Back in June, on my return flight from East Africa to Cincinnati, I woke up mid-flight, hand on my pulsating stomach. Whether I had been dreaming or in an oxygen-deprived wake-state, I can only describe the sensation as having my womb torn asunder. I watched as it happened outside of myself—and felt it deeply too. Terrified as I was, my tears did not stop for both flights home—and throughout the remaining summer months.
What was the purpose of the universe showing me what it had at the time? How we were the caged animals on the Serengeti stuck inside a LandRover on safari, and our witness of the animals was a tease? They were free, something humans will never be.
I yearned to be them in this wildness where time and place melded into one, and one could easily slip in an out of the seams.
For months afterward, I felt like a felled lion, unable to get back my roar.
Was it because there had been stops and starts, stops and starts with the latest progress on my manuscript, Something Italian: A personal history of flight, family, and food at an Italian American table? I already had a signed contract with the publisher. When I turned in a recent draft of the manuscript, the editor said, “I haven’t done much with this. Before we take the next step, we need photo permissions for all your photos. And you’ll also have to write alt text for the photographs (that allows visual content to be accessible to people who can't see it). Send the files to me via Dropbox.” I worked at a furious pace, and sent the next version.
A month later, I asked again about progress. This time, the editor replied, “I did not receive the Dropbox link.” He had waited a month to tell me? I resent the link with the specific instructions to let me know if the link was transmitted. But fury still flamed my days.
I vacillated from madness to malaise, powered by a fever of unknown origin.
During a brief argument over life in general, my husband said, “You complained about going to Africa.” (Which I had. I was worried about mosquitos, blending in with his friends, knowing how much I desired my introvert time). “And now, you complain, I can’t believe what a BIG experience it was. You moan about having to do one thing, and when it happens, you have completely the opposite reaction.
“What exactly do you want these days?” What, exactly.
On a deeper level, I was trying to find some way to ground myself. To come back to the person I was before Africa, if possible. And to wait on this book. Would it really come to fruition? Would it really matter? Was creation the point, as my friend, Michael Dinallo, declared in our email exchanges about the existence of art and the creative life?
The book had been my pandemic project. Sweat and soldi put into that work could not be accounted for. My archives had blossomed, the stories and family trees too. The number of familial connections through social media apps, with both sides of my parent’s families and descendants in Italy, extended out into my real life like twisted grape vines. Our plans to meet relatives and my dogged effort to speak the Italian language were intertwined as well.
However, the book was not the only project. A healing of a marriage was too.
Traces of my argumentative seeking could be found earlier in the pandemic. One of the first disagreements Mark and I experienced during Covid occurred in the kitchen while cooking aglio e olio. (Here, he would joke, of course I’d find a way to blame him). The garlic was intended to be sliced, so one could bite into the crispy bittersweetness of garlic, tamed by the olive oil. My husband, ignoring my requests, proceeded to chop the garlic into miniscule pieces. I raged. Would he do that in surgery if someone specifically requested or trained him another way?
Beneath all that was a weight I had tried to pull forward, only a year or so removed from grief over my mother’s death, my caregiving for her, what I lost in my father’s death and before that. And the not knowing of this state of being Italian without them. That’s why I hung on to the slicing of garlic. Of a way of being in the kitchen, the garden. That had all slipped away with my parents’ passing and the earlier release of my grandparents from their duty to further elucidate on our Italian ways. Even in their deaths, the lived days of my parents took up residence in my frontal lobes. The notion of being Something Italian, not only in book name, but to give back what my ancestors had provided me, a freedom to explore and choose, a freedom now being threatened for many, sat atop my chest causing palpitations in my psyche and heart.
Our first trip post-pandemic to Italy was to my mother’s family hometown in Abruzzo, Italy, in 2022. The life-changing experience caused me to work harder. I modified and shifted the focus of my book. And my life. I stretched where and when there was little skin left to stretch.
Then, came the Africa sojourn this past June. What originated there was still hard to explain. Upon return, I felt unconnected, disconnected, aloof. As if this womb from that dream floated above me wherever I went. Though not a dark cloud, it was obscure.
Was this Africa sensation so much of tearing oneself apart from whatever the expectations I had of myself? and I was hard on myself. In stepfamilies as in all families, one was always left wondering if more could have been done, and for me, wandering through the muck of these relationships. Whatever I had done that was considered insufficient—as mother, stepmother, wife, daughter, sister, woman—it would never be enough, even without whatever heart-shattering revelations had been made to us. Whatever our young adult children were doing now in their lives, whatever choices they were making, I would be happy for them. The same with other family members and in-laws. In a way, I let go of my marriage too, of expectations that had long simmered. That reserve energy I could direct elsewhere.
Was this acceptance of the consequences of my sins as a parent, wife, or other, part of this wildness I desired, the one I saw flashing at me deep in the eyes of the lioness? The ease of sway in the long necks of the giraffes. Was that being selfish?
Was I still the lone speck of sand unearthed from the Olduvai Gorge, unbelonging to anywhere but the past, as I wrote in my journals upon our return? And therefore, was the wildness an abandonment of rigidity, of too much grounding over 58 years? What could I learn from the specks of 2 millions years ago?
By this summer’s end, another long-awaited trip to Italy took place. This time to an even more unassuming part of Italy—Calabria. The stories were many. Mark and I shared inside jokes only we could laugh later about. One about the number of small, boxy, Tiny Winder wind up-like cars, the Panda Fiats, on the road. When traffic slows, it was always the fault of a “f—panda.” Or how much I worked on my language skills, yet Mark was able to connect by “speaking drinking” of wine, amaro, negroni, anisette, Peroni’s, and more.
Fall arrived. I’d always thought of it as an opening for new birth, but what if new birth was really a disintegrating of the old ways that rot in our flesh.
During one of my recent workouts, I listened to an NPR podcast on Pharrell Williams, singer-songwriter, rapper. After a time in his career of stuttering starts, he noted how his successes were those that came through others, not necessarily generated through his own ideas. He said, “I thought it was all about the genesis of me.” And it really wasn’t.
I replayed that track. Each time led me deeper, back into plains of East Africa, where I stood still on that speck of aloneness in the world. Suddenly, the singular speck no longer felt like an island, but a crowded train station filled with other tinier specks traveling through time, bouncing off each other, passing off bits of themselves, depositing them for others to utilize in their sojourn.
So why had I felt this deep extraction from a place so exotic and foreign to me, amidst a language guttural and made up like all the rest? Yet not experience this same mining, following my departure from Abruzzo or Calabria, places so intimately known from inside me that the cadence of the language was enough for me to understand love, and the land recognized my feet whenever they touched the earth?
Pharell’s interview provided me with a fleeting answer. He was often perplexed by others who exuded confidence and grounding, which he now understood was partially derived from knowledge about their heritage. After he appeared on Finding Your Roots, he was in full possession of this same knowledge. This brought a gravity to his life which prompted him to move forward, believe bigger.
The duality of gravity pulling us down, but also setting us free enlightened me.
Is that what I felt after Italy? An unfathomably miniscule understanding of the life led by ancestors two generations removed from me? This roguish road I’d been walking, though only five months had transpired since Africa, was also one of experiencing a sandblasting away of a self that had been constructed out of a growing ego—those small e egos that comprise the larger one—and not a going one.
I had been unwilling to let go of it for fear of what might take its place—nothing. No book. No voice. No words. No existence. Would that be okay?
Busted apart in Africa somewhere over the Olduvai Gorge, my insides had shaken everything loose. Eventually, caraffes of local wines sipped while debris from cobblestones of history fluttered into our glasses and many, many cousins hugged in the Italian language, sloughed off enough ego to fit on a speck.
What’s Next?
Something Italian: A personal history of flight, family and food from an Italian American table continues its own sojourn with a blog update coming soon! In the interim, look out for a feature I’ll be a part of for the National Italian American Foundation called NIAF on Location in Cincinnati.
November 14th - Our next virtual Caring for the Caregiver Writing Experience is Watch this space, email bwilliams@muchmorethanameal.com, or visit givingvoicefdn.org register. Mark your 2025 calendars for these upcoming dates: February 25 (virtual), May 13 (in-person), August 12 (virtual), November 14 (in-person). All sessions are 10 - 12 p.m. FREE, and open to caregivers at any stage.
Keynote Appearances and Workshops
November 14th. Online. WellMed presents Caregiver SOS.
December 10th, Alois Alzheimer Center, How to Strong and Kind caregiving/book talk. Caregiver Writing Experiences, January 15th and April 16th at 2 p.m.. Stay tuned for details.
April 19, Contemporary Arts Center continues its annual writing workshops, this time extended to a series of 8 sessions. Signups details Jan. 1.
What a great reflection. I was right there, feeling it with you. "I had been unwilling to let go of it for fear of what might take its place—nothing. No book. No voice. No words. No existence. Would that be okay?"