For Love Sake

I grew up in a family where efficiency, ie achieving results in the fastest and most economical (frugal) manner, was valued above anything and anyone.

Picture a happy Italian family cooking together, it was nothing like that. Cooking, like anything else, was task-driven, the peeling, the chopping, the pouring, the steering: cold, precise, and mechanic. Children in the kitchen? A nuisance.

Everything was executed against time, a lifelong time-bomb ticking in your ear.

My mum was the victim and the perpetrator of this torture, she often would prepare breakfast, lunch, dinner, cake-for-coffee, and cookies-just-in-case, before 7 am, so nobody (dad and us kids), was in her way.

An unforgiving overachiever, my mom could just not slow down, and this set the time to the entire family machinery. Not her fault, second oldest daughter of a family with seven children, she was child-caring since she was a young girl, then going to primary school while helping in the fields, and then at the age of 10 she was sent to work in a shoe factory, a place where productivity — the number of pieces produced per hour- defined the value of her time, and ultimately her self-worth.

Then her own family, my dad’s work, her own job, three children, and more speed and efficiency to make ends meet.

Imagine Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, my mom’s conceived only the first two layers, physiological needs and safety needs, and by “conceived” I mean that in her younger life they were the only needs she had access to, so she genuinely could not imagine, not even for herself, the existence of any other and higher needs, or pleasures. Aiming at the first two layers, mom made sure we had everything we needed to grow strong in a healthy environment and achieve our potentials. And so we did.

Selfless and totally devoted to her family, my mom did not know relaxation, playfulness, or enjoyment, until much later in her life. That is how much she loved us. I do not even know when she started to slow down, she probably does not know either, but I have a clear moment in my head. I was 21- mid-nineties- and she decided to join my sister and I, in a totally improvised tour of Scotland.

Wait-a-minute, what? Yes! And what about our home, my brother and my dad, cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the entire Universe?

They all survived, I know, who would have thought, right?

Once the time-bomb was defused, my sister and I (by then, young women ourselves) began to discover the amazing woman inside my mom, fun, loving, fearless, (self-)unforgiving, yet kind-hearted. We saw her laughing from a different place. An adventurous woman full of joie de vivre, sitting on a bench, with a spoon in her hand and a Viennetta on her laps, watching passer-byes, and being watched.

I like to think that from that point onward, the entire conversation changed, not only with mom, but dad too. Because if mom was keeping everything together with her magic superglue, dad had been working the equivalent of two full-time jobs 7 days a week, 365 days year, since the age of 8. That’s how much I owe to my parents, bless them.

Mom is now a grandma. Every now and then we still catch her running around with the time-bomb in her hand, but she gets plenty of reminders especially by the youngest generation, whose least concern on the planet is time or efficiency. Mom and dad made quantum leaps in discovering life and freedom from full-time parenting, which for them had meant much self-abnegation. I sometimes think that maybe all of that pressure was yes, to secure a present and a future to the family, but also the unconscious muscular memory and unspoken legacy of past generations who suffered from centuries of hunger and poverty. A legacy that we managed to frame and freeze before it scarified new generations.

Time: if you can’t fight it (and you can’t), embrace it. I was raised terrified of wasting my time or anybody else’s, and so was my mom. That desperate rush did not give us any extra time, or any extra anything for that matters.

Love needs time and a billion other things, efficiency did not make it to the list. Whether it is universal love, love for the people around you, or self-love, nothing can come at the expense of love. Nothing can be worth your time more than loving, no thing.

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