Little Rose was a woman born after the 1st World War into a rural family of many children. She was the oldest female child and hence was not given the opportunity to go to school and learn how to read and write. Instead, she remained at home to help her family around the household.
She married when she was 21. Her husband was at the time a 23-year old man from a neighboring town. She continued to work around the household, raising numerous children. She is remembered as a good, calm, intelligent and gifted woman. She had a good sense of humour. She was also full of ideas on how to improve the household. She, however, was afraid to speak. She was deprived of her voice from an early age, due to the social circumstances which favoured males and looked at females as inferior to men. Although her husband said that he loved her very much, he treated her like any man of that age and time would do: he expected her to be submissive, quiet and happy no matter what. Since she was doing majority of the chores around the house, she got into the wine cellar for sorting out the wine and never really get out of it. Her drinking problem become obvious relatively late, due to an indolent and quiet nature she was gifted with, but it had a significant repercussion on her life and on the life of her children, some of her sons dying young, as a direct or indirect consequence of their inherited drinking habits. She passed it to her children as one would pass a genetic disease or physical trait such as blue eyes or crooked nose.
But I suppose that was the only way she could escape the life of imprisonment. She had her victory in achieving this distorted and self-destructive rebellion. Or was it simply a surrender into a numbness? A final defeat? Her swinging figure and mumbled words were seen as a shameful confirmation of her vice that no one dared to openly talk about. If they talked about it, they would have to scrape beneath the appearances and dive into the root of the cause which was hard to do, given the socio-cultural background of that time. Probably she raised very little reflection and stirred only a shallow ponds during her lifetime. She, however, was not the only woman constricted to the frames too narrow for her souls. She was not the only one without the voice.
By remembering her on this pages, I will try to give her a voice. It may be her voice but it really is a voice of Divine feminine which lives in all of us, irrespective of our gender. It must be brought to balance so that we all can thrive. It must wake up from slumber, it must turn sober, a beautiful reflection of Mother Earth who waits, warm, moist and patient, to embrace all her creatures.
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