

An unwed pregnancy closes these choices.

Until reproductive health is opened up in families and schools, we will have to live with choices, the hardest being the ones we should have educated others from taking.