In response to this week's question in Memory of Mondays, this post has two versions: a short and a long one. I will develop the long version so you can understand.

I was born in 1973, I am the second of five siblings and my only male sibling was born when I was about 15 years old; that is, we were, for a long time, six women at home and only one man: my sisters and me, my grandmother, my mom and my dad. I remember that at home, the first plate of food was for my dad and everything he said was a sacred word and although dad treated us like princesses, we always had to obey him.

My dad, maybe because he was the only man in the family and because we lived in a dangerous area, told all the boys to take care of us, so there was no shortage of older brothers to take care of us, and there was no shortage of older brothers to tell my dad the story. There were very few things we could do without my dad noticing.

Just as I have never smoked, just as I had my first boyfriend when I was 22 years old, I can also say that I have never ridden a bicycle. What? Yes, I've never ridden a bike.

I remember asking the baby Jesus and Santa for it, but they never brought it to me. Then, when I got out of school, I asked my dad for it and he flatly refused and since I was at an age to ask (not to question my father's decisions) I asked him why he didn't buy me a bicycle and his words were “because I could fall or I could ‘lose my virginity’ riding the bicycle”.

My sisters and I never owned a bike, my brother, on the other hand, did.

From a distance, I can see my father's ignorance, his fear that we would do something wrong, his desire to control everything, his machismo, but I also see the submission of my mother, my grandmother, who did not contradict him in any way. Obviously the time and the social environment influenced our upbringing, but also the small and small-town mentality of my parents.

From my childhood, I remember two things that I saw everyone doing and I could not do and that caused me tremendous envy: the first was to see people bathing in the rain and the other, riding a bicycle. Both were, for me, expressions of freedom and happiness that I never had as a child.

When I became an adult, at the first opportunity, I danced, kissed, walked, sang and even celebrated in the rain, however, I have never ridden a bicycle.

There is a famous episode of Friends where Phoebe confesses to never having owned one and not knowing how to ride a bike, and her friends buy her one and teach her how to ride it. I would like to think that at my age, I still have a lot of things to do for the first time and that before I die I should do: ride a bicycle, for example.