Breathe
By Stephanie Orozco, BA in Communication Sciences from the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of the UNAM with special interest in political communication, human rights, gender studies and the right to non-discrimination. She has published opinion articles in digital media with an intersectional and transinclusive feminist perspective. She is currently an advisor on legislative matters and communication in the Senate of the Republic.
This is not a sad text. But it is based on bittersweet memories. People have different ways of telling memories or anecdotes, we leave feelings in every time we recall and bring the past to the now. This is what happened with my childhood, which had a before and an after when I told my dad: you have the hands to do it yourself.
Today it is an anecdote and even a family joke. "Remember when Lupita didn't want to help me put down a glass of water and told me: "You have little hands, don't you? He laughs and then turns to look at me with what I think is affection. But I don't remember the story as I hear it, it wasn't funny to me.
I am certain that it is my mother's figure that gave me the courage to stand up for myself. I have heard the strongest "no" in her voice. I have not seen firmer decisions than hers. My grandmother, her mother, lives in the memories in which my aunts reaffirm that she was a woman who left in her daughters the strength to live with the phrase she used to say and that has lasted so long: "get ready and work so you don't have to stretch out your hand to your husband to ask even for a kilo of tomatoes".
Going back to the time of the blissful glass, I remember being the little girl who would come up and give whatever others asked for. That day was no different than any other but I was busy being a child. I was playing in my own world, one I couldn't often access and being taken out of it made me cross the boundary of what I wasn't: a "rude" or "talk back" child. That's why I responded that way, because I no longer wanted to be serving in the basics for someone. It wasn't just a favor, it was a way of life that many men are used to.
According to data from the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness (IMCO), women in Mexico spend an average of 40 hours a week on housework and caregiving, while a man spends 5.9 hours a week. Women work double or triple shifts, on which the subsistence of other people depends: children, people with disabilities, the sick and other family members in general.
Less and less, but those of us born between 1980 and 2000 grew up with toys that taught us how to mother plastic babies that were increasingly modernized so that we could also learn how to change diapers. We liked to play "comidita" not to imagine ourselves as great chefs, but as the mom who prepares five casseroles at a time for the family to eat. Through commercials and colorful advertisements, they tried to awaken in us a maternal instinct that we did not ask for.
But those who don't grow up in similar contexts, instead of playing, there are girls who are routed into early adulthood because they have to raise their brothers and sisters. We are talking about girls who went from taking care of a plastic baby to actually making someone else live and feel cared for who is just as vulnerable as they are. Girls who are deprived of their own time because they went from school to home, this second place not being a refuge for life, but a place of work. It is worth mentioning thatthere are women who have been engaged in unpaid work since childhood, that is, we can speak of child exploitation in the full magnitude of this problem that for years we have been made to see as one of the worst crimes.
We women are taught from a very young age how to do housework correctly. We learn to sweep, mop, use knives carefully to be able to help in the preparation of meals, to differentiate between Chlorine and Pine, to heal ourselves, to learn how to heal and, in the larger family dynamics, not to sit at the table and enjoy the meeting because we have to get up to serve.
What I see today as an act of solidarity with my aunts and my mother, when I was a child, was a way for us women to have a chance to get together. The men stay at the table, before eating and after eating, having a drink, to talk about their topics and everything that interests them. The women, on the other hand, stay in the kitchen: before, for the preparation of the food; during, to continue serving those who are still hungry; and after, to clean up, or to be more honest, to eat "calmly and at ease" or in other words "so that no one bothers them". And there, in the kitchens, the after-dinner conversation of the women of the family takes place. They talk about the problems at home, the irreconcilable children, the unpayable debts, the problems of alcoholism and everything that should also be solved with the men.
Family dynamics in Mexico are so different from one another that this can be repeated every Christmas or New Year's dinner, but also every night. And in these contexts, unfortunately, it is the girls who get involved in conversations and situations that mark how they will conceive family dynamics in the future. The socialization of problems begins to become normalized, but in secret. It is common to start hearing about other people's pains and, hand in hand with this, seeing their mothers worried about these situations, as if it were a magnet, they attract anguish that does not correspond to them and for which they can do almost nothing: we ourselves, at that moment, forgot that we were only children.
The family is our first learning center, so it is no lie to say that everything we learn there is our greatest challenge. Learning to differentiate favors from responsibilities and acts of love from unpaid work is one of the great challenges that force us to see our relatives not only as members of our family, but also as reproducers of patriarchal behaviors. Since we were children we have noticed this and as adults, we are facing perhaps greater challenges: to stop calling injustice love.
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