Faith, Family, & Focaccia

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

Tag Archives: Discipleship


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A Perfect Place for an Imperfect Parent

The Giggglemonster, has a way with words.

For all that he is still several months shy of his third birthday, he is already finding unique ways of using language to express his personality to the world. Part of the joy I find in this is the bubbling charisma of that personality. A friend of ours was captivated by his chatter on a recent weekend we spent with her family in the mountains. After two days’ observation she made a delighted comment that he is like “a little actor.” With a mother’s shameless pride I cannot help but agree. The boy can really deliver a line. But it is not simply his delivery that has prompted this outpouring of enthusiasm; it is the words he chooses.

In particular, one of his new phrases has inspired this reflection on the joys and responsibilities of motherhood. His intention is not nearly so grand, of course. All he wants to do is to convince me to stay and cuddle with him at bedtime after the nightly routine of stories, songs, and prayer. His strategy in pursuing this goal displays a disturbing mastery of the art of Mommy-manipulation. He softly strokes the area on the bed sheet next to his warm little body and says “Look, Mommy! I make a perfect place for you!” He says it with such joyful expectation that I will respond as he wants, that his expectation is contagious. Cuddling my sweet, loving little boy is certainly much more fun than rushing off to wash the dishes or fold the laundry.

These are just the kinds of moments that I fantasized about before becoming a mother. In my daydreams motherhood offered connection with a person who loves me unquestioningly and wants nothing more than to be near me; the emotional “perfect place.” I knew it was a utopian dream, but if any human relationship offered such a connection surely it would be the one with my children. After all, their hearts, by nature and nurture, are built to fit with mine. Regardless of the challenges of sleepless nights, and temper tantrums, this perfect fit would make it all worth it.

The Gigglemonster’s nightly invitation, however, poses unexpected challenges.  In practical terms, I cannot regularly just ignore the remnants of food hardening on the unwashed dishes, or the very real threat that the piles of unfolded laundry will swallow the couch. These tasks weigh in my mind and leach some of the joy from those potential quiet moments with my son. Much as I sometimes wish that I could master the art of “not sweating the small stuff,” I find that neatness has become very important to me now that my home has become part of my “job.” I can no longer escape to the office for 9 to 10 hours a day, so when my house is dirty I have to look at it all day long. And the daily tasks of picking up after little ones who are continually making new messes has birthed in me a deep need for at least a few moments every night where my cleaning show a result.

But even if I could magically banish my mess-induced moodiness and become the truly selfless mother I want to be, the nightly pleas for extended bedtime cuddling are still a challenge. When the Gigglemonster points out the “perfect place” he has made for me in bed, or when his sister begs for “just a little more special time with you, Mommy” I am faced with the task of determining what really is the most loving response. You see, as endearing as the pleas are, they are also clearly manipulative. They are requests for attention and affection, but they are also efforts to extend bedtime just a little bit longer. They are genuine appeals for love and connection, but they are also rejections of the skills of self-soothing and independent sleeping that Tyler and I are trying so hard to teach them.

So, on any given night, the simple request to cuddle leaves me struggling with contradictory inclinations and responsibilities. Should I indulge us both in 20 minutes of cuddling or try to get us both to sleep close to our targeted bedtime? Should I meet their need for expressions of love, or their need to be encouraged in independence? Of course, the end of the bedtime routine is not the only moment of the day for expressing love or teaching independence, but it is a predictable one. And my inconsistent responses from one night to the next have me hearing the voice of my college child development professor exhorting the importance of “consistency, consistency, consistency.”

It turns out that having someone, or two someones, who love me unquestioningly and want nothing more than to be near me is not such a perfect place to be after all. Being the object of that kind of love is an awesome responsibility, and feeling responsible for people I love so intensely is anxiety-provoking. Thankfully that thought brings the echoes of another voice. My amazing sister Bethany helps to care for her boyfriend’s two little boys and her practical wisdom for everyday life extends to parenting. “Don’t stress yourself about being a perfect parent. You can’t be. Practice good-enough parenting.” Despite my life-long leanings toward perfectionism, this rings true. The Gigglemonster’s artful claims to the contrary, no place, and no relationship, is going to be perfect in this life. That’s part of the blessing that keeps me longing for the only ultimately fulfilling relationship that exists, the one with my Creator. While I wait for the ultimate fulfillment of my faith, however, it’s good enough to enjoy the glimpses of intense love and joy that parenting offers.

Tonight is my night to put Princess Imagination to bed. I’m sure there will be dishes in the sink, and the laundry has extra urgency because it needs to be not only folded, but also packed for our road trip to Greece in two days. It’s been a rather tough day for her though, and there’s no reason she can’t sleep in tomorrow. I think tonight it will be good enough – for her and for me – to forget about the important life lessons and just have some special time together.


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Home is where…

For my first ever blog post I wanted to talk about something simple, something that would allow me to dip my toes in the water of this new medium without the risk of drowning in the depths of complicated introspection. But, let’s be honest, I am not very good at avoiding complicated. So, instead I am going to just dive right in. Inspired by my recent trip to California, I want to talk about what makes a place home.

In the expatriate community here in Milan we frequently refer to visits home. The literal meaning conveyed is straightforward: home is our country of origin, in contrast to Italy which is just our current place of residence. The emotional consequences of this usage are quite profound, however, because it reflects an unchallenged assumption that we are not at home here. If not an overt rejection of the residence we share in common, the exclusion of Milan from the category of home at least makes it more difficult to feel settled here. There is always a shadow of impermanence over the events and relationships that make up our daily lives. Yet, paradoxically, the longing for home and the vague sense of alienation in our current environment are a unique bond that draws us together. So that those with whom we might have little contact or little in common if we were back “home” become allies who support us in our life lived away from home.

This contrast between residence and home struck me in a new way on my recent trip to California with my two children, but without my husband. It was on the 20+ hour trip from Milan to Southern California that I made a passing comment to 5 year-old daughter about going home. She gave me a quizzical look and asked when we were really going to go home, to New Jersey. You see, while California is where both my husband and I were born and raised, and is also the place that we have habitually referred to as home, Princess Imagination has never lived there. Before moving to Milan we had lived in New Jersey for 10 years, so our children both have birth certificates issued by the Garden State. Princess Imagination’s first confident steps were taken on the stone path running along the side of our Belle Mead home, her first best friends were from her toddler class at KinderCare, and she still frequently talks about her “flower room”, whose walls I painted to match her first big-girl bed spread. Much as she loves to visit our family in California (I promise Nanna & Gra’ma – she adores it!), for her, New Jersey is still the place that offers her the sense of belonging and security that our exciting expatriate experience lacks.

This realization that my home-compass and my daughter’s do not point in the same direction made me think a little more carefully about what really makes someplace home. Place of residence is not necessarily the defining characteristic. In a sense of legal residence, I am caught in a vague indeterminate status between Milan (where my legal residency has a specific end-date printed on my permesso di soggiorno) and New Jersey (where we still own a home, which allows me to maintain the legal residency required to access important rights and privileges like voting and driving). The bureaucratic hoop-jumping related to maintaining this dual-residency, if anything, alienates me further from both of these places. But more than that, the time I have spent living in both of these places has been overshadowed by that sense of alienation that I described above. Despite residing in both places for extended periods of time, I have never quite felt like I belonged. And this sense of belonging is, perhaps, part of what sets apart a given place as one’s home. This may be one of the few instances I have encountered so far of English offering a more emotional vocabulary than Italian. As far as I have been able to gather (although I can claim absolutely no mastery of the Italian tongue), the same word – casa – is used in Italian to cover the two English words house and home. But these two words carry vastly different meanings. The common attraction of home among expatriates involves less the physical characteristics of a given place (since these places are different for all of us), and more this sentimental sense of belonging. The understanding of home is grounded, at least for the lucky ones like me, in nostalgic memories of comfort and security, where you know how life works and where you will always be accepted.

Not long into my California trip, and frequently throughout its duration, my two year-old son (the Gigglemonster), further complicated my musings about home by getting very un-giggly in response to home-sickness. It was no reflection on the loving family members that welcomed us so warmly on our trip. Instead I discovered that my extroverted, adventurous, happy little guy is really a homebody, and for him, that means Milano. In large part, no doubt, the absence of Daddy on our travels contributed to the Gigglemonster’s uncharacteristic anxiety, but he was also verbal enough about his distress to identify “my bed” and “my house” as a big part of the “home” he was longing for. If memories of comfort and security really are essential to our identification with a given place as home, then the Gigglemonter’s home is inevitably Milan, because he cannot remember living anywhere else. But for me, there are so many places that hold life-changing memories. My memories of childhood and college are all located in California, but my adult life has been lived elsewhere. And the experiences and learning I have had in New Jersey and Milano are just as formative to my sense-of-self as were my early years. It would be impossible to develop any scale that could even measure memories of getting delightfully lost in Venetian back-alleys, and of pledging to love Tyler for the rest of my life, and of holding my children for the first time, and of making homemade ice cream with my Grandparents in their summer home in Mendocino. Much less could any formula then calculate the relative weight or importance of these memories in defining who I am and where I really belong.

Each of these memories does, however, include members of my family, and perhaps here the Italian language does help. When I looked up the Italian translation for home in double-checking the use of the word casa, one alternativenoun offered was famiglia: family. At least for me, it is impossible to imagine any definition of home that does not require the presence of my family. Of course, I am one of the lucky ones. My own nuclear family, my husband and our two precious children, are a source of daily joy, and they daily tell me in words and deeds that I belong with them. But I have a much larger “family” as well – by blood, marriage, faith and friendship, and these connections also give me a sense of belonging, of being where I am supposed to be when I am with the people who are in some way or another members of my family.

This diffuse family perhaps finally shines a clear light on why it is that I feel rather torn in defining one particular place as my true home. My trip “home” to California reunited me with many members of my family, but my husband was “back home” in Milan. Even when we travel together to California for Christmas, and we gather with many members of our families for holiday celebrations, there are still missing elements: family members who are only part of past Christmas memories, or loved ones with their own families. And there are memories of other places, snow in our backyard in Belle Mead, the lights of Rockefeller Center, the folktales of Baba Natale, that are now part of me but not part of a California Christmas.

The three weeks in California have made me long for an envisioned future when Tyler and I may finally call California home again in the residential sense – when I imagine I will feel more centered and less lacking in a home that feels permanent. But, on reflection, I don’t know if that will ever be true. An expat friend of mine has commented on her blog about how she has “left a piece of her heart” in a number of places she has visited while living in Italy. This breaking apart of one’s heart sounds a bit painful, especially if “home is where the heart is.” For someone like me, who longs for security, and grounded-ness, and belonging, it is a bit painful. There is always an element of longing for the piece of home that lives somewhere else, with a person or a memory that is physically located far away. In my faith I have hope in a future where all this longing will be fulfilled, and all those sources of love and belonging united in the One Source. That is comforting. But in the here and now, it is also comforting to realize that there is a benefit to the pain of being torn. If it is true that home is where the heart is, and if a piece of my heart remains in so many places and with so many people, then I am the furthest thing from home-less. I am blessed with many diverse and welcoming homes.