Italian Courage

The door to the airplane was like a threshold. Stepping through meant leaving behind the cozy house where we had become a family of four, the city in which I had grown up, and my parents, whose tearful farewell was already settling into my bones, making them ache with the throb of goodbye. 

With a chubby toddler on my hip and her towheaded older sister setting out resolutely before us, we made our way across the invisible line between the known and the unknowable. It was impossible to understand then, despite our imaginings, the words of caution and advice, and months of preparation, just how transformative and challenging this journey would be.  

The news had come months before. Ryan came home from work with a celebratory bottle of champagne. A job opportunity in Italy… Italy of all places! 

Hadn’t we always dreamt of living overseas? 

Exposing our daughters to the world, being adventurous, broadening horizons—hadn’t we always talked about something just like this? 

Over long, wine-soaked conversations early in marriage, we had meandered dreamily through the streets of London, the south of France, and villages in Italy. We had shared hopes of something more, even though we weren’t entirely sure what that meant. 

We had been giddy with possibility. The idea of what life could be like in a different country was blurry and vague, so we filled in the details as best we could, creating charming, otherworldly visions that were more precious and fantastical than any real-life experience could possibly deliver.

Once the excitement turned into realty, we spent months in a stupor of constant overwhelm. We sold our house, filled a storage unit, and stayed in a continual state of packing; filled out paperwork, the amount of which was staggering and endless; and we readied for and then watched pass a series of canceled leave dates. When the official date did finally come and hold, it felt almost anticlimactic, and it wasn’t until we were at the airport that reality finally settled deeply into our bones. 

Looking back, I realize now how little attention I paid to the moment we crossed that invisible threshold. Walking onto the plane, distracted and awkwardly maneuvering children and luggage, I wonder now, upon reflection, if there had been something in just that instant that would have held a clue: a cool breeze, the soft touch of something unseen, a sign that had failed to catch my attention. But as we entered the airplane and made our way down the aisle, locating and nestling into our seats, it felt like any other flight. It was the first of several planes that would take us to our new life, spiriting us over the Atlantic Ocean in darkness, silent but for the insistent, unsettled cries of my daughter. 

Living in a foreign country among people who spoke a foreign language, life became the inverse of the one we left. The simplest and most every day of tasks were suddenly complicated, stressful, and left me sweaty with anxiety. 

We lived in the charming, cobbled town of Mirano, due to its proximity to Ryan’s job, which meant that one of my daily excursions was to deliver every morning and then collect every afternoon my older daughter to and from kindergarten. It was a harrowing drive of just under one hour through impatient, angry traffic that I performed in a car with a stick shift. I had just learned how to drive a manual transmission through empty parking lots and side streets, in my father-in-law’s old Pathfinder, under the patient tutelage of my husband, just several weeks earlier. So, each trek was riddled with sudden jerks, stalls, and quite often, tears. 

I spent many of the hours in between those trips to the International School of Padova praying passionate, fervent prayers that my daughter would trudge out of the school building begging for me to teach her at home only to find her skipping from its doors with wide, toothy grins and unbridled enthusiasm for the following day. The simple act of driving had been a thing to which I’d given very little thought since the early days of newly licensed driver. In this upside-down world, though, just the idea of it sent a hot bubble of fear gushing from my belly out to my entire body. 

While Emma was in kindergarten, happily enjoying new friends, a new language, and teachers who fawned over her white hair and blue eyes, my younger daughter, Kate, and I spent as much time on foot as we could. The center of town was just a few blocks away and we made the most of each trip, buying as much as we could from the greengrocer, meat shop, and bakery, stretching out the time between trips to the market that required use of the car. 

This became far easier once the weather cleared. From the moment we arrived in January, there had been a near constant drizzle, rain shower, or mist that clung stubbornly with its gray, wet hands. The cloud cover finally let go, revealing a clear, cerulean sky and bright, warm sun by mid-February and thereafter, we were rarely inside. Kate and I became regular and amusing oddities in our little village, our otherness easily detectable and often met with open curiosity.

Because children are adored above all else in Italy, Kate was my beloved talisman. Instead of only seeing this strange woman trapsing around their tiny town, they saw a chubby-cheeked towhead with round, green eyes and a cautious smile. Italian grandmothers habitually stroked her light hair and marveled at her fair skin, exclaiming at her affectionately:  

Bellissima!

Mi amore!  

Bionda!

A delicate rhythm found its way into our days and as the clouds cleared, so did some of my crippling fear. Each weekday was punctuated at the beginning and end with those abrasive car trips, while the hours between were filled somewhat haphazardly with playing at the park, walks into town, and naptime. If the weekdays were the unimaginative and slightly loathsome school cafeteria lunch then the weekends were the brightly colored, overstuffed brunch buffet. Those two days stretched longingly in front of me, arriving with agonizing slowness, only to disappear with a flit before I could quite fully appreciate their offerings of easy happiness. 

It was of course the promise of Ryan being home, the joy of adult conversation with someone who didn’t require translation, paired with the blissful absence of having to be the driver that made the weekends such cherished moments. We took trips at nearly every opportunity. Long, lazy drives through the breathtaking vineyards of Tuscany, a visit to the bustling city of Florence with all its ancient treasures, day trips to Venice and Verona brought our experience to life, pulling the best of Italy deep into my being. It often seemed like I inhabited two existences: the mask and cloak of fearless warrior, taking on the foreign wilds of a distant and unknown land; and then my easy, truest self would emerge by week’s end, letting the armor fall from shoulders that could finally lower in relief. 

I often felt, during the time that we lived in Italy that the path before me was always a mystery. Stumbling and losing my balance, tripping easily as I went along. It was unsettling, taking faulty steps into the unseeable, the path visible before me only after my foot was planted. I know now that this is where you exist once you have left the confines of your normal, comfortable life. Something opens inside of you, a space to build up the shaky, barely known parts of yourself. A dust ridden, creaky place deep inside where the gritty, sweaty work is done. The place where the courage to go on is built. 

As it often happens when raising small children, one of the other places we frequented was the doctor. By some divine intervention, we found a wonderful, kind young pediatrician whose compassionate demeanor, bits of English, and access to medicine bonded her to us in a way few people did during that time. For reasons that I still cannot fathom, we had an endless stretch of pink eye infections that started with one daughter and was passed routinely around our family with unspeakable swiftness. 

Although every trip to the doctor ended in enormous sighs of relief and frequently tears of gratitude, it always wound up being a complicated endeavor to arrive at the exact location, park correctly, and then locate the correct door. All the signage was of course in Italian and despite our Garmin GPS device being very impressive for 2009, routinely gave us the wrong directions or repeated the word, recalculating while the gray wheel on the screen spun blankly. On more than one occasion the directions of the formless, female voice deposited us confidently into a dead end with many miles left to traverse or the road would abruptly stop at the base of an abandoned construction site or, in one perplexing case, a quite lovely, but unexpected, meadow. 

Toward the end of our time in Italy and our relationship with this Garmin, we came to regard the voice as a wicked, conniving creature who lived beneath the screen, laughing silently at our plight once she had delivered us to yet another ridiculous location. When we had moved back to the States, it was promptly stolen from Ryan’s car and I’ve never been happier to have been burgled. 

Largely, our visits to the pediatrician resulted in typical diagnoses: the aforementioned and relentless pink eye, sinus infections, and the occasional strep throat. Emma contracted a debilitating stomach bug that took her down for the better part of two days, leaving her weak and hollowed out. We were momentarily concerned that she might require intravenous fluids, even though she was able to keep impressive count of her throw-ups, announcing the number each time she was finished. And while she did reach the alarming number of twenty-nine that she imparted in a ragged whisper, she did recover quite quickly. 

So, it wasn’t dehydration that landed her in the hospital, it was seven stitches in her head. My mom had just arrived for a visit, greeted with wild, jumping granddaughters, loud whoops of joy, and tight, teary hugs. We were finishing lunch that afternoon when Emma, who was home from kindergarten to welcome her nana, slipped from her chair and on her way to the floor, met a sturdy, wooden sideboard with the back of her head. Blood seeped through her long, white hair and we knew a hospital trip was in order. I have no memory of the drive, but I can remember the wide expanse of helplessness that opened under my feet. It only lasted for a moment— and then something else took over, something primal and maternal swept in and got us to the hospital. The doctor in the emergency room spoke hardly any English, but lucky for us, comfort doesn’t require words. He patched her up easily with a sweet, jokey demeanor, comparing the thread with which he stitched her to spaghetti. 

Since I drove to the hospital on pure adrenaline and our Garmin had decided to cooperate that day, I had no idea or memory of where the hospital was actually located and could not have retraced my steps if my life depended on it. Which became problematic some weeks later when Kate woke up one morning when Ryan was traveling for work, with cheeks a bright, lurid pink, her small body radiating heat. Several hours later, after Tylenol hadn’t lowered her temperature and an angry, rough rash crawled up her belly, a hospital visit was inevitable. 

I loaded us into the car and set out, cursing myself for not paying better attention the last time. When I finally arrived, following instructions from a far less helpful Garmin, I was told it wasn’t the right place. It had been the accurate location for stitches but not for a feverish toddler. As they told me where to go, I clung desperately to any words I could make out from their directions, but ultimately found myself back in my car; staring blankly at the windy roads and enormous campus of office building with hundreds of doors that all looked the same. Panic prickled at my skin, making me feel shaky and wild. 

Eventually, somehow, after trying a few wrong places, I found the right one. 

An ambiguous door at the end of a twisty sidewalk and up an old, narrow staircase to a small office the color of daffodils. No one spoke a word of English, so I just presented my little, pink, feverish daughter with hot tears spilling down my cheeks. 

“Scarlattina,” the doctor said after an examination, a gentle hand on my shoulder. 

I whipped out my pocket dictionary and flipped through the pages. 

“Scarlet fever?” I blurted out, unhelpfully. “She has scarlet fever?” 

“Si. Scarlattina.”

It sounded prettier in Italian, but the disease itself felt medieval. Who gets scarlet fever anymore? It felt ripped from the pages of Little Women. 

He said some kindly words (at least I assumed he did) in a calm and tender voice and wrote out the prescriptions. Blessedly, with a round of antibiotics, she recovered in several days. It was alarming and disorienting how quickly and severely she fell ill, and I still find myself whispering prayers of gratitude that we not only live in an age of modern medicine but also were able to find that sunny, little room and the benevolent doctor who talked to me exclusively in Italian and I knew exactly what he was saying. (Mostly.) 

Eventually, amidst all the things that were hard, there was a Sunday that dawned with a serene beauty that I felt all the way to my core. We spent it as we had so many Sundays before: meandering into town, enjoying a cocktail outside in the sun, and watching our girls run around the fountain. As I tilted my face upward and closed my eyes, didn’t feel the usual dread that accompanied the inevitable end to my cherished weekend. I thought of the coming Monday with a brief flutter of nerves. I let myself relax into the moment, to revel in how far I had come, to believe that it could even be good. 

Had I known what was to come as I took that step onto the plane, past the threshold that kept me safe and comfortable, would I have kept going? If I could have caught a glimpse of the sometimes helpless, often frantic, occasionally sobbing moments, would I have walked on? I’ve lived many years before and since that one we spent in Italy, but I reflect upon it often. I think about that tiny room tucked deep inside, the one that was cracked open once this journey began; I think about how bright and beautiful and solid it must be now. So many other bright, strong spaces inside myself opened wide in its wake, building foundations of confidence and experience and, of course, courage that never would have existed without it. 

If, all those years ago, I had seen what lay ahead, I would have hitched Kate a little higher on my hip, gently guided Emma down the jetway, and followed Ryan to our seats. And if there had been some sort of sign, a gentle breeze, or a soft, otherworldly voice to mark that moment, I feel certain it would have whispered, “It will be hard, but it will be worth it.”