The Courage to Rise: A Story for International Women´s Day

The Courage to Rise

A Story for International Women’s Day

Today, I honor a woman who carried the weight of injustice and yet chose to rise, a woman who loved, who created, who defied the chains of history
and walked the path of her own becoming.

Spain was still under Franco’s grip. The air was thick with patriarchy,
the iron hand of dogmatic Catholicism pressing upon every home,
every choice, every breath.

My mother and my aunt, Ana Coral, were just girls when they lost their mother.
A loss too deep to name, a silence too heavy to hold.
Their father, needing order, remarried within months,
but their new stepmother saw them as little more than hands to scrub the floors,to cook, to serve. And when she bore a son of her own,
their place in that house grew even smaller.

Then, death struck again.
Their father’s body surrendered to illness,
and at thirteen, my mother knew what could come next.
A girl without protection could be sent away,
to labor in a stranger’s home or worse.
She ran to her godmother who lived in the same neighbourhood in Madrid, pleading not only for herself
but for her little sister.

The godmother took them in, but time was slipping away for her as well.
Before her own body surrendered to death, she turned to the Opus Dei nuns,securing a place for the two orphaned girls: My mother and my Aunt
For a moment, there was peace.

But this is not my mother’s story. This is my Aunt´s story: Ana Coral.

She was laughter and song, poetry and dance,
a soul too wild to be tamed.
At sixteen, in a quiet confessional,
she faced the violence no woman should ever endure.
The priest who should have been a vessel of grace
became an instrument of desecration.
She told no one about how she had been raped, only my mother.

She wanted to flee, not from the nuns, who were kind,
but from the shadow of religion that had defiled her sacred trust.
She met a man, Mario, and in the desperate grasp for safety,
she married at seventeen and left to the North of Spain.

At first, the story seemed to shift toward light.
But the darkness of patriarchy does not let go so easily.
Mario’s hands (my aunt´s husband), meant for love, became weapons.
Time and time again, she found herself at my mother’s door,
bruised, broken, afraid.

Under Franco’s law, a woman belonged to her husband.
She had no passport, no right to leave.
And if she ran?
The law would drag her back or imprison her for the crime of seeking freedom.

One night, the violence was too much.
My father, a young medical student,
stitched the wounds Mario had left upon her body.
She could not return to her home…

She had two choices: exile or death. It was either England or France, until my father´s friend offered to take her to a place beyond the regime’s reach.
A friend spoke of Ibiza, filled with foreigners and different laws, 
where there was a freedom Spain had forgotten.

So she ran.

The police came knocking. My mother feigned ignorance.
The law branded Ana Coral a fugitive.
But in Ibiza, she found life.
She found Uve, a German man with kind eyes,
a man who did not see her as a possession, but as a woman,
as a soul with dreams.

Then came the child.
But Franco’s Spain had no mercy for women like her—
a runaway wife, bearing another man’s child.
Had they found her, they would have taken the baby,
sold it to strangers, erased her existence.

So once again, she fled.
Hidden in the back of a van, beneath blankets and fear,
she crossed the border into Germany.
When the wheels touched safe ground, she emerged,
stood before the authorities, and was granted asylum.

She rebuilt her life in a village that became her home.
She sewed dresses that carried the essence of her soul,
wrote poetry that had been inside her since she was a child,
sang in the village operas as if she were breathing her freedom into the world.

And through it all, she never stopped believing in love.
She did not curse men.
She did not let the wounds of one become the hatred of all.
She saw patriarchy not as the essence of the masculine,
but as a sickness that would, one day, heal.

She forgave what the world could not.

Ana Coral passed recently, but she lives in so many ways,
in the hands of every woman who dares to rise,
in the hearts of those who choose love over fear,
who seek freedom even in the darkest of times.

This was not so long ago. Things have changed so quickly…
And today, her strength runs through all of us.

We are the daughters of women who dared to defy.
We are the living prayers of those who refused to be erased.
We are the voice of the ones who were never given the chance to speak.

And we are here.

Remember to honor one of the women from your line today.

Happy International Women’s Day.

AHAVA,

Ana Otero