Tag: Italy

13Mar

Religulove

When we enrolled Natalie in first grade last September, we opted out of religion class. Even though we share some fundamental beliefs with the Roman Catholic Church, we weren’t comfortable with her learning doctrine as an academic subject. Frankly, I find it incredibly dangerous when any religion is painted in the same black and white lines as grammar or algebra—right versus wrong, subject to a grade—and I’d like to think that we would have opted out of the class even if it had taught our exact beliefs. (Sunday School is a whole ‘nother ball of wax, but it’s easier to discuss what the girls learn there without having to discredit the entire academic system.)

I was at peace with our decision until we picked Natalie up after her first Friday at school. She was as cheerful as ever, happily recounting how she had gotten to go out in the hallway during religion hour and watch the other teachers have their coffee. I was… less cheerful. Bit by bit, Dan and I uncovered that Natalie was the only child in the entire elementary school in the entire course of its history to opt out of religion class, and the teachers didn’t know what to do with her other than send her out of the room. My heart thudded straight down onto our granite tiles.

I know all too well what it is to be the odd child out… the only kid at the grocery mid-morning, the only girl in our homeschool group wearing a jumper, the only teen not pledging for True Love Waits. I remember the icy sense of exposure and the sharp loneliness, and I’ve never, ever, evereverever wanted to subject my daughters to them. However, that’s exactly what I found myself doing that Friday, wielding religious principles that banished my six-year-old to the hallway.

I hurt all over for her, but Natalie was clearly not bothered by skipping class, so Dan and I didn’t push the issue. Instead, we talked to the teachers and arranged for her to join the other first-grade class while hers was doing religion. Some of the other parents overheard us, and the next Friday, Natalie was joined by a little boy. For all the countercultural drama we were putting her through, at least she was no longer alone.

The subject of religion class hasn’t really come up in the months since, but this morning, the little boy’s mother caught up with me after school drop-off. “Guess what I found!” she chirped, taking my arm as if this were the seventy millionth instead of the very first time we’d talked. (I immediately wanted to kick myself for not introducing myself sooner. Or, you know, at all.) “Looking through my son’s workbook, I found a little note he had written during religion hour: ‘Dear Natalie, you are beautiful!’” We laughed together, and I felt a little like crying and a little like skipping all at once. She asked about our church (evangelical), and I asked about theirs (Muslim), and it didn’t matter a single bit that some members of both our religions dedicate energy to hating each other. Our faiths didn’t affect our ability to be friends.

And yes, I know I’m realizing things all the time on this blog that are probably common sense to most people and it’s got to be irritating by now, but I realized in those three minutes of conversation that this is the lesson we’re teaching Natalie with our lives here. She and her classmates might not attend the same church, but our families’ homes are open to each other. We share meals and swap recipes and give each other’s children rides, and if I hadn’t been bracing myself so hard against alienation, I might have noticed sooner that there was no need. Our differences don’t prevent us from loving each other well. Our separate journeys with God don’t make us enemies. That this is even possible makes my soul giddy with hope, and I find myself grateful in a way I couldn’t have imagined last September that my daughter gets a front-row seat.

17Feb

Shelled

One thing I have learned a lot about over the past year is that Italians do community they way they do pasta: effortlessly, enthusiastically, and often. It’s both one of the most daunting and one of the most delightful aspects of life here.

The above picture I snapped at yesterday’s neighborhood Carnevale parade isn’t likely to win any photography awards.  In fact, I don’t even recognize anyone in it (that may or may not have anything to do with the camera angle), but I love it regardless. The people in it made up a small portion of the neighbors who paraded the streets yesterday disturbing the peace with high-volume joy. Little girls skipped through snow slush in their princess dresses, and little boys dressed as pirates tried to make it more than two yards before staging another sword fight, and grandparents held hands, and we mamas chatted over the clatter of homemade maracas while keeping an eye out for each other’s offspring. We were superbly loud.

Do you see the police car at the front of the line? Several officers came out to block traffic for us, and it made my heart swell every time one of their firm faces cracked into a grin at all the exuberance. Even the car drivers, whose big important plans were having to wait for short legs, waved and cheered from the sidelines. And do you see the man across the street toward the left of the photo wearing a bright blue scarf? His name is Michele, which I now know because the crowd made up a cheer for him as we walked past. I mean, why not?

After looping the neighborhood, we all squeezed into the elementary school gym for an epic dance party complete with disco lights and paper ribbon explosions, and it struck me that what I was doing at that moment—boogying with my girls and admiring their friends’ costumes and making plans for a moms-only date night and laughing with my neighbors—was exactly what we’d hoped for in moving to Italy. Doing community. Sure, neighborhood-wide disco parties can daunt an introvert like me into hiding, but it turns out that the delight of inclusion, of intentional, joyful togetherness, is just the thing to sweep an introvert like me right out of her shell.

 Carnevale Sophie(Not an introvert.)

26Jan

Prayer and Pixie Dust

This might sound crazy, but I prayed for Disney World.

By the tail end of our month in the States, our Christmas trip was beginning to resemble a parade of unavoidable expenses—tolls, Urgent Care x 2, gasoline x a million, and ever-mounting bureaucratic fees for the paperwork we had traveled to get—and despite the gorgeous generosity of friends and family who welcomed us in, we just couldn’t swing a day with Mickey Mouse.

That realization hurt like a choke chain yanking us straight back to our credit card bill. There we were in Orlando for the last time in our foreseeable future with a few days to spare and two little girls who spent a solid 45 minutes in the Disney Store pretending to be princesses.  The girls weren’t expecting anything more, and maybe that was part of why I ached so much to take them… especially Natalie who softly read every Disney World billboard we passed on the way to get her broken arm set. So I prayed.

You should know I’m no good at praying. The church traditions of my past have left a script in my mind from which I rarely find words to deviate. I don’t know how to be honest with my head bowed and eyes closed. Instead, I’ve learned how to feel, careful not to muddy my heart’s surface with thoughts, and I imagine that I’m directing that feeling toward someone who cares. This time, logic scolded me for asking God for something so frivolous when people all over the world struggle with very real needs. My brain followed this up with a cynical laugh because really, I expected someone to just up and offer $400 worth of tickets to a strange little family from Italy? My heart wouldn’t stop hoping though, so I blocked out cynicism and logic and felt as earnestly as I could, following up with “please.”

And wouldn’t you know, someone just up and offered $400 worth of tickets to our strange little family two days before we returned to Italy.

Words can’t express.

The girls leading the way - 2

We’re back in Italy now, adjusting to the time difference and unpacking far more than we remember packing, and if jet lag weren’t already doing the job, my gratefulness at being home would keep me in a waking stupor. A string of miracles is the only thing that got us there and back again, which anyone who’s ever approached Italian government offices with a deadline can confirm. We’re starting 2012 with little certainty but with enough hope and possibility to make up for it fifty times over, and each time the choke chain has started to tighten this week, I’ve relaxed back into the glow of this—answered prayer, extra pixie dust included.

Disney World collage

3Oct

The Rest Laid Plans

My calendar says I’m at work teaching businessmen the future tense right now, but in actuality, I’m stretched out on our living room couch with a post-cappuccino buzz and a glowing sense of… survival? victory? impending insanity? Whatever it is, it’s much more pleasant than I would have anticipated Friday afternoon when this all started…

Our trip had been going almost too well. The girls and I had pulled out of the driveway a full minute ahead of schedule, ready with our individual lunchboxes and sun-dappled tunes, and the traffic gods had smiled on us. I’d been nervous to do the 4 ½ hour drive solo with the girls, but just past the halfway point, I was finally relaxing into the easy rhythm of the road, daydreaming about my upcoming date night.

That’s when the alarm went off. I didn’t even know our car had an alarm until it was shrieking at me and pulsing bright red letters on the display: “STOP! STOP! STOP!” I stopped. Hoping it was just a glitch or maybe something easily solved with violence, I consulted our car’s manual. “Low oil pressure—Do not turn on the engine!!!” Well poo.

I had never arranged for roadside assistance before, much less in a foreign language, but two hours, twenty-five phone calls, and one entirely justifiable crying jag later, the girls and I found ourselves high atop a car carrier exiting to The Middle of Nowhere, Emilia-Romagna. “We’re having an adventure!” I cheered while secretly wondering if we’d have to spend the night fighting off wild boars and vagabonds in the surrounding forest.

Collage - Atop the car carrier

“All the mechanics are closed for the weekend,” the roadside assister chided as he deposited our car in a parking lot, strongly implying that a more responsible driver would have broken down during normal working hours. “I’ll take it somewhere Monday,” he concluded, taking off his work vest and getting halfway into his own car before pausing. “Want a ride to the train station?” Oh yes, thank goodness, yes.

The train station was tiny and already emptied out for the weekend, but I had enough coins for the automatic ticket machine, and the girls nearly launched themselves onto the tracks for joy. I have to admit, trains are fun. They’re relaxing and exciting all at once, and passengers have no responsibilities apart from reminding their overly delighted daughters to tone down the shrieking and jumping please for the love of all that is holy and sane. We read stories and ate chocolate muffins and weren’t stranded in the forest, and for the entire duration of our ride to Bologna, I felt nothing but optimistic.

I might not have been so glib had I realized that the Bologna train station is basically a mile-long zoo dotted with ticket machines that don’t work and shifty-eyed loiterers and train conductors that slam the door in the face of desperate mothers running up with two young children, four bags, and assorted accessories. Thanks in part to Ms. Conductorzilla, we missed our connecting train by a matter of seconds, and in the process, I mysteriously cut my hand and managed to strew objects all over the platform. It was not the brightest moment of my life to date.

However, I pulled it together, found a bandage, purchased tickets for the 9:45 train to Milan, and took the girls out for a leisurely dinner at McDonald’s. Date night plans were pretty much shot at this point, but at least the girls and I had plenty of time to relax over Happy Meals and maybe do a bit of sightseeing before catching our train. We settled down at the table with our food, and Natalie asked me to check the tickets. I obliged, but they said exactly the same thing that they had every other time I’d checked: “Arrival – 9:45.”

Wait.

Arrival?

Oh no oh no oh no oh no. There on the other side of the ticket, the side I had somehow managed not to see up until that point, was clearly stamped: “Departure – 8:40.” I didn’t breathe as I checked the time on my phone.

8:37.

Well damned if we were going to miss a second train that evening. I dumped everything I could from the table into my purse without bothering to zip it, grabbed every bag and child in sight, and began to run. Mercifully, the restaurant was only a block away from the station, but once we got in, there were crowds of people to navigate (while shouting “Excuse me!” in whatever language came to mind) and then two separate flights of stairs. I was dragging Sophie along at top speed and trying not to cry from desperation when it suddenly registered that the girls were laughing. Not just laughing but guffawing. Sophie was laughing so hard that she doubled over, and that’s when I realized she had lost two rather important items on our dash down the stairs: 1) pants, 2) underwear.

Both girls promptly fell over from laughing so hard, and I couldn’t tell whether I was laughing or crying as I sprawled on the floor trying to get Sophie presentable again, and it felt like an eternity before I had collected both children and luggage (my bearings being long gone), and we lunged onto the closest train without checking, and it hurt to breathe, and I didn’t see how I’d survive if we had gotten on the wrong one after all that.

Miracles were on our side though. Not only were we on the right train—and with a generous thirty seconds to spare—but we were on the right car and standing directly in front of the right seats. The entire way to Milan, the girls and I dissolved into giggling fits while I fished individual fries out of my purse and reminded my brain to stuff the What Ifs. We got plenty of looks from other passengers, but when one has just done the impossible and gotten her hysterical, semi-clothed  children and their dinners from a restaurant onto a train in two minutes and thirty seconds, one doesn’t tend to value dignity quite as highly as she otherwise might.

Collage - Making it to Milan

I dropped the girls off with their beloved Uncle Mike and caught the last train of the night up to Lake Como, arriving at the banquet just after midnight in smudged jeans and who-cares hair. It wasn’t exactly the Cinderella evening I had envisioned.

But then again, I hadn’t envisioned how deliciously relaxing it would feel to hold hands with my husband under the stars with a good glass of wine and the whisper of water over rocks… or how luscious it would feel to sleep the next morning away in a king size bed… or how perfect a simple carpaccio would taste for breakfast lunch on the waterfront… or how complete I would feel the next evening when the four of us were together again, walking hand in hand along Milan’s navigli.

Collage - Loveliness

The only thing that really cast a damper over my weekend was knowing I’d have to get up ridiculously early this morning to take public transportation to work. It felt especially overwhelming last night around 1 a.m., having just arrived home and wanting nothing so much as to put a hold on responsibility. Here too, though, the chaos of upended plans rearranged to reveal miracle, because when an all-day bus strike was announced for our city, being car-less and reliant on public transportation got me exactly what I went to Lake Como to find in the first place: a day of rest.

23Aug

Unknown v. 2.0

August 3rd slipped by this year without a hint of fanfare (unless you count a dirty house as a celebratory tradition); it was a normal Wednesday in a normal workweek in a normal summer, and it completely slipped my mind that this normal was once the sheer unknown gaping underneath.

Four years ago, we packed our lives into a motley assortment of boxes and tracked a thing with feathers across the Atlantic. Through miracle and determination, Dan had found a job here that fit his abilities perfectly, and the opportunity to finally, finally take on our dream was marvel and terror at once. Some nights, we danced in a buzz of ideas, lit from the inside out with the champagne-glow of adventure. Other nights, we lay creased in thought, my hand resting on the precious variable in my womb as the whens and hows circled like vultures overhead.

There was no gingerly edging off the beaten path, no feeling out each new step from the safety of solid ground, no road signs assuring prosperity in 4,500 miles. All we had was the blank expanse of possibility and the faith to leap, spurred on by knowing our options boiled down to courage or regret. We took the leap, and on August 3rd, 2007, we landed on Italian soil to begin forging our new normal. In the four years since, we’ve settled into the comfort of friendships and routine, language becoming ever less of a barrier and the Italian culture sinking ever deeper into our bones. It’s more than we could have hoped for when we boarded the jet back in Philadelphia…

…which makes this new drop-off all the more dizzying.

Dan has turned in his job resignation. It was necessary for a variety of reasons, and it was time, but oh. We’re here again with the buzzing ideas and circling questions, minus one occupied womb and plus one meticulously written business plan, and while there are possibilities that make our heads spin with goodness, they’re still only possibilities. Our now-normal has a windblown pang to it. I keep taking mental inventory against my better judgment and trying to work out which facets of our life—home? church? friends? money?—will still be in place come Christmas. My heart balks as the calendar pulls us forward.

Never mind that we wouldn’t be here in the first place without that leap off the edge of reason; I don’t want to do it again. I don’t want that momentary weightlessness above the dark pit of my imaginings. I don’t want to have to rely so completely on a divine intention I still have difficulty trusting (and sometimes believing at all). I just want someone who can peek into the future and put a stamp of guarantee on our steps before we plunge into them. I would like the risk eliminated altogether, thankyouverymuch.

But if I’m honest with myself, it’s only the narrowest bit of my mind that’s clinging to the notion of safety. The broader scope of who I am recognizes that ours, like any good story in the making, runs on the cogs of adventure. These tenuous days swinging between doubt and hope are paragraph spaces in an unfolding work of art that teaches us to live as protagonists rather than as background filler, and the process is nothing short of exhilarating.

It seems clear that August 3rd has served its time as a memorial to our story and is now ready to pass on the honor to a new date, a new landing—whenever and however it may be.

31Mar

Catnip

I’ve written before about how my childhood springtimes in Texas failed to coax any drop of sentimentality out of me. In fact, I couldn’t understand why so many people went into raptures around the end of March. Our primary spring imports were mud and allergies, and the weather’s slow slide from warm to really warm hardly seemed worth rhapsodizing. (It’s entirely possible, of course, that I could have put more effort into noticing the seasonal beauty, but I was always loyal to autumn with its crackling leaf piles and nutty breezes.)

Here in Italy, however, this time of year is like personalized catnip. Only a flimsy fondness for decorum keeps me from rolling around in every patch of wild daisies I see, paws flying and propriety punch-drunk on sunshine. Not only have I stopped minding when others wax poetic about spring, I’ve started my own list of celebratory ballad topics:

  • The sight of freshly washed socks tiptoeing on the line rather than slung over radiators to steam dry. (If any of you knows Journey’s song-writing team, you’re welcome to direct them here.)
  • The scent of my favorite lemon perfume laced with memories of Sorrento and excitement over this Easter’s camping trip.
  • The texture of damp earth, the elemental weight of seeds between finger and thumb, and the whisper-touch of newborn plants.
  • The sound of the girls’ laughter spirited away by the open air, waltzing in windows and back out to whirl under their footsteps.
  • The flavor of 2011’s first strawberries, sorbet for dessert, and cherry blossoms dished up on periwinkle breeze.

Plum blossoms in the backyard

What about you? Does anything about this time of year stir you into a feline frenzy and/or inspire you to poeticize socks?

23Mar

Harebrained

Admittedly, our weekend in Rome wasn’t the most harebrained idea I’ve ever jumped on, but it clearly was not the work of a sound mind. One daughter was vomiting, you see. The other was dealing with a bout of “poop juice” (what her term lacks in delicacy it more than makes up for in originality), and I was feverish from a mild case of food poisoning. However, one’s husband only runs his first marathon once, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to cheer him on. Besides, it was Rome. Cobblestone streets, gold-plated basilicas, Colosseums, Rome. We were all going.

As close as we got to the starting line  2

The decision was at least 30% mistake. The family and friends of 14,000 racers seeped along the streets carrying curious tourists along, and a sickly mama with a preschooler attached to each arm was no match for the full-bodied tide. We never made it within 300 meters of the starting line, and we were somehow less successful at finding the finish.  As for my vision of popping up around the city like moles with Metro passes, arriving at famous monuments with impeccable timing to whistle and snap artsy photos as Dan ran past… well, we were actually more like earthworms, inching from the underground stops in pale discombobulation and completely missing our first pre-planned photo opportunity because we were lying belly-up in the sun.

Basking in the sun

However, for all its faults, the experience was one I’m glad I took life up on. Had the girls and I stayed curled under familiar blankets, we wouldn’t have gotten to watch spring wake fresh-faced from her beauty sleep and beam into the niches of the Eternal City. It was a rare kind of pleasure to sit on a marble bench in the Piazza del Popolo with the sun freckling my nose and the girls napping on my lap while we waited for Dan to sweep by on the stream of marathon runners. For that hour, we had no obligation to tour or snap photos or do anything; it was a golden opportunity to just be, and the unplanned respite could not have been more perfect. While tourists milled around surreptitiously snapping photos of us (“I’ve never seen such a sight in all of Rome,” grinned the man who offered to take a shot on my camera), I soaked up spring and the precious nearness of my still-little girls.

We were a tourist attraction 2

And then my husband ran past—kilometer 37 of 42.2—and it was incredible to see his hard work and dedication in every footstep planted on centuries’-old pavement.   We smiled at each other like married people do, one in sickness, one in health, both calculating the experiences of our life together and coming up rich. Then he turned the corner, the girls and I collected our jackets and sickness bags, and all four of us headed on jellied legs toward the finish.

Daniel at kilometer 37 - Cropped

That was about the time the girls and I got lost and Dan ended up dehydrated and we realized it was three in the afternoon and some of us hadn’t eaten in 24 hours and our parking meter ran out and the glamor of our adventure was trampled under tired feet and I decided that next year I’m limiting my spring-welcoming activities to opening windows and potting flowers. Still, even our least sane ideas lead to experiences that we cherish as our family’s most valuable keepsakes, and there’s no doubt in my feverish, harebrained mind that we left Rome richer than we came.

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