Summertime with the Suoceri
Suoceri = In-laws: this term brings to mind clichés about overbearing parents-in-law, awkward holiday meals, and passive aggressive comments on wedding/parenting/child-rearing choices. That’s not what I’m dealing with, luckily. But I’m also not working with a family of loud, dancing, wine-drinking Italian in-laws who just want to squeeze me and fill my face with cheek kisses either. Massi’s family is quiet, reserved, humble, and simple. Simple in the sense that they live a very simple life; they don’t travel or leave the house much for reasons beyond attending church and hospital visits. All meals are cooked and eaten at home, unless there is a VERY special occasion for which a party has been organized. Relatives and friends from the town drop in to share a coffee or drop off vegetables that they’ve grown in their garden or simply to bring them needed items during this period of post-lockdown since everyone living in Massi’s parents’ home is immuno-compromised. There is no internet, no air conditioning, not even much fan usage for fear of the blasted draft getting on one’s neck or chest and causing all manner of ailments.
The area of countryside where Massi comes from really is beautiful. It’s hilly and green and full of fields of grain and grapes and other agriculture that farmers having been cultivating for generations. This area epitomizes the south. It’s charming, old-fashioned, and family-centered, but after too long can begin to feel somewhat monotonous. My experiences in the south with Massi’s family are difficult to express and full of contradictions.
Like FOOD. I love food. Italian food and my love for cooking and eating it is part of why I started writing this blog and is also one of the things that got me through my lockdown cabin fever. But when one’s whole day is built around meals, and the second that you’re eating breakfast someone is asking you what you’d like for lunch and then for dinner, and when a 70-something woman spends all day on her feet, cooking lunch, serving lunch, cleaning up after lunch (did I mention no dishwasher?), and then gets started cooking dinner, you start to wonder if maybe these people need something else to focus on besides food.
“Maybe would you all like to go out for a meal?”
“No no, it’s safer to eat here at home; dietary issues, you can’t know what they add to your food in a restaurant, too much salt, too much sugar, maybe they use BUTTER!, maybe the food comes from that part of Naples where they grew vegetables on top of a toxic garbage dump, no no, it’s better and safer if we eat here.”
“Okay, well, could I help you? You know, I’m a pretty good cook myself and I’d love to be of some assistance so that you don’t have to do everything”.
“Oh no, it would probably take too long to explain how we do things in Italy. It’ll be easier to just do it myself. Plus, you’re our guest. Relax! Sit on the couch.”
<Whomp whaaa>
Then before every meal, I pull Massi aside and ask him to back me up when his mother starts offering me too much food.
“I’m not that hungry and I just want a primo. I want pasta, and that’s it. No meat, no fish, no side dishes. I just want to eat some pasta and call it a day- got it?!”
“Yes, fine, Jackie, you can tell her yourself. If you don’t want anything else to eat, just say ‘No thank you’”. I roll my eyes. AS IF I HAVEN’T TRIED THAT TACTIC 300 TIMES OVER THE 4 YEARS I’VE KNOWN THIS WOMAN.
Lunch comes. Mamma serves everyone. We begin eating. Silence. Mamma looks to Massi “Is it okay?”. Massi: “Yes, Mamma, it’s good”. Mamma looks to me “Is it okay?”. I smile and nod “Very good!”. Silence. Massi: “Actually, it kind of needs salt”. Mamma gets up and grabs salt. Massi adds some salt to his pasta. Offers me some. I refuse because I don’t want to offend this woman by insinuating that her food is not properly salted (which it isn’t because Massi’s brother can’t have too much salt in his food due to his high blood pressure, and we all must pay this price). Mamma looks to Massi “Now how is it?”. He nods “Buon’”.
We finish our first and second abundant helpings of pasta, Mamma takes away our first course plates and I ready myself to start saying “No, thank you!”. The table setting arrangement already has my second course plate waiting under my first course plate, empty and ready for MORE FOOD.
Mamma asks me to hand her my plate so she can fill it with some sort of meat. “Oh, no thank you, I’m okay. I don’t need a second course”. Mamma looks at me surprised, then disappointed. “Come on, a little bit”. “No, really, I’m okay”. Massi’s brother pipes in “Is she on a diet or does she just not like it?” as if those are the only two reasons someone would refuse food. “No, it’s not either of those, actually. I’m just full. Happily full!” I add smiling, hoping that will assuage her growing disappointment. They look at me confused- how could she be full after just one and a half gigantic plates of pasta? “But I made this salmon for you. I know how much you like salmon. We never eat salmon. I got this because I knew you would like it”. I look to Massi for help. “She’ll have a little. If she can’t finish it she’ll give it to me”. Mamma looks satisfied and heaps an enormous salmon filet onto my plate, then adds some vegetables on the side “No no! That’s enough!” Then adds a little bit more. I glare at Massi.
This is how every meal I’ve eaten in the south has been.
Another reason I find it difficult to be down south is that on top of there being little to do (besides wait for the next meal), there are also very few places to go. Massi’s town has 300 inhabitants, no restaurants, 2 coffee bars, 1 church, 1 school, and 3 streets. During other times of the year in which we visit, I’ll take a passeggiata around the town (circling the whole thing in 15 minutes) but because we’re visiting at the height of summer (mid-high 90s) and -oh yeah- there’s a pandemic on, being outside and going into too many places just doesn’t sound appealing.
Once or twice Massi drove me to some small picturesque towns, but unfortunately I always need a chauffeur for these visits (no valid driver’s license in Italy + can’t drive a manual car). Although these little escapes are nice, I often feel bad about taking Massi away from his family for too long. So for the majority of the time that we spend with Massi’s family I’m either watching him help his parents with home improvement tasks, asking “can I help?” or “can I hold the ladder?” or “do you want me to hand you a tool?” (“No, no, don’t worry. You’re our guest. Relax! Sit on the couch”) or have given up and go into our room to read a book.
With little to do, I spend a lot of time thinking -then ruminating- about my relationship with my in-laws, and there often comes a point where I initiate a discussion with Massi about how difficult I find it to connect with his family.
“They love you!” he assures me whenever I bring this topic up, but my question remains: how can they love me if they don’t know me? If we’ve never talked about anything of substance and they don’t actively inquire about my life or my job, what do they know about me besides the things I choose to eat and not eat in their house?
“To them, asking too many questions can seem intrusive and they don’t want to offend anyone” he says. For me it’s the opposite- asking someone nothing about themselves can appear that one doesn’t care to know.
“They just want us to be happy- if we’re happy, they’re happy” he’ll say. Okay, that’s good and all, but don’t they want to know anything about the person who loves you?
“They’re old, Jackie. They come from a different generation in which families were not quite as active or communicative as you’re used to, especially in the United States”. Is this true? Is this my Americanism showing? Am I expecting too much?
Is this just a matter of me being a foreign person to them? And by that I don’t mean only my country of birth and native language, but the fact that I chose to LEAVE my country of birth, a thing that probably never crossed their minds as a thing that someone would do voluntarily. Can this be chalked up to “cultural differences” or does the generational difference play a bigger role? Does this difference strike me as being so stark because they’re in the south of Italy, historically more traditional and less progressive than the north? Is this a matter of rural versus urban, countryside-living as opposed to city-living, a difference that Americans live with as well and become painfully aware of during election years? Is my education level and work experience a factor, adding to the list of things that differentiates me from many women in their town? Is there a way to talk about all of this without sounding like such a snob?
My hope is that this relationship will improve over time, but is it possible that it will become even more stark if and when we start to have children of our own?
Or am I reading too much into all of this? Is this just how relationships with in-laws can be, regardless of culture? Does this have less to do with me being an American and more to do with different personalities and character traits? Do I need to just make peace with it and move on? Or find a way to simply not care so much? Probably.
The discussion doesn’t get quite resolved, but after a week at Massi’s family’s house, we head toward the seaside, just the two of us. Massi’s sister has a condo on the coast of Molise in a town called Campomarino. It’s darling and now we have a chance for a summer holiday in the traditional sense. We spend a week on the beach, exploring little towns, eating fabulous meals, and just trying to let the stress of the last 6 months wash away in the surf.
We were also able to spend a few nights on Massi’s sister’s boat. We spent three days out on the water, swimming in the Adriatic Sea off the coast of Puglia, spotting WAY too many jellyfish for my comfort level, eating seafood on the boat, taking an excursion to see some of the incredible rock formations and grottos along the coast, and being rocked to sleep by the movement of the water. By the end of these few days we were both relaxed and refreshed and not exactly ready to go back to life on land.
After our time on the sea, we dock the boat and make the journey back to Massi’s family’s town. We share a few more meals over the familiar mix of the blast of Italian singing shows on tv, silence, and lots of discussion of what food we’d like to bring up north with us. Mamma packs our car full to the brim with bread, cheese, eggs, tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, onions, garlic and all sorts of other foods grown by the neighborhood. I know that Mamma wants us to think of her food (and, by extension, her) another few days after we’re back in Florence. I get it. I too show my love with food.
As we drive back to Florence, Massi and I continue the discussion of his family, more specifically his parents. Over time I’ve pieced together a better idea of where they’re coming from- who they are as people, not suoceri. Massi’s dad lost his father during WWII when he was just 3 years old and his mother worked in the fields (the same ones surrounding Massi’s town that I admire and photograph continuously), harvesting tobacco, grain, and tomatoes in order to put food on the table. In 1940 she was a 26 year-old single mother with 2 toddlers living in the south of Italy doing the only work that was available to her at the time. This is Massi’s grandmother. This is the same grandmother that lived with Massi’s parents from their first year of marriage until her death 6 years ago. Whoa. I’m here talking about having difficulties with my mother-in-law, but my mother-in-law’s mother-in-law lived in her home for 45 years. Just let that sink in for a second. Your entire marriage from day one, your mother-in-law is living IN YOUR HOME. And it was Massi’s mom’s responsibility to take care of not only her 4 children but also her mother-in-law when she fell ill and needed near-constant care. I’m pretty positive that I wouldn’t be able to handle that life. And any woman that can navigate the role of mother to her own children as well as caretaker to the elderly mother of her spouse for more than half of her life deserves all the respect we can muster.
And knowing more about how Massi’s dad grew up- the example he witnessed of his mother’s strength and resilience- I could see how he would wish for little more than a large, loving family with which to surround himself, a simple yet stable life. He was a life-long teacher at that one little school in Massi’s town and even though he’s been retired for 30 years, he is still respectfully called “Professore” by the town.
Especially now, especially this year when we’ve slowly watched our everyday routines and big plans get disrupted, when many of us have moved our lives indoors for extended periods of time, and when many of the things we considered essential have come to feel much less important, what has come through as being the most vital thing to keep us going? What are we left with when everything else falls away? The people we love: our family, whether by blood, by marriage, or by choice.
So perhaps my in-laws don’t live a small life, but they are choosing to live a big life in a small place in order to keep everything and everyone close. Living in a place where their whole family can reach them in 20 minutes maximum, they can hold their whole world in their arms at a moment’s notice. Why travel the world when your world is right in front of you? What else should they be focusing on besides feeding themselves and their loved ones enormous meals and taking care of each other? The way that Mamma shows her love to her kids and grandkids is to feed them. That’s her love language and her love currency. I get that. And as I continue to pass my late summer days inside, baking sourdough bread, cookies, and cakes for the people I love, I really get it.
