la festa della mamma
on becoming a mom and learning
how to raise a baby, and myself, in a foreign culture
When a baby is born in Italy, it’s common for that home to be bombarded with pale pink or light blue decorations. Balloons, ribbons, bows, streamers. “Benvenuta Chiara! Benvenuto Giovanni!”
This fanfare will live until the sun has taken it’s time fading the colors over weeks and weeks. The welcoming of a new life in an Italian family is celebrated in a way so much bigger than I’ve ever experienced. I get it now, after some time here… It’s the birth of a new generation of a long line of history in a culture deeply ingrained with a reverence for tradition. When COVID hit Italy, it devastated a vast population of grandparents first. In the aftermath, one can’t help but see how the value of new life, new babies, new mothers and mothers twice and three times over again are worshipped. Treasured. Even if the babies don’t belong to their own lineage. New life is the extension of your legacy.
The first time I felt a fragment of this was when my daughter was about six weeks old. It was the beginning of June 2021 and after weeks of rest from my c-section I decided I was ready to drive, very carefully, alone with my baby girl. For anyone with a newborn, I know what you’re thinking, “oh my god, DJ, how long before that little potato started wailing in the backseat and you couldn’t even twist to see what was wrong???” Answer: Not long! I made it about five minutes down the mountain before all hell broke loose and I had to stop at the largest church near our home. It has this huge parking lot that overlooks downtown and north towards the Alps, a great cafe. Wisteria blooms here during April. It’s one of my favorite places to be, and mostly because of the moments that came next…
Fact: When a newborn baby cries it sends this grating, horribly painful feeling searing through a mother. It’s hard to explain and impossible to prepare yourself for, but that specific cry sends shockwaves through your soul. The fact that at times it’s near impossible to decipher what is wrong or how to fix it only exasperates a mother’s stress. And when we’re stressed, it’s like they feel it through the pores of our skin and the cycle snowballs. At six weeks old (aside from the first two weeks when she pretty much just slept) Rylee Lou and I had countless times like this that left me feeling like a worthless failure as a mother, human, woman, wife. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing and I felt so deeply that I was letting her down every time she desperately needed me. We’d bounce, I’d sing, I’d strip down naked to hold her against my warm skin. Helpless. That’s how I felt those first months. When was that “natural mother’s intuition” going to kick in?
So I pulled over and we parked in that church lot. I slowly and carefully slid out of the driver’s seat and held my healing incision as I climbed into the backseat with my crying baby. I unbuckled her tiny body from the car seat, shaking. I held her to my chest, I remember the Free People lace top I was wearing, and wrapped her in my arms.
In that moment, it was the first time that just by holding her, she stopped crying. In that moment, all she needed was me. Her mother. I was her mom? A flicker of magic superhero power sparked under my skin, just slightly. I will never forget June 3rd, 2021. The sky was clear, the nuns in the crosswalk, the daughter in my arms. I was a mom.
Afterwards, we braved taking a walk down the hill north of the church after she settled and was fed and changed. Wrapped in a baby wrap tightly to my chest she quickly fell asleep, probably exhausted from all the backseat screaming. While walking back up the hill to my car an old man stopped me and began speaking in his raspy, old, Italian accent.
“Un dono di dio,” he says to me. My Italian not very advanced at the time, but I understood him instantly. Peaking underneath the wrap so he could be graced with her sleepy little face, he repeated it again to me. “A gift from God.”
In my early adulthood years, I can’t tell you how many times I’d heard people say things like “children under a certain age just shouldn’t be allowed in __________ (this restaurant, this museum, on planes, literally anywhere at all).” It’s painful to think about now, because for those moms just dying to be out in the world, by saying that all those people are doing is hurting the parents. Babies cry, babies scream. Toddlers have massive feelings and temper tantrums that turn the sweetest angel into Voldemort in a snap. And guess what? No matter how inconvenient it is to you that that baby is crying on your flight, no one in the world wants them to stop crying more than their parents.
To my readers in America, I’m about to say something that’s going to really piss you off….
Not once. Not one single time, have I felt this pressure while raising a baby in Europe. Especially Italy. I agree with that man, my daughter is a gift from god. She was nicknamed “molto tranquille fragolina” (calm little strawberry) by the nurses at the hospital for how calm, and quiet she was. This changed once she woke up six weeks later and cried non-stop, but that’s not the point. The point is that as perfect as she can be, she’s still a hot mess. She has meltdowns daily, at home or in public. Her emotions make zero sense to me sometimes. Full on flops in the grocery store when I say “it’s time to go”, and “no you can’t bite directly into that wedge of Asiago DOP”. In these moments it would be be a natural reflex to want to apologize for her disrupting the peace… but right as I’m about to “Mi scusi” to the entire room, I find I’m caught with these loving glances from every man, woman and child in every direction.
"Baci, baci, amore. Mia cara… bellissima.”
I’ve seen a man, a biker in full leather and a “pussy” sticker slapped on the side of his motorcycle melt into putty at the sight of a baby girl. I’ve had countless mothers and nonnas, complete strangers, want to help me and hold her when she’s crying. Women I’ve never met gently pinching her cute little thighs. The head waitress at our local pizza spot, overcome with joy at the sight of a little girl in a white eyelet dress, sweep her off her feet into her arms - she doesn’t even know Rylee’s name. Fluffing her head of “super bionda!!” hair at the gelateria on Sundays. This is what it means to have a baby in Italy, they aren’t just your baby, they are adopted into Italy’s family.
The way Italians revere and love, prioritize and value the mother, the Madonna, and the new generations that they bring into the world has spoiled me. It’s nothing to see a toddler, dressed in a red tulle frock, asleep in her stroller next to mom and dad on date night at a nice restaurant. No one double takes when you roll into the most “grown up” locations with a baby at your side. We’re a family, we’re a unit and we go together always.
Il riposo is a time of day in Italy, and many European countries, where businesses shut down midday usually from around noon to 3pm. This time is used for many things, lunch and proper time to digest being one of them. But for parents and grandparents, this time is a pause in the workday so they can pick their kids up from school and take them to Il forno or the gelateria to have a treat and talk about their school day. Can you imagine such a priority being built into your day?
“Sorry boss, I can’t do that 1pm meeting, I have to walk my kid home from school and feed them.” How obvious, yet how foreign!
These little habits, these massive traditions prioritizing family and your children’s time in the most basic way during these fleeting years, are now ingrained in me. It teaches children that I see you, I hear you. You didn’t choose to be here, I brought you into this world and now I’m going to do my best to do the least amount of damage as I raise you into the human you will become. It’s so simple. And even with the positive upbringing I had, that my husband had, these little examples that the Italian familial unit has shown us has changed our way of thinking about parenting forever.
Even more specifically, the Italian mother somehow manages to do it all, and I’m still trying to figure out where she gets the energy. Maybe it’s that strong esspresso she has in the afternoon but I think it’s more than that. The Italian mother is the rock the family is built around. She is fierce and strict, but warm and nurturing, protective of her little mimmo and mimma. She is the artist of the meal we gather around. The pressed tablecloth, the laundry drying in the sun on the line. She is the perfectly clean home, that she cleans herself mind you - she does not need help. She embodies la bella figura, and passes it down to her sons and daughters. I mean for the love of Madonna, these people have Sophia Loren as an example of motherhood, the bar is set high!
La bella figura is how one carries oneself. It’s about presentation and having pride in oneself. It’s about behaviour, and grace, tact and gentility. It’s about hospitality and beauty and to comportarsi bene.
- Sandi Sieger for Italy Segreta
Whether intentional or not, over the last two years so much of what I’m describing to you now has crept into my bloodstream. If you tested my genetics, I’m fairly certain you wouldn’t find any Italian DNA but in the same way my daughter’s life began in this country, so did mine.
It’s not to say that the life prior to now never existed, but it ended when she was born. I didn’t realize that right away, but a new woman was created. At first I mourned the loss of her, looking back at old photos of carefree moments with girlfriends poolside in Miami. Spontaneous drinks, slept in mornings, days spent doing nothing but feeling caught up in my own emotions and worries within the walls of my studio apartment. From the moment your child is born, you will always be a mother. Whether that child lives a healthy long life, leaves you too soon, breaks a bond with you in later years, it doesn’t matter - you’re never the same again. This can be met with a great deal of resistance at first as the selfish nature in us takes over, and that’s natural. Please don’t be hard on yourself, because this has to settle in its own time.
It took a while for me to stop comparing my experience as a new mom to my fellow new moms back in the States when my daughter was born. Social Media made it too easy for me to see them spending their first Mother’s Day poolside with a glass of wine in their hand while Grandmother’s fought over who got to feed the baby. Heading back into work after 8 weeks, or working their way through maternity leave and proud of it (congratulations to your employers for being such “dedicated teammates”…)
Meanwhile, the border’s still closed, the grueling demand of a brief paternity leave left me alone at home healing a wound physically and emotionally. Holding my girl, taking each step of the stairs in my home two feet and a deep, sharp and painful, inhale at a time.
At some point it became clear to me to turn off that signal to the west and focus on what the mothers around me were doing. How were they choosing to be moms in these first years? For starters, maternity leave in Italy is at least one full calendar year. If the mother chooses to take a second year, she still gets a percentage of her paycheck and a guarantee that her job will be waiting for her. I’ll repeat myself: That’s two years, the first two years of the child’s life that the mom is given the choice to prioritize the growth and legacy of her family. With less guilt, and more respect, for her making that choice for her family. (Yeah, I’d rather follow that example too.) I was freelancing for a woman-led jewelry company around this time when the doctors here diagnosed me with PPD. I shared this information with that company, that I was having thoughts of suicide, and they graciously allowed me a few weeks to collect myself. When I reached back out at the agreed later date, they had replaced my position with someone else. It’s not personal, it’s business…
I’m sorry, there’s no eloquent way to say it: But, fuck that.
Living and watching these multi-generations of Italian mothers from the sidelines has shifted my perspective on how to embrace this honor and let go of the me I used to be and the expectations I had on myself. For that, I will be endlessly grateful for the way these women have, in a way, raised me over the last two years while I was raising my daughter. I used to think the best example I could set for my child was to be a traditionally “successful”, do-it-all-woman. But dear Italian Mamma, you’ve shown me so much more. I can show her strength, I can show her values, I can show her tradition. I can show her beauty in ways that I never dreamt before. Delicate, soft and strong and unyeilding,
My time here in Italy may not be forever, it’s ever present in my mind that we could be called back to the States at any moment. But that doesn’t matter anymore, because what the Italian Mother has left in me is tattooed in my heart. You have humbled me. Thank you, for shaping me, I am the mother I am and always will be because of you.
Buona festa della Mamma…
