Eleven years ago he started my great adventure:I became a mother. When I look back the experience of motherhood is drawn as the most intense, revealing and creative of my life. After that, nothing was the same and at the same time, it was more real than ever. I stopped being myself to be more myself than ever. A paradox?
No, it is not a paradox. Eleven years ago my son was born. Taking care of it, defending it, understanding it and loving it has offered me the possibility of being stronger and wiser, it has made me recover all the dreams that I had left in the future of a life adapted to what is considered normal. I have been, in capital letters, with the strength of a lioness and with an enormous impulse of freedom.
We are alive but life is part of a cycle, and that has given me tremendous peace of mind. I no longer fear death, I would only fear that I would arrive before seeing my son as a fully trained and capable adult, I would only fear not caring for him during his childhood, when he needs me most. I accept my mortality as part of the process that has allowed him to be alive. How not to reconcile with life, which naturally draws on the finite of my life and the life of another?
I have stopped fearing and compromising with many things that before, for conformism, education or custom he had accepted as impossible to change. For him I have made complicated decisions, nothing understood by the environment. I have done what I wanted to do, sure of myself and well documented, without fearing the opinions of others, changing my world so that the world changes for him. I have transmuted my values to make them stronger and more coherent.
I have learned again with the voracity of childhood. I have read, I have spoken with wise men and women, I have participated in social and political movements, which, with their blacks and whites, with their disappointments and successes, have made me learn much more about myself and people. I wanted to better understand children and their natural processes, to take better care of them and that has freed me from many rancid ideas without any basis that continue to be part of popular thinking. I have done many courses and workshops, I have re-enrolled in another university degree, I have soaked in scientific readings on psychology, anthropology, pedagogy and medicine. I have even published my first book, titled precisely, "A new motherhood."
Of all this time only I regret how quickly I let it pass. I miss my baby, my two-year-old boy, the little Hector who woke me up at six in the morning asking for a tit or asking to play. I would like to have taken better advantage of every second, it happens fast, very fast, the childhood of our children. Please, readers, take advantage of every moment, time is fleeting, nothing is worth what you can devote to your children.
I still care that children suffer. I have pledged to do my best to eradicate violence against them. They hit them. They fall asleep crying in their cribs, and now I know that it hurts them. Do not let them grow in responsibility and freedom. Let them label them, deceive them, humiliate them, punish them and give them away. That they do not learn with pleasure, that they fear those who have to protect them, that they be taught that the strong can harm the weak, that they teach them that violence gives reason to the person who exercises it. That they are not happy and that they are not themselves.
In eleven years I consider myself a different person, with many defects, some that I have not learned to overcome, but more committed, wiser, more cultured and braver. A new life was born eleven years ago, that of my son, but also his birth offered me the possibility of being born again.
You, readers who begin this itinerary now, perhaps with fear and exhaustion, send you much strength. Start a wonderful adventure and in a few years nothing will be the same, I can assure you that. Mine started eleven years ago ... and continues.
