Faith, Family, & Focaccia

A faith and culture Mommy blog, because real life gets all mixed together like that.


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Driving toward Cheer

Driving in Milano is a challenge. The lane markers are inconsistent, the signage is sparse, the traffic rules are unpredictably enforced, and the roundabouts could double as roller derby competitions. I have a number of expatriate friends who are duly licensed drivers in other countries who simply refuse to drive here.

While I understand their intimidation, however, I am an American and my car is important to me. It lets me get my children to school before the gate closes (on most days). It lets me go grocery shopping at the one supermarket in the South East section of Milan that is actually a supermarket – and to bring home more bags that I could shove into a rolling shopping bag. It let’s me travel outside the city (to church, to the lake country, to picturesque hill towns) without being subject to the timetables of the Italian rail system. It is not the sole means of transportation that I use in my daily life, as life in the US usually entails, but it is still important. So, I have learned to drive in Milano without fear, and without any accidents (knock on wood!).

Parking in Milano, is an entirely different story. As in any large metropolitan area, the number of parking spots available is inadequate for the number of cars that roam its streets on any given day. The Milanese are perhaps more creative in their response to this problem than the citizens of other cities. There is some double-parking, of course, but much more frequently drivers simply stow their vehicles in any open space of pavement that is not the active driving surface of a roadway. Such “parking spots” can include the curbs of medians or the painted stripes that are meant to substitute for a median when a roadway splits. More frequently, however, the preferred parking spots are on the sidewalk. Provided that you do not obstruct pedestrian crossways, and that you allow sufficient space for other cars to squeeze past along the open portion of the sidewalk (with side mirrors tucked in tight and parking sensors blaring the single note that is supposed to indicate “you are too close, buddy, BACK UP”), such parking opportunities are apparently free to all takers.

This permission to park unconventionally, however, has not alleviated my anxiety with the inevitable conclusion of journeys completed by car. I will frequently take long or convoluted trips on public transportation, braving ugly weather and trying to balance stroller, bags, umbrella, and metro card, in order to avoid the requirement to park my car at my intended destination. If I do not know there is a parking lot, with marked stalls that are actually wide enough to fit anything larger than a fiat, I think twice. In part this is because of the particular car I have. Now, I really should not complain. Tyler’s company has provided us with a very nice Volvo S80 sedan. This meant nothing to me before I moved here but I now know this model to be a very safe and comfortable vehicle complete with seat warmers, navigation system, ample trunk space, and room to accommodate our family of four quite comfortably (and occasional fifth passengers somewhat less comfortably). Unfortunately the consequence of all that space is that is has wide bumpers and a long wheel base, making parking in smart-car-sized spaces a nightmare!

Thankfully, the blessed relocation package has come to the rescue yet again. Whatever parking disasters I face when touring Northern Italy in my trusty Volvo, I know that when I return home there will be, waiting to receive my unwieldy chariot, a box. No joking – that is really what the Italians call a garage unit in an underground parking structure. Our box is not exactly a heaven of open space. Parking the Volvo in our box (which is mockingly situated at the far end of a corridor of much bigger boxes), requires that I reverse the car the length of the corridor and execute a precise 4-point turn. The car can still only be pulled into the box, of course, after manually opening the garage door, pulling in my side mirrors, and allowing right-side passengers to exit the car (because they will not be able to open their door once the car is inside).

All these requirements aside, I love my box. It is my guarantee that I do not have to scrape my bumper, or someone else’s trying to squeeze my car between the side of a building and a long line of other cars in order to maneuver it into the one narrow strip of open sidewalk in a four-block radius. I rarely even look for street parking anymore. Now that I have mastered the tricky angles of my 4-point turn, I just head straight for the big metal gate that marks the entrance to our parking garage, located just below our apartment building.

But yesterday my progress toward the oasis of my box was blocked by a little red car parked at a slight angle across the sidewalk cut-out. Now, I should explain that there is a clear exception to the implicit Milanese permission to park on any sidewalk wide enough to admit a vehicle. Sections of sidewalk that need to remain free to admit other vehicles are always clearly marked (in a marvel of Italian consistency and clarity) with the words Passo Carrabile. Of course, the prohibition is not always absolute – there are some passo carrabile notices that mark only the large portone, or front entrance to a building. Milanese drivers all understand that the prohibition in these cases is only against abandoning your car in this spot for any extended duration of time. It is perfectly acceptable to just pull into one of these spots for a moment or two or run up a delivery, or to load or unload your car. I have done so numerous times in front of my own building, or when picking up friends. However, when the passo carrabile sign marks the entrance to a parking garage, it really is discourteous to block it with your car unless you remain with the car to move it in the event that someone needs to pass.

In this case, the driver was most definitely absent, and repeated honking did nothing to effect his or her appearance. My response was not gracious. It was the end of a long day. I had both of the kids in the car and a drizzling rain outside. I did not want to have to walk from whatever street parking I might miraculously be able to find juggling an umbrella and school bags, and two squirmy children who delight in splashing through puddles. My parking oasis was supposed to save me from that!

My kids were in the car, so I did my best to control my temper and to respond calmly to their innocent but annoying queries about why someone had parked so we couldn’t get it. I honked a few more times, looked around futilely for someone rushing from a nearby building in responses, and then decided to chance it. Thankfully, the training of 20+ months of driving and parking my boat of a car around Milano had given me a very keen awareness of its dimensions and turning angles. Inch-by-inch I was able to slide it past the little red obstruction and angle it through the heavy metal doors down the ramp to safety. I let out an explosive breathe that was a substitute for the expletives I would have liked to scrawl on the back window of the blockade. Then I heard an incredibly sweet sound from the back seat. Clapping.

“Great job, Mommy! You did it!” The Gigglemonster was cheering for Mommy, and when I looked into the rearview mirror I could see that his face was split by his signature grin of gleeful delight. It was a humbling but joyful moment. He was right. I had done it. While the absentee driver’s parking selection had been inconsiderate, it hadn’t actually hurt me in any way. We had reached our destination unmarred, except for my evil mood. And that mood was entirely my responsibility. If I chose, I could be happy instead. After all, I was getting a round of applause from my son for my driving skills. How frequently does that happen?

So, I am trying to learn from my little three-year old to drive and park in Milan with more cheering, and less muttering. It’s not easy. When I came home from school drop off today in the continuing rain I wasn’t exactly thrilled to see a large delivery truck completely blocking my access to the garage. As I wound around the extended route of one-way streets to circle back to the garage entrance my frustration rose on each of three circuits. But I breathed deeply, and I tried to hear my son’s sweet voice in my head. “Great job Mommy. You can do it.” You can stay calm even when you are tired, and have a cold, and just want to get home to some hot tea. You can put things in perspective and realize that having five minutes to waste driving in circles is an incredible luxury. You can remember that the world was not actually created to serve your own convenience, and that the people getting in your way might actually be doing something much more important with their time than you are.

So, when the driver finally emerged and waved his apology, I waved back and smiled. It might not have been my warmest smile, but I smiled. And I know what my Gigglemonster would say if he had seen it. “Great job Mommy. You are not being cross.”

 


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Speaking of shame

It had been a while since I posted. This is not for lack of potential content. Actually the last month and more has been full of experiences that fulfill the potential of this European adventure to expose me to reflection-inspiring ideas. However, it turns out that the life that inspires writing actually takes a lot of time to live. Funny how that works. Now that my travel schedule and language training is taking a bit of a break, I have (at least in theory) a little more time to reflect on what I have been learning. Which has brought me to reflect on how this recent phase of frenetic activity started with my long-delayed return to formal learning: Italian classes.

Learning a new language, especially this beautiful latin tongue, was one of the many wonderful promises of our expatriate assignment. I studied spanish for 6 years in jr. high and high school, but while I did relatively well in class I never spoke with fluency. The ability to actually speak, not just stutter through basic requests, but to speak and think easily in another language has been a long-time dream. Since virtually all experts agree that immersion is the only efficient way to obtain such facility in adulthood, I moved to Italy full of expectation. As I have reflected in an earlier post (Mother Tongue and Limited Proficiency), all has not gone as easily as I expected. Simply being surrounded by the language is not sufficient in and of itself to produce facility with an unfamiliar language.

Perhaps an example can best illustrate my point. Immersion allows a language learner to repeatedly hear common phrases as they occur in daily conversation. Unfortunately, hearing a phrase over and over only embeds it in your brain when you can accurately hear the pronunciation. “Va bene” (roughly translated as “it’s good” or “OK” although the literal translation is “it goes well”)  sounds very much like “fa bene” when you are still learning italian pronunciation. Moreover, “fa bene” could very well be a perfectly reasonable phrase for all sorts of situations, because “fa” is the third person, singular, present tense of fare and fare is the most ubiquitous word in the Italian language. The dictionary definitions for fare fill up three-quarters of a page and include meanings as diverse as “do”, “make”, “build”, “be”, “manage”, and “act”  among many others. When first learning Italian it seems like “fare” is without limit in its applications, and the fact that you hear “_a bene” twenty times a day in all kinds of situations seems to match well with this versatility. I do not know how many times I said “fa bene” in my first months here before my husband was kind enough to correct me. To accurately learn a new language one needs more than just exposure – one also need instruction that can prevent the embarrassment of mis-learning.

Despite the mental fog brought on by the endless permutations of “fare,” however, I have approached my language acquisition task with gusto. For more than 19 months I consulted my Italian-English dictionary, drilled with written verb and grammar exercises, and compiled questions for my language exchange partners in my efforts to learn the language. But mostly, I just dove in and tried it. I knew I was making many, many, mistakes, but my other alternatives were worse: either simply staying silent, or speaking excruciatingly slowly as I stopped to conjugate every verb and to figure out the gender and number of each noun to assign the appropriate article. I just kept trying, mistakes and all, and looked forward to the day when I would finally have the child-free time to take real lessons and kick-start my fluency.

My first activity in my very first Italian class was a reading/conversation activity. We were given a list of statements in Italian that presented opinions about the necessary tools and activities for learning a foreign language. We were supposed to read them all, pick the three with which we most agreed and discuss our selections with a partner, in Italian, of course. The statements were all written in very absolute language (i.e. – “it is impossible to learn a foreign language after the age of 18″; or “the most important thing is to read something every day”). As a result, I only completely agreed with one statement of the ten, the contention that (in my rough translation) “it is better to try to speak even if you make mistakes.” This had certainly been my experience in the prior 19 months. My italian language experience to that date could be fairly accurately described as an extended exercise in “speaking even if you make mistakes.” While I believed this was important to the learning process, however, I was hoping to move beyond this phase now that I was in a formal Italian course.

Looking back over the past 8 weeks since I began my course, the unreasonableness of that expectation seems as obvious as the parallel pipe dream of fluency through “immersion.” Of course a mere 45 hours of classroom instruction were not sufficient to transform me into an easy bilingual conversationalist. Of course I could not decipher the complicated formulas of Italian grammatical structure through 1 hour lessons on roughly 15 specific grammatical topics. Of course the mistakes I made blithely for 19 months of halting speech in my new adopted language would not simply disappear once I finally got formal help to “learn Italian.” It just is not that easy. I was recently informed by an American acquaintance who has lived in Italy for 20 years that Italian still does not feel natural — and that is with the help of an Italian husband and a bilingual daughter.

But here is the irony: the one statement I agreed with about learning a new language is less comfortable to me now than it was that first day that I stepped into the classroom. On an intellectual level I can agree that you have to just speak and not worry about making mistakes, but I am just tired of making them. What is worse, now that I have a little instruction under my belt, I am more aware of making them. Where before I would chatter away blithely ignoring the subjunctive tense, now I am paralyzed every time I begin a phrase by introducing uncertainty (“I think that…”, We hoped that…” etc.) because I now know that I need to conjugate the following verb as congiuntivo and I cannot remember how to form the verbs. Where before the versatile pronoun/participle “ci” was just another baffling mystery of the Italian language, now it is a a very unnatural part of speech (to a native English speaker) that I nevertheless feel that I should be able to use, and use correctly.

There is another memorable moment from my first day of class: I learned the word vergogna. At first I thought it meant embarrassment, because in the Italian-only context of the class where everything must be learned from context, this seemed the most appropriate translation. When I later looked it up however, I learned that the more precise translation is shame. Whether used to substitute for embarrassment or shame, the word has been painfully relevant in the weeks that have followed.

At the suit shop when we are buying Tyler’s new suit I deliberately interaction with the salesman in English. I don’t feel like I have the vocabulary to discuss cuts and fit in Italian and as an international company I know the staff speak English. At the end of an extended conversation he learns that we are not visiting; we actually live in Milano. “Oh, how long do you leeve here?” (English is not easy for him, you see) “Almost 2 years.” I feel vergogna that I have demanded this interaction be conducted in English, when it is now obvious to him that I have far less excuse than he does for my difficulty in my non-native tongue.

I meet the mothers of the Gigglemonster’s classmates and I try valiantly to converse with them in Italian. They are patient with me, and listen politely while I struggle, and stammer — a direct result of my new-found consciousness about just how poor my Italian really is. They make a point of calling me over to their group as we wait outside the gate for school pick-up to begin and they do their best to include me in their developing friendships. But they chatter away in Italian, talking over each other and exclaiming dramatically, true to all the classic Italian stereotypes, and I stand there in silence, able to follow only part of what is being said, and feeling like an outsider. I am wishing there were a polite way that I could just stand alone to avoid the embarrassment of my incompetence, and I feel vergogna for this response to their friendliness.

I snap back in response to my wonderful mother-in-law’s effort to encourage me about just how well I am learning Italian. Twenty months of frustration and embarrassment and loneliness come gushing out as I deliver an impromptu lecture about the difficulties of struggling with language every day. She doesn’t understand; she doesn’t hear all the mistakes I make and how humiliating they are; for her Italian is a fun exercise while for me it is a necessary tool that I do not wield as well as I need to in order to function in my daily life. She is as gracious in receiving this undeserved outburst as she is in everything else, but again I feel vergogna. I have received her kindness and support with recrimination rather than gratitude, and that is something of which to be ashamed in any language.

Shame is not a comfortable emotion. I have had moments in the past few months were I began to long for this experience to just be over. I began to anticipate the luxury of living in an environment where I speak the language better, not worse, than most people I meet. I began to dream of escape from days punctuated by embarrassment, and the shameful light that embarrassment casts on my own lack of maturity. As the limits of even intensive study have killed my dream of easy fluency I have wanted to throw up my hands and say “what’s the point? I am leaving in a year anyhow. Why keep struggling?”

But the answer is that there is a lesson in shame, if I will only learn it. If I abandon my efforts and resign myself to the shame, then it really has been pointless. All the study, and the effort, and the embarrassment will have borne no fruit in my life. I will not speak Italian well, and, even more importantly, my understanding of myself will not have been transformed by this experience. BUT. If I keep trying even when it is frustrating and difficult, I will have learned that I can do things even when I do them poorly. I do not like doing things poorly. It is not comfortable. But it is also NOT shameful. To continue to try, to make mistakes and not give up, to be the slowest person in the conversation and keep trying to participate; that is something to be proud of.

Up until very recently when people ask me if I speak Italian, or when Italian friends assert that I do speak Italian, my response has been embarrassed denial. “No, no, no. Non davvero. Not really.” But I recently realized something. The very first Italian phrase I learned, before even moving to Italy, was  “non parlo bene l’italiano” – “I do not speak Italian well.” From the very first days of my residency here I have been using this phrase to apologize when I do not understand something said to me, or to explain why I am speaking so slowly, or thinking of the right thing to say. I do not say “non parlo italiano” – ” I do not speak Italian.” I say “non parlo bene.” And that is true. I don’t speak well. But I do speak Italian. And that is quite an accomplishment.

I speak Italian poorly, and there is no shame in that.