The First Forays Outside
The cats are starting to gather around the door when I go out to feed the birds every morning. They know that the temperatures are rising and they are starting to eye the drier patches of the backyard. Honestly, I can’t wait to start taking them on walks. Especially Wesker. Her mood really improves when she can take her fluff into the breeze, and when her mood improves, she eats a lot more. She loves to check out the freshly emerging grass and sniff around while the birds tweet overhead. I just love to see her enjoying herself.
A Notebook of One’s Own
The story of Alba de Céspedes’ Forbidden Notebook begins when Valeria Cossati, a bourgeois housewife with a part-time job, buys an illegal (due to wartime restrictions on paper) notebook from the local tobacconist. As she fills this forbidden notebook with her thoughts and fears and the realities of her daily life, she begins to see just how unhappy she is at how her life has unfolded and how constrained she is by the roles of wife and mother. As she begins to wonder how she can achieve any kind of real fulfillment, she’s left with the hopelessness of fighting against a patriarchal society and her own family’s demands.
Forbidden Notebook is a powerful story of identity and just how women are stripped of it and how deeply this absence is felt. Cossati doesn’t even feel comfortable in her own mind and her independent thoughts. She doesn’t feel comfortable to even express herself in the privacy of a notebook.
Generational Differences
There are quite a few works of literature that explore similar topics, but not a lot of them delve into the generational differences between mothers and daughters in the sense of the changing landscape of women’s rights and perceptions of women’s roles in society. Cossati and her daughter go through a period of friction where Cossati experiences a mixture of happiness that her daughter’s horizons are less limited than her own, and bitterness that she gets to be freer and more independent than Cossati feels she ever had the opportunity to be. This leaves a mother divided on trying to impose the same rules that restricted her own life as a way to pass the suffering on, and attempting to let her daughter make her own decisions. It’s a complicated thing to explore, and Céspedes does so masterfully and in a way that lingers after the book is done.
Repeating Cycles
Though Cossati is struggling to be free of constantly being only a mother or only a wife and to reclaim the lost parts of herself. More than that, she begins to see that this is a battle that is not limited to just her, but one that stretches across women in general. She has finally seen the cage and the bars and is rattling at the lock. Forbidden Notebook is a testament to repeating patterns that keep women down and prevent them from being who they truly want to be or even seeing themselves as people at all, let alone individuals with unique wants and needs that have nothing to do with the roles they are forced to play and the demands they are forced to fill. Forbidden Notebook is about breaking the cycle and, while I wish I could say that it wasn’t still relevant today, it most definitely is.
Bunny Day Cometh
When Bunny Day comes early, Bunny Day always creeps up on me. This year that is definitely the case, but in a way, it’s helping me take the tasks slowly and mindfully. I’m also hoping it will make me be a bit more reasonable with chocolate. We both need to be. My lovely spouse has been struggling with migraines triggered by chocolate, and while she can still have some, she cannot have as much as she’s used to eating.
