Preface
How do you begin to write about your own life, aware that you’re choosing the right moment to do so? This question is the reason I postponed writing this project for so long. Every time I tried to picture myself sitting in front of the computer, I wondered how I could ever begin to untangle the knot of the thread that is my life, the events that have made me the person I am today. And yet, I feel that some pieces of my story, which for me have been a source of so much pain and despair, might represent, for someone out there, a hand reaching out in the middle of the storm.
Perhaps there is no easy or right way to talk about the death of your parents, and about what becomes of your life after you’ve buried them both. I was born in a small town in central Italy thirty-one years ago, raised between the countryside and the gentrification that, day after day, tore green patches from nature to turn them into parking lots and new shops. A town of twenty thousand inhabitants, where, over time, I discovered that even if you don’t know everyone, everyone knows you and what you do (and sometimes even what you think, if you’re not careful and let your mind wander too much).
And one of the thoughts that kept coming back to me as a child was asking my mother for a little brother or sister. But she didn’t want any more children: after having me at forty and my two older siblings twenty years earlier, she considered that chapter more than closed. But brothers that old — Lucrezia and Giulio — were of little use to me, and I certainly couldn’t play with them the way I wanted to.
It was then, for the first time, that my mother Maria told me she didn’t love my father. That didn’t make sense to me at all: if you love the person you’re with —babboRenzo, in this case — you always have children together, whether you’re twenty or sixty! And so, in the bathroom on the second floor of our family home, while mymamma sat on the toilet, I asked her:
– Ma te i’ babbo lo ami, no? (But you do love Dad, don’t you?)
At three years old, what could a mother possibly say to her daughter, if not a big, strong ”Yes“. And yet, mymammatold me that after so much time, you learn to care for a person, but love (if it ever existed)
– No, it’s not there anymore.
Because perhaps, for my mamma, I was never really a child at all.
