Return to Italy

I know I said I was going out of town, and the erratic blog posting reflected that, but I didn’t really say much about the trip. There was too much going on with it, and it was taking a toll. Now I’m ready to start writing.

Just to catch up anyone who doesn’t already know, my mother is Italian. She married an American soldier who was stationed there when she was seventeen, coming to America just before she turned eighteen. All of her family is in Vicenza.

Julie and Maria and I have all been there with Mom, but not together. We have seen a fair amount of things. Vicenza is pretty close to Venice and Verona, so we have been there, and other places in the area, but only in that area.

The three of us really wanted to go together and see other places. Specifically, we wanted to go to Florence and Rome, and some other places nearby, and see family, of course. We will always want to see them. We were looking at September, and trying to figure out do we drop Mom off in Vicenza, or bring her for part of it, and all of that, and then things changed.

Our brother and his wife planned a tour of Italy that would end in Venice, so near Vicenza, and they wanted to see family, and they needed someone there who spoke the language. The time range they were looking at was May 19th through 21st, but it ended up just being the 21st.

I tried to find a way to make everything work, but it was not happening, and then Maria’s boss would not let her have the time off, and suddenly I realized that our trip was not happening now. Mom needed to go; that couldn’t wait. She could not go alone, and I did argue that it might make more sense for Julie to go with her, because Julie earns more, and gets more time off, but really, it was always going to be me. I speak the language, I have the patience, and it was just how it was going to be.

And honestly, there was some relief in figuring that out, because suddenly we had a plan that worked, but it wasn’t what we wanted at all. I don’t know when we will get our trip, but pretty much everything we wanted to see, my brother and his wife have now already seen. And it was fair, because he had not been in Italy since he was three, and remembered nothing, and she had never been, and we have all at least had some experiences and met everyone, but it also felt like an imposition, and that maybe we should have said something, but we waited too long, and so there was stress there.

There were other things to make it not completely relaxing either. Mom was stressing about the trip, and it was my job to keep talking her down from the ledge. Many of her concerns were valid. It is a physically exhausting trip, all of her surviving siblings are old, and yes, there were absolutely money concerns, though a few months wouldn’t have made too big of a difference there.

A few months could make a difference for Mom seeing her family though. When she and I went in 2008, I remember feeling a sense of urgency about it, like we couldn’t keep putting it off. A few months after we got back, one brother died, and then a few months after that, a sister. And they were the ones you would never have expected. Mom is the youngest, but Paolo was just above her, and Luciana was so vibrant. Now there are the two oldest, who will be 91 and 90 in August, and the fourth oldest, who has Alzheimers. It was not going to be easy, and there was this sense that after getting back the phone calls would start in a few months, and we would lose them all. And that’s not a reason to delay going, but it doesn’t make you feel eager either.

Some of it is that I was in a funk too. Part of that was the stress of the trip, but it was not only that. I was trying to do too much, and getting worn out. I felt like my writing was missing some spark, and I wasn’t getting anywhere with my reading, and was just overtired.

No one tells you “Oh poor baby, you have to go to Italy,” unless they are saying it sarcastically. And I didn’t really want anyone to say that, but what they were saying was “Lucky” and “I’m so jealous” and that did not feel right at all. I was leaving my sisters behind, and facing age and death (and fretfulness), and possibly resenting my brother, and I was stressed, and not feeling the way I wanted to feel.

I was also going to the place I love, with the people I love, and for reasons that I had felt were right, so I had to trust and see how things would turn out.