‘Mamma mia’

My mother says that if you really hate something, the best thing to do is spend time with it. Once enough hours have passed, it will become your friend. Spend time with your enemies and you will develop empathy for them. Spend time with your detestable list of conditional verbs and you’ll end up wanting to carry a copy in your wallet. Spend time with your fears and you’ll develop a strange affection toward them. I have been wanting to write about Italian mothers for more than a year now. I sit down twice a month to write an article, and more often than not, I start by declaring to the keyboard that I want to write about la mamma. Unfortunately, the keyboard does not care what I want. And it never helps me write about mothers. It’s quite a titanic task, you know. There are stereotypes lurking at every corner. Each time I start a la mamma article, the over-bearing meal-maker who irons her son’s socks always butts her way onto my page and won’t budge an inch. Try and fight against Italian mothers, even imaginary ones, and you’ll most likely lose. Today, though, I’m going to outsmart her. I’m going to spend time with the things I fear. Mostly, I’m frightened by two things. The stereo-typical and the trivial. They are mortal enemies to the writer in me. But maybe today I can find the strength to love my enemies for an hour. Because basically, I’ve just got to get this over with. I’ve got to write about mothers in Italy so I can stop thinking about them. Okay. Here is what I’ve observed about mothers in Italy: La mamma’s ability to make life both easy and difficult surpasses all expectations. She is paradox incarnate. No one else knows how to occupy such contrasting roles with such poise and grace. She serves at the table but rules the world. She is stage-hand and starlet. A bea-con of self-sacrifice who always gets her way, la mamma serves like a foot soldier and commands like a general. She is martyr, warrior, ser-vant and queen. Maybe that’s why, in Italy, her word means everything. The phrase mamma mia, like the mother it recalls, works in all situations. Mamma mia is ‘No way!’, ‘Imagine that!’, ‘Incredible!’, ‘Wow!’, ‘No problem!’, ‘What a bore!’, ‘How exciting!’ and ‘What a nice surprise!’ More similar to ‘my God’ than ‘my mother’, this prized piece of language covers the entire range of human experience. It conveys wonder and implies surprise; it reveals horror, shock and disbelief. It can mean dismay and disapproval. It can stand for appreciation and awe. Italian mothers cannot keep secrets. Neither can mamma mia. It says it all. In Italy, anything that’s worthy of interest or comment gets a bit of mommy in the mix. Perhaps the most common Italian expression, mamma mia is used to protest against high prices, pouring rain and rude neighbors. You can say it when a child brings you daisies. It’s good for marveling over how much your nephew has grown. It’s great for bemoaning the state of the universe. Like the mother it mentions, mamma mia can carry the weight of any emotion. Last Friday night, I met my friends Claudia and Daniel for bistecca and boar sauce. Children of Italian mothers, all three of us spent the bet-ter part of our childhood in North America and then moved to Europe to live out our adult lives. They both work for the United Nations in Rome. Daniel has spent the last six months on a World Food Project mission in Afghanistan and Claudia has recently returned from an emergency training camp in a place I’m not allowed to mention. Her job was to take important diplomats hostage to see how they would react to emergency situations. In their company, my life in Florence is utterly mundane. After an hour of world hunger, social unrest and puppet governments, I started to feel antsy. What was I doing with my life? Shouldn’t I be out saving the world too? Just in time, our conversation took a fortunate turn and we started talking about our mothers. Did yours’ make you eat squid risotto in the school cafeteria? Did yours’ make you wear crocheted underwear? Did yours’ become suddenly obsessed with your bowel moments as soon as you set foot on Italian soil? Admittedly, all very trivial topics. But sometimes the world is a big bad place and there is something therapeutic about talking about la mamma. It helps you remember where you are from. It might even help you remember where you are going. Amongst the laughter, I told my friends about my interminable mother-based writer’s block. ‘I’d say that mamma mia is a good saying for grown-ups, because deep down—we are just kids—busy making a mess of things,’ Daniel said. He smiled but something sad was happening behind his eyes. He had seen more of the world than I’ll ever care to. ‘My mom used to make peanut butter sandwiches by folding the slice of bread over. It was her effort to integrate,’ I told him. ‘Everyone else had isosceles triangles with the crusts cut off.’ He squeezed my hand and laughed, letting the mood be light again. I went away from that dinner with a few worthy realizations. The first is that I know nothing about civil rights in Afghanistan. The last, and most important, is that adults should be encouraged to use mamma mia often. It’s only a few words away and you never know when you’ll need a bit of mother in your world.