Sometimes I don't make a bit of sense

I haven’t disappeared, or given up blogging… but the husband’s gone back to Italy and this means two things: I am the children’s number one entertainer and my photo editor, organizer and transferer from memory card to computer is gone. Hence, no writing and certainly no photos. Alas (or thankfully, depending on the points of view) we are flying back to Italy next week and we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming.

I wrote this post last week (or the week before, have completely lost track of time) and though it is long and rambling and not completely coherent I felt bad just leaving it sitting there so am posting. So for now, I leave you with this, and I’ll be back to writing and commenting (and tweeting, pining and what have you) next week if the jet-lag and my two kids don’t kill me.

The question I hated the most at the beginning of the whole leukemia saga was “how are you?”, with the head tilt and the concerned expression. And my answer was always “fine”, because what the hell else was I supposed to say, right?

I certainly couldn’t answer: “I feel like something large and slobbery ate me, digested me and shit me out and I was just barely conscious enough to experience it all”, because, well, who wants to hear that, and what could they possibly say in return. 

After two years nobody asks me that anymore, people go on with their lives and even though the husband actually was re-diagnosed this year and had a second transplant, the news was old and trite and simply didn’t elicit the same sensationalistic reactions. Which kind of surprised me, on the one hand, because obviously with cancer if someone relapses pretty quickly after treatment the odds of them surviving kind of start going down. On the other hand, I had fewer questions to answer and fewer people to reassure and that was definitely a good thing for me.

Now, though, I’m seeing lots of people that I hadn’t seen since before the illness so the how are yous have started all over again. And this time around, with a teeny bit more maturity and distance from the fact I’ve started giving it some actual thought. How am I? The first thing that popped into my mind when I thought this was, well, I’m way better than I would be if the husband had died aren’t I? Certainly on the more positive side of the spectrum as far as possible attitudes go, but not quite comforting either.

How am I?

I’m a little sadder, generally, than I used to be. Not about anything specific, I just used to be more happy-go-lucky. I’m a little more distant I’m trying to let go of my expectations. I’ve had some disappointments, throughout these two years of the husband’s illness, from people I thought would be closer to me, from people that really should have been closer to me, but I’ve learned something very important in the process. Most of our disappointments are the result of our expectations, if we can let go of those our lives will be much easier. I hope I learn to do this in this lifetime.

I also have a more developed sense of what’s important in life. Not that I don’t often find myself wasting time and energy on futile feelings and actions but I’m learning to recognize them as unimportant, and I hope to get to the point of just letting them go (soon). 

So, how am I doing? Better than I would have thought, worst than some people think. It isn’t all water under the bridge yet, unfortunately. Every day that passes that the Husband doesn’t relapse is a good day, but we don’t know it’s a good day until it’s over. It’s like you wake up and hold part of your breath, and you hold it all day, and at the end of the day you breathe out and think phew, one day further from the transplant. Every day we’re a little more optimistic, but the illness is still very much a part of our lives. Even though the people around us forget, and thank goodness that they do, we don’t forget. Not ever.

So this makes me more emotional and I have a shorter temper especially when I see people close to me getting angry and upset over stupid little things. I want to tell them, you’re alive, you’re healthy, you’re loved, stop fucking worrying about what people think about you, or stop getting mad because that guy cut you off or who the hell cares that this or that wasn’t perfect, but this is what people do and who am I to say they shouldn’t.

I find I’ve distanced myself emotionally from many of the people I love, but that happens I think when you try and let go of your expectations. With no expectations there are no disappointments, but there’s a certain, necessary, emotional aridity that’s a direct result.

So, how am I? Well, I haven’t really figured it out yet, but at least I’ve started asking the question too, and maybe, hopefully, someday soon I’ll know and I’ll start feeling normal again. 

Virtual Coffee {26}

Hello dear friends, and welcome to coffee. I can’t believe it’s been three weeks since our last virtual coffee together! (I’m refraining from segueing with “where has the time flown” as we’re not quite eighty yet…) Let’s get our favorite topic, the weather, out of the way first, shall we? Our crazy climatic conditions continue (oh, how I love alliterations!), you may remember we had a pretty cool and dreary summer, an inexplicably hot September and about 5 minutes of autumn. Today it has started snowing. Yes, snowing.

Of course it’s not snow snow yet it’s still that gross, slushy, wet thing that looks like snow coming down, splatters on your windshield but then turns to water as soon as it hits the ground. Up where the husband works (which is also where I go and pretend to work a couple days a week), it’s actually snowing, real snow. Which is fantastic because since the leaves haven’t finished falling off the trees yet the tree branches get really heavy with snow and break off. This is so great on so many levels! Let’s see, well first you have to watch where you park because those lovely falling branches tend to land on parked cars, and there’s no point trying to park away from the trees as we work on a mountain covered in pine and chestnut trees. Also, the branches like to fall on telephone lines, which is so exciting cause then we get to work with no phones for months and months because we live in a beautiful albeit completely inefficient country (see how I switched those around?) where it takes the phone company three months to come repair our phone lines. (Three months is not an estimate or an ironic exaggeration of reality, it actually happened just like this two years ago when it also started snowing way ahead of time). Unfortunately, I won’t be able to go visit this winter wonderland we call our workplace because I haven’t finished fishing out all our winter stuff from storage, and the husband can’t seriously expect me to go work and risk catching a cold cause am inappropriately dressed now can he!

Setting sarcasm aside, the past few weeks have been both crappy and great, since I’ve posted on the crappy enough this week let’s talk about the great. The husband and I went off on a wonderful weekend getaway to Milan two weekends ago. A weekend in a nice hotel was my birthday present, and since we had a really good friend’s fortieth birthday to celebrate we decided to treat ourselves to some child-free time. It was wonderful, and very, very strange. We simply aren’t used to being without two very short, needy, hilarious and cuddly people all the time, so we kept looking around for them all weekend. It was fun spending time alone in a city we loved and lived in for many years. It brought us back to the early years of our marriage and to another life of dinners in nice restaurants, aperitifs in chic bars, of buzzing in and out of beautiful shops with nary a care in the world. It was also nice being pampered in a lovely hotel, of course we had forgotten how snooty people in the service industry were in Milan, but all in all we had a great time. Oh, and did I mention I did some shopping? Ahem, let’s leave it at that.

I’m still waiting on my other birthday present, which was supposed to be a KitchenAid all-purpose mixer/blender thingy, but isn’t cause I already have one (that’s another, less design-y brand) that works fine and has all the attachment pieces already, and so was swapped with a Le Creuset pot. I’ve been coveting one of these for years, and am very excited to try all the wonderful roasts and stews in it. If only my husband would get his act together  and take me to buy it (hint, hint, wink, cough).

Ok, my coffee’s gotten cold and all the dreary wet snow outside is making me sleepy so I’m done rambling on today. How’s about you? What have you been up to? Do you own a le creuset or a kitchen aid, would you recommend them to your friends?

Now go visit our hostess Amy!

Identity Crisis

I’ve mentioned before that I had a rather varied childhood. Parents from two different countries and cultures, born in Italy, moved to US when I was seven, went to a French school (in the US, started school in the British system in Italy – starting school in Texas with a heavily British accent was loads of fun, as you can imagine, I didn’t get picked on at all), moved back to Italy for University, but home was always Texas… until I got married.

Let me start off by saying that I count myself to be an extremely lucky, privileged person because I got to experience many different cultures firsthand. Our family friends in the US, the people I grew up with, my virtual aunts and uncles and cousins, are from all over the world. I remember when I watched “My big fat Greek wedding” I spent the entire movie going OMG, that’s so familiar, even though I’m nowhere near Greek and had never been to Greece until a few years ago, but many of my Mom’s girlfriends are Greek so, for example, we would often celebrate Easter at our house and (usually) a week later Greek Easter at one of her friend’s house. I went to a French International school for seven years, I had friends from Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela, Canada, Pakistan, Iran, France, the US, Algeria… I could go on and on, but you get my point. I lived and breathed so many cultures, each family had it’s own different quirks and customs that being slightly different was totally normal.

But now… well now I live in rural Italy, where being different is just different. And the thing is that the longer that I’m away from “home” and, absurdly, “home” to me is still Houston though I haven’t lived there full time in fifteen years the harder it is for me to define my own identity. I look and sound Italian, in fact, I am Italian, although I’m actually not, not really. I don’t have any of the shared childhood experiences that Italians have. I don’t recognize half the stuff they talk about, they don’t know half the stuff I talk about, there’s no common ground. My childhood has much more in common with American kids… but I’m not American (incidentally, I will never forgive my father for refusing to apply for citizenship, which we could have done, about a million times!).

I have a friend here who is me, in reverse, she’s American but grew up in Italy, her dad’s American her mom is foreign. She’s been here since she was seven. She is way more Italian than me, and I’m way more American than her, yet our passports say otherwise.

It got me thinking about how important, how much of an impact the way in which we spend our formative years is. Overall, I’ve lived more years of my life in Italy and yet my Italian friends often wonder how I could possibly be so foreign. This led me to believe that the greater part of our character, our opinions, our belief system is created when we’re young. As adults we can tweak, we can use our more mature rationale to improve ourselves, possibly to let go of some insecurities or to develop our strengths, but the core of who we are is a result of our childhood and young adulthood.

The other day I was talking to my new therapist, and I was telling him that I got some very negative reactions when the Husband got sick because I needed to talk about the possibility that he could die. I felt it was important, imperative even, for me to know what he would want should he die. When my Dad died my Mom knew exactly what he would have wanted and not having to decide anything, just having to follow directions was a huge burden off her shoulders. The husband knows me and agreed that it was necessary and had no problem discussing it with me. His family was appalled. My therapist commented that of course his family was appalled, I’d grown up in a culture where death is not danced around too much. It’s a fact of life. Of course, different people react to it in different ways, but there’s much less stigma about death in the US than there is in Italy. In Italy death is something one doesn’t mention, it’s a huge taboo, he said it probably has to do with the extent to which the Catholic Church permeates everyday life. I tend to agree. (He also informed me that in Italy there’s no such thing as a DNR order, this freaked me the hell out.)

Most of the time I walk around feeling foreign in my own country, the other half of the time I walk around feeling foreign in the US cause I haven’t lived there in so long. It’s exhausting. I remember when the whole Janet Jackson Super Bowl debacle happened and the ensuing uproar in America, I was like, what the hell, y’all, it’s just a boob! – A very Italian reaction. So every once in a while I wonder, who or what am I?

When people ask me where I’m from it makes me want to jump off a bridge screeching because the answer’s so drawn out and complicated. And believe me, I’ve tried simple. For example, I get to talking with a new mom at the park and she inevitably asks where I’m from cause my accent in Italian is slightly different from here as I lived for many years in Milan. So I’m like, oh, I’m from Milan. Short, simple, sweet. But then the Boy will come up and ask me something or I yell at him to not push his sister off the slide, and I do it in English, cause I talk to my kids in English, reflexively. So the mom, raised eyebrow, says, wow your English is really good, so I have to answer oh, I grew up in the US and I swear to you, somehow, the conversation spirals from there into something way more convoluted than you’d want with a total stranger at the park. I can’t seem to avoid it.

I don’t know, maybe this whole mental mayhem I’m going through right now is just a consequence of having been gone from the US for far too long (three years (shudder) up until the husband got sick I had always gone at least twice a year). I used to always find a balance between my Italian, my American and my (albeit small) Brazilian side and now I just need to recharge my American batteries for a while. In fact, lately I find myself teary-eyed every time I hear that Michael Buble song “I want to go home”-

To this end I’ve finally decided I’m going to Houston in November! For a month! Maybe even six weeks! I’ll be there for Thanksgiving! Oh my god a real, honest to goodness American Thanksgiving, with my family, in America! In Houston! Where you can wear shorts at the end of November and there’s no snow to speak of!

And wow, I actually had to write the longest post ever written just to slip that in!