Speaking of balanced beings, i must mention someone who is very important in my life and to whom i owe everything that i am: my father. from him i learned about laughter, tenderness, independence, generosity, and the joy of playing and creating. the love and respect i feel for him have allowed me to establish healthy relationships with the masculine world, and it is to his wonderful influence that there is a balance between the masculine and feminine in my work. you’ll have to forgive this boldness, but i think women are very fortunate that men exist! the gods are very wise and certainly knew what they were doing. they created the sun and the moon, light and darkness, the eagle, and the serpent, all for the same reason. they are the perfect complements and the mechanism we use to reach heaven. in my life, this loving, passionate, intense union of masculine and feminine has given fruit to a book and a film that embrace my family’s past, my national conscience, my obsessions, my fears, my hopes, and more than anything else, my belief in the love between two people. a love that is now public and circulates in theaters and bookstores all over the world and which has made me worthy of public acknowledgement. acknowledgment that i feel compelled to share with my mother, my daughter, my grandmother, my sisters, with sato and tita, and all the women before and after them who day by day, year after year, have put us in contact with our true origins. i also want to share it with all the women who have not forgotten that stones do speak and that the earth is a living being. and with those who transform each daily task into a ceremony of union with the universe during the twelve intense, masculine solar months, and the thirteen magical feminine moons each year of their lives without ever being recognized for it. what has esquivel learned about gender roles as discussed in this excerpt?