A Woman's Battles and Transformations

Books

Throughout her life, my Mother struggled with poverty and masculine violence. She was born in the late 1960s. At 16, she had to leave school because she was pregnant. At 19, she already had two children, no qualifications, and a husband she hated. Sometimes he would try to beat her, but my mother always fought back. After two or three years, she left him and met my father; she was in love with him, and one year later they had a baby, me. They were happy, but very quickly my father changed. Watching her when I was a child, I thought her life was already fixed forever- the village, the lack of money, the toxic presence of my father. She was in her thirties but she was like a shadow; I dreamt of replacing her, of having another Mother, more smily, more shiny. I ran away from her and from my family to study in Paris. The silence grew between us. I didn't know her anymore. But one day, the year of her 45th birthday, she called me in the middle of the night. 'I did it. I left your Father'. She found a job. She ...