On Equality, Its Magical and Infernal Places

 

All year long thinking and gathering memories, or something to contribute on this day. Yes, for me, it's a day of pride for having met you, for having ventured into our relationship, sometimes well, other times terribly.

We are human, and we make mistakes thousands of times.

Thank you first and congratulations second, just like that, for being a woman who crossed my path and helped me learn things. From what I’ve seen recently in the empowered world, congratulations and thanks are generally not well received anymore, but since doing what I'm told is not really my thing, I thank and congratulate you infinitely, and as Luz de Día says:

Let’s make our glasses clash 

For having found each other. 

Luz de Día. Enanitos Verdes  

https://youtu.be/iEfzONE82cY?si=GVkU5lzUUGilZq1t

 

My mom turned 80 years old; she is and has been the first woman in my life, probably the one from whom I learned the foundation of equality, though today it’s not clear to me if equality really exists, or if it's even characters like me who are the ones creating the inequality.

I wrote her a letter about her 80 years, and it’s fair to say she’s one of the first women almost completely liberated from men, but especially from an even more important point than men: The Family Home.

In that letter, and as I read it to her at her party, I realized she was freed from her home, because while she worried and acted on many things, there were others that slipped through her. I think this is a liberation many women lack, and it creates a huge inequality.

“The children are the mother’s,” my grandmother Sussen Majluf told my father. I would change the phrase to:

“The house and the children are the mother’s.”

This is inherently an inequality, because then we, the ones who inhabit it, are immigrants without papers, always. A few days ago, at a dinner, I discussed it with Mariona, and she said no, that we had NIE (a Spanish ID for foreigners). What does it mean to be an immigrant without papers or with NIE? Not having the same rights, and that’s already a big inequality.

As I said, within what we could, in my house, many things were done by my dad and me (“the men of the house”): something as simple as shopping at the market and the supermarket, those were our weekly tasks. We all washed dishes, set the table, each served themselves, and we always had someone to help with the cleaning, which allowed a big part of my mom’s liberation, not just in old terms, but for all of us.

During that trip to Mexico last year for my mom’s 80th birthday, we went to see Ufe, who was my nanny and helped in the house since I was 2 years old. Her work in the house allowed a certain part of liberation. Ufe was like our “Roma,” based on the Mexican film about a middle-class family. She taught us many things, especially me; she taught me how to make eggs in all forms so I wouldn’t have to wake my parents up when I was hungry. I liberated them, and she liberated us.

All my gratitude to Ufe, for her work and teachings.

As you can see, the house is a place where inequality prevails, on one hand, because all the rules are set by women, and this, whether we like it or not, leads most men not to get involved or not be bothered. Doing so is an eternal war.

We will always do things “wrong,” but let’s understand “wrong” as different from what the woman expects. Most homes are a dictatorship where things are done in that way, and my dear Mariona admitted she is a dictator, almost all could admit it. The problem is that it’s impossible to do things the way you do them, so many women end up doing them their way.

Terrible, but that’s how it is. How do we change it? How do we let homes have other ways of doing things, other times of doing things that aren’t ours? I imagine it’s complicated to think and propose it, but this letter is that: speaking and thinking about other possibilities of living together.

Not long ago, I watched the series One Hundred Years of Solitude, and honestly, I thought it was good. I had re-read the book not long ago, but watching the series allowed me to see several important things. The man in his world, how many of us end up living. I asked myself why I ended up in a world different from the family home, and I realized it was because I was an immigrant without papers, because the house’s rules often don’t take us into account; they just are, and we follow them, or as happens in the novel, we live in different worlds. This happens a lot, and until there’s more equality at home, there won’t be greater liberation. At least that’s what I think.

Not long ago, I read a meme, as they call jokes on the internet in an image, and it said:

What’s the formula for being happy with a woman?
O + B + D + C

Some will laugh, some won’t. I laugh, but I don’t obey, I flow just like the river.

There’s another important point in the novel, the influence of mothers on daughters. I asked my mom if she had freed herself from her mother, my grandmother Elena, who passed away in 1980, 45 years ago. Her answer was no; she still dreams of what my grandmother would say about how she manages her house and children. She, my mom, also added that my grandmother Sussen also told her (without saying it directly) some things about the house and the children.

I wonder how many women can’t free themselves from their mother’s vision. My friend Mar spoke to me about the Mitochondrial Eve, who is like the mother of all women. I took it to my crazy ideas and thought about the book The Call of the Wild, it’s like that ancestral call about how things should be done. I believe that this liberation of women from their mothers often hasn’t happened, and it’s necessary. Because I also believe that much of what’s called “machismo” is taught at home, and as I’ve said, that dictatorship isn’t of the illegal immigrants.

Someone told me that children wouldn’t grow up without the order of a home that mothers impose. According to another book I read about how we double our age, before 1950, children died in droves: vaccines, pasteurized milk, and drinking water were what really made a difference, and we didn’t double our age; we simply prevented children from dying before puberty.

With this, I want to say that yes, a mother’s care for her children is important, just like a father’s, but we can also relax; other things influence survival, and we’re not the parents. We’re no longer in caves, and we can tell Mitochondrial Eve that we’ve progressed and that we can be a little more free.

I can only ask you:

Are you free from your own dictatorship at home?
Are you free from your Mitochondrial Eve?
Would you give papers to this illegal immigrant?

(Or should we put rules like Trump? Or keep being the right-wing racists who don’t accept immigrants? Everyone will decide)

I’ve thought about many women in my life:

My friend SM+ told me: There’s always more time than life, and there’s always an opportunity. I sighed.

Ale told me on my birthday that she had dreamed of me. I sighed.

I think of you every day, and today I write this simply because I’ve been thinking all year about the woman I once met, who taught me, hugged me, and above all, left me with a feeling I’ll always be grateful for.

“Today, you finally fell asleep and started dreaming

 You dreamed that everything changed, and that you could try it” 

Mujer. Maldita Vecindad y los Hijos del Quinto Patio  

https://youtu.be/XGVpX7FJTqw?si=v0gdggnD4DL6bPej

 

A hug, and may liberation come by not seeing the other as guilty but by seeing ourselves as agents of change. If I change, the world changes, they say…

BeZos and AbraSos

Pau / Pablo / Fellah

(Or whatever you call me, because I’m the same person who feels and writes to you: Thank you)

Translated from Spanish with ChatGPT OpenAI