Get up every day, have breakfast every day, “hello beloved, how?” forget to get back into Barik, fuck, pay bus ticket, stairs, sit in the chair, “we’ll get coffee in the afternoon, OK? You have to go to school to find Mikel, play the park, give snack, have nothing in that park you hate to talk to anyone, the assembly, take the record, take the record again, the coffee you've talked about before, thanks, in your crew you take antidepressants, you make the meals skip a pickle while nobody realizes that you have the psychosis.
Clink! You've come up with a 60-euro bizum, you're thinking that maybe it's not worth losing two evenings a week, spending five hours with that child a week, for 60 euros, but what nice Mikel, and it makes you well to be with you, they have problems at home and you want a lot and well, maybe in the next course I tell you what to leave, or well, you think something, maybe a friend or friend takes work.
You come home, you compare the house between the four, you thought you would pay the rent between the three, but no, they have put in a room and the guy doesn't like it. You would like a house, shared with your intimate friend, with white walls and plants, windows that will allow you to enter the sun every day and a large wooden table. But in idealism, these apartments are twice as expensive as your friend's, and cllaro, to dream is free, but not white houses with plants. You can't hang the squares in your room, because it has forbidden you to make holes in the wall that owner gives you 1,000 euros a month, and you don't want to live without painting, but to have paintings you have to have walls, and you don't have a wall, you have a flat rented in black in that neighborhood that is between the center and the periphery of any urban center of Euskal Herria.
In Idealistan these apartments are twice as expensive as your partner's salaries and clareté, dream for free, but not white houses with plants
The phone wakes you up to hours, you've just entered a friend's mother and you're probably going to die, if you wanted to talk to someone, but no one has taken your phone at those times, you're afraid to dominate your parents, you're the only daughter, you don't want, but you know that you'll soon be the reference person for your parents, you'll change roles, your parents have as many years to retire, but not many. “And then what?”, “I don’t know,” “Am I a bad person thinking this right now?”, you say no, but although their parents are younger, a small fear has been born between the stomach and the intestine.
Hanging clothes, scrubbing, sleeping the children, cleaning the bathroom, making the shopping list, preparing the snack, attending the phone, listening to the last to come home, sad but smiling, taking the next one softly, attending the prices of the shops, we have met their amamas, their family problems, work, known, our mothers, and we are learning for it. Because you learn to maintain the lives of others and to do all that work with kisses or wages precarizados.Porque you learn when we care and how much, how to help without noticing, how to make all the work invisible.
The woman, who is largely built on her, on non-work remunerado.Porque that unpaid work that we do in the place of others is the non-contributory pensions of our mothers and the excess to care for our mothers, the low future pensions of our mothers and the reduced future practices that we will assume to take care of our fathers. Because the system does not magically reproduce itself, concrete decisions do, the re-familiarization and privatization of care, the precarization of lives, the conversion of mental health into privilege and the systematic against mental health, judging, coding, attacking our bodies, turning into privileged housing, precarizing lives, destabilizing, negating the future.
Because all the work we do in each other's place is non-contributory pensions for our mothers and excess to take care of our mothers.
Meanwhile, we do not take care, we do not take care of anyone’s life, we do not have important reasons to go on strike, our reasons are not “true”. In other words, the problems of young women are children's problems. We know how these mechanisms work, because patriarchy is well built, but we already know time. Ours are not true “reasons”, as what women do is not “work”, as a feminist strike cannot be “general”, because the “real” reasons, the “real” work, the “real” strike, which is always of others.
On 30 November, we will celebrate the General Feminist Strike, because we are the only daughters that we have to take care of our families, because we take care of the Basque children in the parks we hate, because we have no walls to put boxes, because mental health is restored in therapy, not only in cafes, but because we are not going to be watching our whole lives as mothers, our mothers and all the women who preceded us.
We need a public surveillance system, responsible for our bienestar.Necesitamos that the bases of the surveillance system become village in town, that the emanates return to the territories, that we are also in the decisió centers n.Mientras so much, we will continue to be heavy, very heavy, with our reasons, our work and our strikes, with that form of strike that has had the most impact in recent years. We will continue to reinvent syndicalism, taking the streets in our forms, we will decide why we go on strike and with whom we go, but above all on Thursday we will continue to write feminist history to recover and rewrite the future. On Thursday we will be in the streets.
Maider Barañano, member of the Youth Platform of the Basque Country*.