I was born in a beautiful home, my siblings and I were children loved and respected by our parents; however this is something my father could never have said.

Dad was the first of nine siblings, my grandmother, a strong-willed, hard-working woman who used to say she never had "luck with men", something I heard as a child and never understood until I did. My grandfather, on the other hand, was a businessman who, unfortunately "for him", never recognised Dad as his son, nor had the joy of his company until many years later.

As the first son, Dad had to deal with the different partners my grandmother was good enough to share his company with. He knew both emotional and physical disrespect because the gentlemen felt they had the right to beat him when he made a mistake and to harass him whenever they wanted, without my grandmother's intervention. Dad didn't study because he had to help grandma in her empanada sales on the beach and in the different economic activities necessary to support him and his siblings, and when he was able to do so, grandma's partner at the time said he wasn't going to "raise a knife for his own throat" (something I still don't understand).

In the midst of mistreatment from his own and others, Dad got on his feet; however, he never treated my grandmother badly, let alone abandoned her. As he became a man, despite the wounds of an infamous upbringing, he always said to himself, "when I have children, I will never treat them like that, my children will not go through what I went through", this was something he always remembered.

When I was 3 years old, we moved to a house that was not yet finished because my grandmother needed daddy around and somehow, I think daddy couldn't refuse to be there for her. So I grew up under the shadow of my grandmother, her cries of a woman who lived in front of the sea and her requests that looked like demands and that we complied with out of respect and because she was "my dad's mum".

Mum, she is older than dad by three years. As the youngest of 11 siblings, she was very spoiled. My grandparents had a farm and a big grocery store in "Churuguara", Falcón State. Mum used to tell us that She was breastfed until she was three years old and that, when she wanted to, she would call my grandmother Ramona with a sign of her little finger so that the customers would not notice and she would sit on the sacks of goods and my grandma would breastfeed her right there. :)

She was never in need, nor did she know what it was like to be unloved or mistreated, but the fact of being spoiled at home was something that stayed with her and that she never thought would end with the passing of time, something she had to learn. Mum got married, on a whim, at the age of 16. Despite my grandmother's advice and just because her older sisters had already done it, she made the decision, Fortunately, she did so with a man who treated her very well and to whom she was married for 11 years. They never had children, he died and my mother moved to Caracas. Her brother-in-law (her husband's brother), who was also married to her sister (my aunt), was the one who, curiously enough, told her about my dad and eventually introduced them, they became engaged and, after a year of "constancy" and insistence on dad's part, they got married.

Dad always tried to have everything at home. Mum, as a homemaker, liked to have things when and where she needed them. It was always like that until Dad became unemployed. Even though dad was always hardworking and we never lacked for anything, things got complicated for him after he became unemployed. I remember that mum was always in a bad mood until she found a job. Soon her smile returned. Dad, for his part, started his cleaning products business and everything seemed to be back to normal.

While this was going on, I, who was the eldest of my siblings, was witnessing all this kind of pseudo-wellbeing, which, being in danger of disappearing, was sowing bad moods and discord. My mum, from my point of view, was very demanding and dad, unfortunately, found it hard to keep up with her.

When I started my own family, I was unwittingly repeating my mother's pattern of behaviour and said to myself "I don't think I'm demanding too much". When things were not done the way and at the time I said it, I did it myself, even if I had to neglect what I was doing at the time, I thought that if I didn't do it, no one would do it or that it wouldn't look good. I became so burdened with everything that I got sick, but I still didn't understand why this was happening to me. I was acting foolishly, thinking it was the right thing to do.

One of those days when "you wake up and you can hardly open your eyes", I went to the reflexologist, who is also my friend, and while she was examining me, she touched a part of my leg that made me scream as if I had been hit very hard, she just told me, **you have to let go**. Without having told her anything, she knew that my nerves, my emotions, all of me was broken, in chaos. She told me that she knew how much I loved my children and that precisely because of them, I should leave it up to each person to take responsibility for things because one of two things could happen, either I would get sicker (physically) than I already was or I would run the risk of falling into depression.