Es Tu Vida, Haz Que Tu Quieras

I just finished talking to my Spanish madre. It was one of those conversations that started as talking about homework and ended up being something much more.

I've written a lot about places I've gone to and things that I've done, but I haven't written much about my family, which, for obvious reasons, is the biggest influence on my time in Alicante.

Juani on her wedding day. So beautiful.

She told me all about her life, today. I just asked her to tell me stories of when she was twenty, and then she started telling me all of these things about her, and her life, and her family. She told me how she lived the majority of her life under a dictatorship, where women weren't allowed to be outside of their houses after 9:30pm. They could only stay home and work in the home, she said, cook and clean and do everything while her husband just waited for her to serve him. She told me how she couldn't live like that, that she wanted to be free. How, after twenty-five years of marriage, she finally had had enough of being locked in, and separated from her husband. How everyone told her she was crazy, that she was going to be alone for the rest of her life, that she was making a huge mistake, and she told me that she would rather be alone and free than together and captured.

She told me how, when she was young, her father worked on the railroad, so she rode it for free all around Spain and watched the brown tierra fly under the wheels. She told me how she had three daughters, and raised them to be smart, to think. She told me how she was never like those other girls, that she always wanted more.

You only get one life, she said, you might as well live it the way you want.

Every summer, she goes to her house in southern France alone, just to be there, in a beautiful place that she loves. Here in Alicante, she said, she has family, she has her home, she has her students, her grandsons and daughters, she has memories, but there, she is able to be alone, in a beautiful town, with herself and her friends. She is able to do what she wants, where she wants, to explore, discover and understand her world.

It was hard, she told me, to go against her husband, to go against what people expected. But, every day, she knows it was worth it. Her life is hers, now. Politics, republics, dictators, for her they are all fancy words for liars, all of them -- she has lived through three sets of governments, maybe more. The only thing she knows is to rely on herself.

I told her she would like the women in my family.

Es tu vida, she told me. Haz que tu quieras.