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From the time I was a little girl, I was raised without knowing what a boyfriend was, or a husband, or being a woman, or anything like that. I used to say… the day I marry, the day that I have a boyfriend, that I have to marry my first boyfriend and only death would separate us.
He was 23 and I was 14, now he is 33 and I’m going turn 25… when I came to realize the truth of the situation, I was already in love and a love that was blind…
My mother always said to me… that I had no future [with him]… He was my first boyfriend, my first husband and the father of my four children. It was an act of rebellion that I got involved in this world… because he hit me.
My first reaction was of humiliation, knowing that I had endured 10 years starving, in misery, sleeping on the floor, enduring all those jobs, for wanting to be a good woman and then to be so disrespected in that way…
…for the simple fact that one day I took my son to the doctor from 4 in the morning until 6 in the afternoon. (On my way home I saw him in a bar). I went [back] to complain to him, that I hadn’t had breakfast or eaten at that time. Then he started hitting me in front of all those women… I felt bad. He did not have any reason to treat me like that in front of those women…
I told him “If I’m going to stay with you, I’m going to become a whore, because you don’t deserve me, you don’t deserve me as a good [woman].”
“He never mistreated his children… on the contrary, he never spoke harshly to them… nor did he like to hit them. The boys don’t think badly of their father either… they all love him.
Thank God, my mother never abandoned me… I could always count on her help, I could always count on her help.”
I have continued to follow Esperanza who is now a member of a Pentecostal church.