#vivaestaba
I always asked myself, what was the point? After so many years of watching the women in my family suffer. To watch them be at their partner’s every beck and call, take care of their children all alone, yet have to ask their partner’s for permission if they ever decided to do anything.
Holidays, though, were the worst. I had to help clean, cook, and serve while I watched my cousins sit and play dominoes. They laughed with my uncles whilst getting drunk.
I couldn’t drink because I wasn’t a “puta like cousin Yolanda” as my mother would put it. Yolanda was everything my family hated, she was a well-studied, strong, independent woman. To make it matters worse Yolanda was pretty with long black hair and café con leche colored skin.
I wanted to be Yolanda and not my sister, Michelle.
Michelle finished college but had two kids and a loving husband. She no longer lived in New York but had moved to Texas with her military husband.
“That’s what you need,” my mother would say as she pointed out Michelle and her husband’s PDA. “Un hombre, a man to take care of you.”
“Mami, I can take care of myself,” I answered back after putting the last dishes on the table. She scoffed.
“Liberal women have screwed everyone over,” she said, starting her usual rant. “Next thing you know they’ll want dicks.”
“Ya lo hacen, Carmensita” said my aunt Gloria as we walked past her into the kitchen. “You know, those men who want to be women.”
I closed my eyes, the ignorance in this small kitchen was embarrassing. I washed my hands and walked out into the dining room, all the women were serving their husband and children, except for Yolanda, she served herself and a few kids.
Today she had a dark T-shirt showing off her tattoos. I looked at my grandmother just to make sure she was still breathing.
Yolanda challenged the standards I hated.
That’s why it hurt so much when she was found dead in her apartment the next day.
