My mother
She raised three children in two languages on the principle that the more ways you have to say something, the more precisely you can feel it. She has opinions about everything, including things that have not happened yet. When I was twenty four and the doctors had run out of good news, she sat beside the hospital bed and refused to accept the version of the future they were handing us. She is the reason I am here, in more senses than one. This year, instead of writing about her, I asked her three questions, one afternoon, no script. What follows is the conversation, in her words.
Francesco,
Tell the surgeon story. The one from the day after.
Francesco came out of that operating room and twitched his shoulder. The surgeon had just finished telling us, with the practiced efficiency of someone who delivers this speech regularly, that Francesco would never move again. Francesco had been out of surgery for perhaps four minutes when he decided to offer his own opinion on that prognosis. He lay there on that gurney and produced a single twitch of his shoulder, just enough. "Evidently my son disagrees with you, Doctor," I told the surgeon. The surgeon was not amused. Francesco, I suspect, was.
If I could only send you two products for the rest of your life, which two?
The Retinol Rescue Overnight Cream. My favorite product in the world. Not in this line. In the world. I go to sleep. Something happens. I wake up quietly restored. And the DNA-42 Clinicalift Serum, which carries a particular significance for me because I was present during parts of its development and offered observations that Francesco actually incorporated into the formula, which any mother of a son will tell you is not something you take for granted. It lifts with the quiet efficiency I find most admirable in anything or anyone. It does not announce what it is doing. It simply does it and leaves.
What is your favorite multi-generational tradition?
We come to the table. We have always come to the table, and everything that has ever mattered has happened there. An Italian family does not sit at a table quietly. We argue. We have opinions about everything, including things that have not happened yet. We disagree about the correct way to make a dish that everyone in the room has been making for forty years. We tell stories about people who are no longer here as though they might walk through the door at any moment. We speak two languages in the same sentence without noticing. And in all of this, without anyone ever stating it explicitly, we are telling the children at the table who they are, where they come from, and what is expected of them.
Happy Mother's Day. To my mother, and to yours.
