Maitena and an intelligent review of the women in his life

I always liked women. When I was a girl it seemed to me that men were all the same and women were all different. I liked to look at them, talk to them. There was something spontaneous and warm. They amused me. The clothes they wore, the ways they moved, the topics they talked aboutthe things that made them laugh and cry.

Since I started drawing, I drew women. Never a sunrise or a horse, women. My favorite comic characters were women: Periquita, Little Lulú, Trudy, Mafalda, Cachirula, Robotina, Patora. All drawn by men.

At nineteen I came across comics The infernal cord by Claire Bretécher. With a very expressive line, relentlessly showed the relationships of the woman with her mother, her partner, her children, her body, her age. That was what I wanted to do, talk about women’s lives.

I was in love with her for many years.

They are women in my life who left marks on the map of my history. Without a doubt The most powerful of those brands is named after my mother.. I dedicated my first book to him, Altered Women: “For the queen of the altered ones.” She didn’t like it. The Polish woman did not understand the irony of Buenos Aires. I gave her all my books but she never read them.

Another of the first women in my life was my childhood nanny, who sometimes took me to her modest house in José C. Paz, where everything was different from my house. Especially because they spoiled me. I think I learned the tender part of myself with her.

There were three more babysitters who were women in my life. Each one in her time, they took care of my children. I dedicated one of the books to Carmen. Overcome: “What is the only thing a woman who has everything needs? Aid”. The women in my life are my two daughters. With the eldest, who I had when I was a teenager, we grew up together. Together with her and her brother – the man of my life – we moved more than seven times in fifteen years.

They are the children and adolescents in altered women. The boy who asks his mother to please not tell him how they did it to him. The insufferable duo of the turkey age. The teenager humiliated by a horrible compliment. The one who meets her former classmates from primary school who didn’t even register her and now they look at her tits. With our youngest, who was born twenty years later, we lived for twelve years in La Pedrera, a small coastal town in Uruguay. She is the girl who doesn’t want to go to kindergarten and the one who gets bored in Overcome.

The women in my life are my friends. I can’t imagine a life without friends. I had and have many friends. Good and bad friends. Close friends and new best friends. They are all women in my life.

The Cheta friend with whom we played the rat. The brown friend who lived on the other side of the road. The older friend, a journalist, who had escaped from Córdoba in the ’70s. The friend who came to visit me at the sanatorium when I lost my daughter in childbirth. The friend with children of the same age. The friend we used to go out with to get drunk and see bands. The friend who went to live in Madrid. The friend with whom I had sex with a woman for the first time. The friend whose boyfriend I stole and the other friend who stole my boyfriend. The friend with whom we drew together in the same workshop for four years. The friend I miss living so far away from. The friend who lives in the forest. The other friend who lives in the forest but in a house with water and electricity. The friend we went to Iceland with. The friend who brings me flowers from her garden. The friend who puts me into the sea. The friend who draws incredible. The friend who kept her mother crazy about her since she was fourteen. The friend who rows in mud and the one with the gypsy curse. They are all women in my life.

They are women in my life: my sisters, my sisters-in-law, my daughters-in-law, my Polish cousin. My goddaughter. My high school history teacher. My colleagues from NiUnaMenos. My father’s secretary. And my mothers-in-law are also women in my life. The one who came to visit us with two bags of food and candy for the kids. The one who persisted for ten years to see her granddaughter. And the one who taught me how to be a grandmother.

And my granddaughter, one of the most important women in my life. With her, when I thought he had lost her forever, her tenderness returned.

The women in my life are my characters. Little Fló who questions her parents, the sensual Coramina who explores her sexuality without her prejudices, La Fiera who mocks men, the thousands of women full of teeth and with wild eyes of altered women, Overcome y Dangerous Curves.

I find myself drawn hundreds of times. To all the ones I went to. The recently separated one, working while the boys fought, the house in disarray, the smell of teenage sneakers and a desire to live. I see myself in love and with a broken heart, I am the overwhelmed housewife and the good wife, the jilted lover, the guilty mother and the successful but dissatisfied woman.

The women in my life are my readers. Without them none of this would have happened. Her support enabled me to tell more and more things, to say everything.