Dear Moldovan Women,

Dear Moldovan Women,

I know you have been waiting for this day the whole year, Women’s Day, the day when your neglectful husband will buy you a flower (ONE) and will “surprise” you with the same welcoming words as every year, telling you how wonderful, pure and candid you are; he might even tell you he loves you. It is the day when your children will be embarrassed to congratulate you with Women’s Day, so they will wish you Happy Mother’s day. It is also the day when all your male colleagues will smile, buy flowers and chocolates and congratulate you by telling you how wonderful, pure and candid you are, and they might even tell you how much they enjoy working with you.

I know that this day for you is the only day when you can sincerely forgive every little bit of disrespect or disregard, and all the stress, conflict, bad behavior, and sincerely smile. That flower for you is the symbol of your femininity and this day in the year is the reminder of you being a beloved wife or girlfriend, a beloved mother and a once courted woman with all her dreams and wishes.

Stop it. This is pathetic.

I am sorry I am rude. But stop it. And also stop the self-serving theory that women are that special and deserve special things. We are all special and we all deserve the best.

We don’t need a day to be reminded about that, what we do need, though, is constant education about mutual respect.

Women’s Day is a throwback to Soviet times where a model was constructed and promoted: the Soviet Woman which later turned into the Moldovan Woman. And that happened for political reasons.

What I wish for you, my dear Moldovan Women, the 21^st century women with democratic aspirations, with basic democratic human values and principals, is for you to have the courage to live your lives as you dream, wish and imagine them; to have the courage to defend yourselves and stand up for yourselves; not to put up with being disrespected at home and loved in public but to learn how to impose respect and respect others; to protect your children and defend them. What I wish for you is for you to teach your children about sex and sensitive issues, and not follow your mothers who let you find out about sex on your own because sex was a subject they were ashamed to talk about; to get married because you love the man and want to spend the rest of your life with him, and not because he is rich, or because you’re afraid of being a spinster; to understand that marriage and family life is a partnership with equal responsibilities; to be an example to your female peers as responsible citizens and human beings; to receive small gifts just because it’s just Monday and you are loved, and not by habit on a “special day”.

My dear Moldovan women, I wish you hadn’t abandoned your careers as  professors and doctors for unskilled work in Italy, Spain, Portugal as illegal migrants sending your money home to your husbands and children who spent it on clothes and now have problems understanding the world. I wish you hadn’t accepted to take that unknown path and got trafficked into slavery and all its terrible degradation and hurt.

I wish you hadn’t become so disappointed with life that you forgot how it could be. I wish you hadn’t lost hope and stopped striving for your dreams.

Dear Moldovan Women, please forget the mystical role and image that has been propagated and start living a real life, a better life.

Yours in solidarity,

Ionela

P.S. All these things I also wish for Moldovan men.