Signora?

The first time I went to Italy I was just a few months past my nineteenth birthday. A college friend and I took the overnight train from Barcelona to Rome, arriving at the station bleary-eyed and minus my friend’s camera bag, which had been stolen from her lap while she slept. (Incredibly, she had found the camera itself dumped in a tiny bathroom a few cars down.) Outside, we tried to take the bus to the hostel that we’d read about in our tattered copy of Let’s Go, Italy!, but the driver shook his head fiercely at the liras we held out to him. That’s great, we thought, clamoring aboard with our enormous packs. Italian buses must be free! We cheerfully rode the buses without paying for two days before some fellow tourists informed us of our mistake: you had to buy the ticket before you got on the bus.

Travelling in Italy opened my eyes in a way I had never experienced before. It was not my first time out of United States; I’d been to England, where my brother and sister and I laughed that our British cousins said “tea” for “dinner” and “pudding” when they meant “dessert.” But to set foot in a country where I understood nothing but grazie and bellissima, where the landscape seemed something out of a fairytale, where simply walking down the street made me feel more beautiful than I had in my entire life... Italy was a different sort of awakening. Surely, then, too, hundreds of foreign tourists must have milled around me, but they were not what I saw. The rustic looking pizzeria near the Fontana di Trevi was not an over-priced tourist trap; it was the real Italian deal. I climbed clock tower after clock tower, the red-roofed panoramas nearly pushing my heart out through my chest. This was Italy, and I was in love. I left ten days later determined to make her mine.

And I did. A year and a half later, I arrived again in Siena in February, with three semesters of Italian under my belt and my suitcase lost somewhere between New York and Florence. I spent three nights shivering in the frigid medieval apartment I shared with three other American students before the suitcase finally arrived and I piled my warmest clothes on top of the thin blanket that covered my bed.

Every morning when I left the apartment for the university, stepping out onto the narrow, stone-paved street, my heart rose into my throat. Was this really my life? I felt half-choked by the excitement of what the day would hold. A short semester later, I was just beginning to feel at home. Encouraged by my parents, I took a leave of absence from college and found an apartment just outside the city walls with three Italian students.

It was there I learned how to enjoy Italian coffee, how to use a bidet, how to appreciate the almost-crunch of pasta cooked al dente. We cleaned the bathroom thoroughly at least four times a week and set the table for our breakfast of hot milk and cookies before we went to bed. I made lists of new words only to find that a few weeks later I knew them without having once glanced at the list. I became best friends with Andrea, a quiet, intelligent boy who cared enough about what I had to say that my Italian blossomed, my journals filling with the beautiful rhythm of my second tongue. I borrowed a bicycle from another friend-- a beautiful gay boy from Sardinia who wouldn’t come out of the closet until years later-- and spent long afternoons riding around Tuscany’s rolling hills. I played hours of chess with Andrea in our favorite cafe, kissed a smooth-skinned soldier under an olive tree, walked home more than once in the pre-dawn, the air outside the bakery already sweet with the smell of baking bread.

* * *

A year ago, when Don took all three kids to visit his family in Alabama and Georgia, and I was left with a quiet house and some time on my hands, I finally wrote a long over-due email to Chiara, the one Italian roommate with whom I’d forged a lasting friendship. When are you coming to Italy, she wanted to know. It was seven years since I’d last seen her, when Don and I had travelled through Milan on our way to our honeymoon in Slovenia. And although I had truly meant only to reach out to an old friend, the seed was planted... When was I going to Italy? I ordered a collection of Italian short stories to brush up on my Italian and started scheming.

Still, I couldn’t even think of going without feeling selfish. When the twins were little and still nursing, I had often fantasized about a weekend-- even a day-- to myself. I needed it. I deserved it. But the children were so much easier now. My desperation gone, the thought of a week to myself felt extravagant and self-indulgent. And even though I had my own money saved, I balked at the idea of spending so much on a ticket when we were economizing all we could at home.

And then, of course, there was the obvious: whatever time I spent in Italy would mean Don flying solo at home. True, I had solo-parented for equally long stretches of time, but it had always been when we were travelling and my parents or my sister were there to lend a hand. But my rock-star husband insisted that he “wasn’t scared.” In fact, he hardly seemed daunted. When a friend reminded me over dinner one night, “You can’t take it with you,” I made up my mind. I was going to Italy.

* * *

Chiara and her husband live in Rome now, with their two-year-old son Mattia and a baby girl on the way. They live near the center of the city in a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment with a narrow balcony and marble floors. It is spotless. Everything is white-- the walls, the floor, the kitchen cabinets-- and there is not a mark or a fingerprint anywhere. I can’t help but think of my own home, with its muddy floors and sticky cabinets, and feel ashamed.

I have arrived with two guide books checked out from the library at the last minute and no plans. At home, everyone kept asking me this:“What are your plans?” To speak Italian, to eat Italian, to pretend to be Italian... this was all I had in mind. I haven’t come to sight-see. And yet, how can I be in Rome and not sight-see? On Monday, Attilio gives me a ride to the Fontana di Trevi on his scooter on his way to work at the bank. We squeeze past cars, speed around round-a-bouts, weave through creeping traffic. He points out monuments and buildings; I take in all the suit-clad men lined up on their motolinos as they make their way to work. With my helmet on no one can see my face, so my fantasy of being Italian is holding up just fine. I’m just another girl on the back of a bike, zooming through the streets of Rome.

Ten minutes later, after Attilio has dropped me off and I’ve wandered over to see what I can of the famous fountain, now almost totally under reconstruction, I know I have to let go of the fantasy, at least for now. I think of Don saying, “What’s wrong with looking like a tourist if I am one?” I sit down in a piazza and study my map.

An hour later, I enter a cafe and order my favorite Italian coffee drink, a latte macchiato, the only one that I have yet to see in an American coffee shop. While I’m waiting, I overhear one of the baristas say, “What is the signora having?” and that first time, it catches me by surprise, to hear that I am signora now, not ragazza or signorina. I think of my eighty-year-old grandmother saying to me once, “You feel just the same on the inside.” I look at my face in the bathroom mirror as I leave and wonder when I became signora. Because Gran was right; I feel just the same on the inside.

Except, of course, that now there are three pieces of my heart walking around on their own two feet, more than four thousand miles away. When I think of them, my heart aches, so mostly, I don’t. My time here is like a latte macchiato, mostly the sweet milk of utter freedom, marked just a little by how much I miss my children.

Near the end of my trip we go to Tivoli one evening, a small hill town near Rome. We eat panini in a piazza and then go inside Villa d’Este, a grand Renaissance villa with a spectacular garden filled with fountains. The sun sets over the countryside below, and golden lights illuminate the fountains. It is Attilio’s first time here, and he fairly bursts with pride. “Italy should be able to live on places like this!” he says. Chiara’s eighteen year old cousin declares she’s found the place where she wants to get married; now she just has to find a boyfriend. I nod in agreement. This place is magically beautiful, quintessentially romantic. I long for Donald and for my family.

Before I left Asheville, when I told an older lady who takes my gym class that I was going to Italy to celebrate my fortieth birthday, she said, “What a great idea! You should do that every decade!” As my days in Italy dwindle, I latch onto this idea. I’ll be back when I’m fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty. Divvied up like that, into just four remaining visits to Italy, the rest of my life suddenly seems frighteningly short. I have to remind myself that I’m still-- hopefully-- in the first half.  I mention as much to my friends, and Attilio sighs. He is a bit melancholy at times these days, worn down by the daily routine of work and parenting and maintaining a spotless house.  Yes, he admits, but the second half will be the harder half, since our bodies will inevitably begin to fail. I know he’s right, but somehow I don’t see it that way. Sure, it’s hard for me to look in the mirror these days without cringing a little at the lines on my face. Still, at every race or triathlon I do, there are scores of older men and women, often finishing ahead of me. I choose to believe that my own body won’t hold up any differently. And when I think of my first years in Italy, with all the youthful folly and self-searching that they held, I’m sure I’d rather be forty than twenty, rather signora than signorina after all.

Spending the week in Rome alone reminds me how little my pleasures in life have changed. My best times are spent on Attilio’s twenty-five year old mountain bike, riding alone down an ancient Roman road one day, risking my life in the city traffic the next. When I reach my destination on the bike or make it home again, I am jubilant. I look at churches and mosaics, monuments and fountains, and I appreciate them as I always have. But my favorite moments in Italy are spent meandering down the green paths of secluded villas and exploring the lonely remains of Ostia’s fallen city. You always liked the green places, says Chiara over dinner, remembering me on Carlo’s bike. 
We are both struck by how little we have changed. “Sei proprio uguale,” were Chiara’s first words to me when I got off the plane. You’re exactly the same. In the eight years since I’ve seen her, I have experienced the most drastic transformation of my life: I am now a mother. I feel changed. Still, I know what she means. Chiara has a huge baby belly, strands of gray in her thick black hair, and a lovely, high voice she uses only when talking to her son. But she is still my Chiara-- still patient, clear-hearted, generous, and kind. On my last morning in Rome we drink our hot milk together at the small kitchen table, both in our pajamas. The pan of brownies I made for her yesterday are almost gone, and I smile as she cuts herself another piece. We could almost be in our little apartment on Via delle Luglie in Siena, so many years ago. I smile again, thinking how this evening I can I tell my children that in Italy you can eat brownies for breakfast. Then Mattia calls to Chiara from the bedroom. “I’m coming!” she calls, and she goes to him.

Bedtime

This one is a few months old, but I'm always reluctant to share my poor attempts at poetry. Thankfully, Clayton has gotten over his fear of going to kindergarten, and spring finally seems to have arrived!

My son calls from his bed, distraught--

“I don’t want to go to kindergarten!”

Oh for heaven’s sakes!

It is eight months off, and after eight already

I am desperate to be alone, and done,

to read and eat a bowl of cereal,

to not be mom.

But my impatience makes no dent

I cannot ridicule this fear out of him,

nor make him laugh it gone

He cannot understand that change

is hardest from the side he’s on

so I sit on the edge of his bed and talk

of other things

the banana cake we’ll make his father

for his birthday

and valentines

and how, in spring,

we’ll go camping on the beach

and wake, amazed, to see the ocean

just beyond our tents.

“And the sand?” he asks, eyes bright

And the sand, I say,

and we grin at each other,

waiting for that morning that will come

and the bright blue sparkle

of spring.

Fleeting

Sylvia comes into my room in the morning on silent feet; the cat who slinks in through the opened door wakes me before she does. She says nothing, just grips the mattress in two fists and pulls herself up next to me. This morning it was four. Usually at that hour I would rise groggily and escort her to the bathroom and back to bed, worried that, sandwiched between her body and Don’s, I will not sleep, or that the six o’clock alarm will shortchange her precious rest.  

But Don is away on a conference, so there is no alarm, and the bed is mostly empty, so I move over to make room for her and pull the comforter up over her compact, fleece-clad form. With surprise I realize that, rather than my usual annoyance at the night waking, today I feel grateful for this warmth, this closeness. Sylvia says nothing, just reaches out to rest her foot against my leg. I feel her soft hand brush against my cheek, and then her breathing deepens and she is asleep.

Sylvia, in daytime hours, rarely wants to cuddle. She does not want to be hugged, or kissed, or carried.  Oppositional to her very core, she responds to each gesture of affection with defiance: “Don’t kiss me!” “No, you DON’T love me!”, “I am NOT a good girl!”  She can whip me into a rage with her stubbornness. Hair brushings, trips to the potty, carseat bucklings-- all become battlegrounds for our war of wills, leaving her crying angry tears and me growling with frustration. Last week she shrieked and wailed for half an hour because I dared to help her with her backpack as the car line for preschool pick-up stretched behind us.

At times like those, I resent how hard she makes it. Already I’ve become spoiled with the general ease of parenting now. I try to turn a deaf ear to her tantrums, but her screeching stresses me out and irritates me with its pointlessness.

“I guess she’s living up to the threatening threes,” Don says, and he’s right. I remember-- vaguely-- how infuriating Clayton could be at this age. Oh, wow, you really have your hands full, people would say when they saw the twins, but I’d insist they were easier together than my three-year-old son was alone.

Recently, after a weekend afternoon spent with the kids, Don commented, “It’s really amazing how they can totally infuriate you one minute and fill you with overwhelming love the next.”

As always, he nailed it. That’s why even though I pull my hair out in frustration multiple times a day, these days I feel suffused with a pervasive gratitude for this time with my children. And it is so hard to hold! Even the unforgettable moments that make me grit my teeth with their sweetness slip by and are forgotten. I look at pictures from mere months ago and think, “But that is not who they are now!” I watch mommies in cafes with their infants strapped to their backs, remember, and yet find it impossible to remember.

These words, I suppose, are my best bulwark against the inevitable forgetting. And yet I suspect that as heartbreaking as it can feel now, I will not always grieve their growing. When Clayton sets up his stuffed bear squad in bed to read them stories, or swaddles Pooh in an infant blanket so he can play “baby doll” with his sisters, my heart aches with the little boy sweetness of it, and the shift that will surely one day come. And yet, I feel so much pride at how he grows:  the easy, ripped-jeaned style of him, the carefully-printed letters of his name, his new and unexpected worldliness.

As parents, it is what saves us, that there is no losing without gaining, that each forgotten moment makes room for what comes next, each fleeting stage a prelude for what our children will become.

Three days have passed since I wrote this; already I do not remember the cute, unforgettable things I wanted to get down so that I would not forget!  But there are these:

A week ago, Sylvia stood by the refrigerator in her pajamas, erupting with vomit. Clayton and I heard the splatter and abandoned the bedtime story we were reading in his room. He looked at his sister, puke still streaming from her mouth and through her fingers, and burst into tears.

“What’s the matter, Clayton?” I asked him. “Are you afraid you’re going to get sick?” (This was my fear, after all.)

“No!” he said through his sobs. “I just love Sylvia!”

Healthy again, Clayton and Dee Dee want to put on a song and dance show for me.

“Boy ballerinas are just called dancers,” he clarifies to his sister before they begin. Then they turn off the lights in the kitchen and direct me to take my seat. Dee Dee sprints to her room to turn on her dance music CD and returns to stand side-by-side with her brother in the dark.

Clayton, suddenly self-conscious, says, “Actually, I’m sort of shy to sing by myself.” He nudges Dee Dee with his elbow. “Sing, Dee Dee! Sing!” he tells her. She doesn't know the words-- it’s the Macarena, after all, and who does?-- but she tries her best. Then the beat gets the best of them and they’re dancing, Clayton hurling himself into wild spins on the tile, and Dee Dee doing her best ballerina leaps. Sylvia stops communing with the dog to join in; she likes twirling around until the room spins around her.

I am grinning so big my cheeks hurt. They smile back at me; they always seem so overjoyed to see me happy.

“Why are you smiling?” they ask me, even though they know already.

But there is no answer big enough.

It has become obvious to me that so many of the moments I find most endearing involve my children being sweet or tender or playful with each other. I suspect that most parents feel this way. There is something almost primal about it, that surge of satisfaction I feel when the clan is momentarily united.

It happens most notably when we are in the car, their three car seats wedged together in the back of the Prius. The other day, on the way to a preschool class we all attend together, they played what can only be described as “Clayton Says.”  

“Take a nap!” Clayton would command, and all three would tilt their heads and squint their eyes closed.

“Now wake up!” Eyes pop open. Sylvia pops open her fingers, too, just for effect, and we all laugh.

“Now look out the window! Now take a nap. Now wake up!”

I can’t help giggling as I watch them in the rear-view mirror.

“What?” Clayton wants to know. He knows when I approve but likes to hear it just the same.

“You guys are  funny, that’s all,” I say. But, really, the feeling is so much bigger than that: my immense love for them and my intense gratitude to be sharing this moment with them all rolled up in a huge ball of feeling inside me, so big I have to laugh or I’ll explode.

On the way home, Sylvia starts chanting a little made-up song, and I can sense the other two listening. I catch Clayton’s eye in the rear view mirror and we grin at each other, knowing we’re both thinking the same thing. She’s just so cute! Again, I can’t keep from letting out a little of my joy.

“Don’t laugh!” Sylvia commands. “I’m just singing a song!” But, for once, she’s not really angry. She keeps singing-- and we keep listening-- all the way home.

Saying Yes

A few days ago, I was making lasagna, my hands covered in ricotta and mozzarella, when Sylvia trotted out of the bathroom, her pants around her ankles. “I pooped and peed!” she announced.

“Don!” I yelled. “Can you wipe?” I spooned tomato sauce atop the cheese and noodles, and thought, This is how it’s different.

Since I have begun parenting full-time, vacations have been hard for me. I still count down the weeks until school’s out, but once the vacation is underway, it’s hard for me not to feel a lurking disappointment. After all, vacation or not, life on the home front proceeds pretty much as usual. There is still the daily laundry to do, the meals to prepare, the small fires of sibling bickering to put out. On a regular day, if I get three loads of laundry put up, the floor swept, and the dinner made, I feel productive. But on a “vacation” day, the same ordinary tasks make me feel as if I have squandered precious time with the usual household drudgery. I have to make myself appreciate the little ways my life gets easier: I can finish making dinner uninterrupted instead of breaking to wipe a bottom.

I can see Don reveling in the down time he has at home. Every morning he makes a pot of real coffee instead of his workday mug of instant; an egg or two on toast replace his usual bowl of cereal. He stands with his coffee cup in hand, watching the squirrels’ acrobatics on the bird feeder, or warming his jeans in front of the fire. When Clayton asks, “Will you play with me?” or Dee Dee holds up a book she wants read, he immediately answers, “Sure!” When the kids ask me the same question, I am constantly putting them off. “Let me just put up this basket of laundry,” or “In a minute. I just have to finish....” Don just reheats his mug of coffee and settles in. He plays pirates with Clayton, holds a giggling Sylvia upside down, reads Dee Dee book after book. Effortlessly he transforms the chaos of our home into a vision of domestic bliss.

It’s not that he’s immune to the frustrations, either. The expletives have been flying around our house this week in an unprecedented manner. When we watched the little boy in A Christmas Story stand in the bathroom with soap in his mouth as punishment for his foul language, Clayton asked, “Did he say ‘Goddamn it?’” Given the words he has heard regularly this week, I was relieved that it was only that mild expletive he had chosen to parrot. But despite the intermittent swearing, Don exudes a peacefulness about being at home that so often eludes me. He doesn't rush the kids off to out-of-the-house activities; hour bleeds into hour, until, amazingly, dinnertime is upon us and the day winds down. When I return from a run or a morning out, I ask, “What have you all been up to?”

“A whole bunch of nothing!” he says cheerfully.

How hard it is for me to relax into that contentment! I can’t always quiet that voice in my head, urging me to go, do, move, accomplish... And then, of course, there is always something that needs to be done. I am amazed at the number of children’s books that feature some variation of the tension between a child’s desire for mom’s attention and the chores that claim her time. Maybe it’s because the sparsity of his time with them motivates Don to engage more readily with his children. Maybe it’s because he doesn't care quite so much if the house is deteriorating into a cluttered mess around him. Maybe it’s because, by the end of the day, I’d usually rather wash the dishes than play pirates. Whatever the reason, I am grateful both for the father Don is to our children and the way he inspires me to turn down the must-do-it-all mania and say “yes.”

Don’s brother’s son and his new fiancee are staying with us for a few days, and on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, we showed them around downtown. “I have to use the potty!” Dee Dee announced as we wandered through the Grove Arcade, admiring the ornate architecture and the gingerbread houses on display. Taking both girls to a public bathroom has, for me, easily topped the list of the challenges of having twins. I’ll be helping Dee Dee with her pants, only to see Sylvia belly-down on the floor, army-crawling into someone else’s stall, or examining the water in a toilet bowl, both hands on the rim. I’ll be wiping one bare bottom while the other one is streaking out the restroom door.

This time, when the three of us entered the restroom, a young mom with a baby stroller was waiting for the handicapped stall. The stroller was regular sized, not the double behemoth we used when the girls were infants, and the baby inside was invisible and silent. I might have made the kind of smug comments mothers of older kids always seem to make to those with infants: “Oh, enjoy that time! It goes by so fast!” or “Just wait until he’s moving! Then you’re in for it!” But what I felt seeing that mom with her infant stroller was not wistfulness. It was relief. Sure, you gets lots of long naps and convenient immobility. But then there’s the constant low-grade, useless anxiety; the baby luggage that must go everywhere; the gauntlet of wakeful nights and exhausted days; the yoke, however sweet, of being the one with the breasts.

As the mother maneuvered the stroller into the stall, Dee Dee disappeared into the one next to it. I heard the lock slide into place.

“Do you need some help, Deeds?” I asked.

“No,” she said matter-of-factly. “I've got it.”

All that afternoon, I continued to be awed by the ease. Incredibly, all three kids kept their hats and their coats on. They stayed on the sidewalk; they listened when we called for them to stop; they held our hands at the crosswalks without protest. Sure, Sylvia fell down, burst into tears, and would not take another step on her own power until safely inside the warmth of the ice-cream parlor. But what a wonder to walk around downtown, without a single baby worry of any kind, all of us pointing and exclaiming in unison: “Look at that Santa! See that sock monkey! Look!”

The Prius had never felt so cozy as it did on the ride home, with Sylvia immediately asleep in her carseat, and Clayton and Dee Dee chatting to each other peacefully beside her. When we arrived home, there was still an hour and a half until dinnertime. The manic voice inside my head roused itself from its stupor: “Just enough time to squeeze in a run!”

But I didn't. Instead, I watched while Don helped Clayton put together his new Lego spaceship and Dee Dee watched Beauty and the Beast for the sixth time-- “Mom, the Beast gave Belle a library!” I sewed new eyes onto the blue-footed booby that Howard had chewed off so many months ago, chatted with our neighbor at the mailbox, read a long letter from my sister, sauteed vegetables for quesadillas. The Christmas lights still sparkled on the tree, the fire flickered, the baby monitor hummed...

The snugness and peace that I’d felt in the car had crept into the house with us. Miraculously, it stayed. After dinner, I didn’t watch the clock, pushing everyone towards bath and bed.  Instead, I helped Dee Dee write a book about a Christmas mouse, while Clayton played with his new spaceship and Sylvia dragged her comforter into the living room to cover Howard, who was sleeping in a chair by the fire, then climbed up to cozy in next to him.

When we did, at last, begin the usual routine, I didn't feel as if I was tapping into my last reserves to make it through until bedtime. Instead, I felt buoyed up by a quiet peace. As the day-- and the year-- wound down, I took a hot bath with the girls instead of washing the dinner dishes. Afterwards, it was my turn to read Clayton’s books. “Can you make Pooh and Bo talk?” he asked. He wanted his stuffed bear squad to meet his new Lego aliens. Usually, that question makes me whine with exhaustion and impatience; I am desperate to be done. Clayton’s brow furrowed. I could see him anticipating my resistance. But that night, the force was with me.

“Sure,” I say. “Let’s do it.”

Here’s to another year of saying yes.