March 8th, 2019 - WOMEN'S DAY

Sometimes life reveals its paradoxes through strange coincidence and weird details.
I take this thing very seriously. For example, I make plans and they just go upstream. But it is not a misfortune. In fact, things go wrong to prove to be a fortune. 
Today,  March 8th, 2019, it reveals a paradox.
And here's why. This morning when I woke up I did not really think about it. I made coffee and got ready to go to work. As always. I left a note to Lars. Tor would have been home because he has a little fever. I'm late. I go downstairs and see the bus pass under my nose.
I ran from one station to another to look for a solution. In the end, I choose the safest route to Ubhan After 10 minutes of waiting passes my train.
On the train sitting in front of me is Stella, a colleague of mine.
We work in a big international company and there are many people. We met several times but we had never talked I sat in front of her and we made our way together.
She is Venezuelan and has been living in Berlin for many years with her husband and eight-year-old son.  I asked her how many years she worked and she told me she worked for many many years in this company. It's the only job good for her since she's a mother, she tells me. Here she can take shifts from 8 to 2 pm. They call it called Muttershift. She can go to get her son to school and take care of him. It is her choice no one forced her.
The husband does what he can to help but he works full time.
She tells me that it is not possible to do this somewhere else so easily.
In other companies, they do not even hire a woman if they know that she is a mother because "well, we're looking for flexibility".
In addition, she does not speak German at as a native speaker. It almost seems to be a subtle way of saying that a company does not identify itself with the image of a working woman, maybe foreigner.
In the end, he asked me "who knows how single mothers manage to make it?"
What do they do if the school is closed and they can not take the child to work? What if they have finished the available days?
Women's Day became a public holiday this year in Berlin.
And still, any kind of parity seems so far away in reality.
There are demonstrations here and there. It sounds like a joke since demonstrations are during a day off, that in the end for Stella, I and others like us is a normal working day (paid a little extra though).
The more they liberate us, the more our liberators celebrate us. And for us? We pay twice.