The Death of Communication

They told us that technology would shorten distances.

They told us that technology would streamline bureaucracy.

They told us that without technology we would fall behind.

They told us that this time around, the revolution would be digitalized.

They didn’t tell us that technology would kill communication.

The only surprise is that it has killed communication even in the work world, and the proof of this lies in the hundreds of emails that I sent out over the past three months and which never got a single response, not even a cold, formal, old-fashioned, “No thank you.”

It’s discouraging enough to have your business proposal refused, but when from across the cybersphere you receive nothing but silence and the most antiseptic indifference, things feel even worse.  When things get this gray, a “No thank you” starts to feel like an accomplishment, a ray of light, something to be celebrated with champagne and oysters.

Not that the death of communication has left the private sphere untouched, even though in the age of the so-called social networks, when everyone is connected to everyone else, this may seem to be a contradiction.

But once the ephemeral and imperceptible movement of an index finger over the “Like” button has come and gone, I don’t see or read any great discourses.

I understood that communication was officially dead when, during a hyper-technological business call with an up-and-coming travel corporation organized through tumble and carried out on skype, I heard my husband speak with a man whose embarrassing shortage of vocabulary made me cringe from behind the monitor.  Disconnected sentences and incomplete phrases, all interspersed with waves of like and you know, made you pray for multisyllabic words that just didn’t come.  My not-yet-four-year-old daughter is more eloquent.

And that young man, fresh off his university degree and full of energy and enthusiasm, is no exception.  He is a member of that part of the world that neither writes nor reads, but tweets.

But this is not an anti-technology post, which would be both oxymoronic and in bad faith, given that I too use Fb and Twitter.  There are limitations to technology, but there are remedies too.

To avoid turning into one of those half-wits who speak in three-word sentences that hang rather tenuously to any logical meaning, we should use all of the tools that social networks and other technological advances place at our disposal, but in such a way as to cultivate The Word, with all of its magical powers.

We must continue to communicate as human beings.

That indeed would be a revolution.

Tags: communication, internet, people, reading, social network, technology, word, writing

Smile, It’s Christmas!

Complaining about Christmas is a bit like shooting at the Red Cross.

It’s simply not done.

And yet everyone does it, if for nothing more than to feel like they are above the glitzy, schnitzy media and shopping frenzy that appears to have taken mind-control of everyone else.

But in the end, no one is truly able to keep the oppressive Christmas cheer fully at arm’s length.

Christmas is the shadow of its own reputation, like an aging woman who clings desperately to her faded beauty that will never return.

When my grandfather fell ill, one of the pressing thoughts in my mother’s mind was to celebrate Christmas the same way as always, even if the boat was taking on water from a thousand holes.

There’s no room for sadness at Christmas, and anyone who isn’t up to snuff is criticized as being a bad omen.

Lights must twinkle, wrapping paper must crinkle, eyes sparkle, and pure white snow fall from the sky.

This summer in America, my mother-in-law told me the story of a Christmas dinner thrown by family friends.  While the guests oohed and aahed over the procession of gorgeous plates dancing past them, the hostess recounted with total nonchalance how she had cooked each and every one of them.  She left out the detail that in fact, each and every one had been brought there by a discreet caterer, discovered only after some sleuthing by my incredulous in-laws.

Lying in order to look better is one of the oddities of American culture, but in its own way, it fits in with the parade of Christmas greetings, good cheer, blogs on how to have the merriest of Christmases, and the ubiquitous nasal voice of John Lennon singing “Happy Christmas” until you can’t take another verse of it.

And so, let’s lie to ourselves about not having enough money in our wallets for expensive gifts, about the fact that things aren’t the way the Chirstmas-happy media wants us to believe, about the problems that inconvenient people remind us of.

Let’s all smile … it’s Christmas.

And if we’re all good boys and girls, we’ll make it through yet another Holiday Season.

Cheerleaders or Critics?

I grew up in a family where you never praised your own chilren; it was much more common to laud other people’s kids than to give a “Good girl!” or “How beautiful!” to me or my sister.  In this, there was total fairness toward both of us.

That doesn’t mean that we grew up in a family without love and affection; it simply meant that we had to fight our battles on our own, and take what recognition we could get for ourselves.  My Jungian analyst, who helped pull me out of my dark hole after birth #2, thinks that this is one of the reasons for which I developed a stronger “masculine” side to my personality.  Acting more like a “man” with a tough hide protecting my emotions, I was able to find satisfaction and success through methods that were not always the epitome of sweetness and light.

But my family and its style of child-rearing was not unique, at least not in Italy.  Aside from the legendarily overprotective Italian mother-son relationship, Italian society does not tend to give easy compliments, fake enthusiasm, or political correctness.

Douglas, on the other hand, had a thoroughly American upbringing.  Ever accomplishment was a landmark, every stick drawing a budding Picasso, every decision the most perspicacious.

Time hasn’t changed anything, and now in the role of grandparents, my in-laws are the same way with their grandchildren as they were with their children.  But they are no exception either, from within American society.

Americans, as everyone knows, are ultra-competitive.  If they have to do something, they want to be the absolute best in doing it.  My son has to walk earlier than other children; my daughter doesn’t draw, she creates; she doesn’t make baby sounds, she communicates; at three, he already plays like Pele; she’s the best in her ballet class and will surely go far …

This parental syndrome of cheerleading evidently works, considering that the push for self-confidence and the drive to win at an early age have produced the strongest nation in the world.

But if 1 out of every 1000 children who have been lauded and applauded by their family all their lives actually makes it big, the other 999 grow up into adults who believe that the world is at their feet.

And the day that reality hits them can be truly difficult.

On the other hand, those who have had to fight for themselves without great backslapping and encouragement, carving out their little slice of glory on the way, become stronger and stronger with the passing years … but at a price.

Raising your children with the expectation that the world is a fairy tale place where everyone will roll out a red carpet in front of them is unrealistic and unfair; but raising them without giving them any recognition for their little victories may turn them into hard, cynical human beings.

As always, the answer lies somewhere in the middle, especially insofar as we feel the need to give our children what we ourselves didn’t have, but without going overboard.  Prepare them for life, which can be tough and isn’t going to make any apologies for anyone, with a positive outlook and believing in themselves, knowing that we will be there to give them a hand when they fall.

Tags: accomplishment, America, americans, cheerleaders, children, critics, family, Italy, life, reward, Society, victory

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

The other day, words came out of my mouth that I hadn’t heard in about twenty years.  In fact, the last time I heard them used was by my mother, yelling them at either me or my sister when we had crossed some line.  “If I come over there, I’m not coming over there for my health!”

That expression had been marinating in some little drawer of my brain for decades, just waiting for the perfect moment – yelling at a whiny and disobedient daughter – for my mind to dust it off and pull it out.

Without time to even reflect on what I was about to say, the fearsome ultimatum had already slipped past my lips.

The force of examples, actions, and words, repeated hundreds of times and absorbed like a sponge by the eyes and ears of a child, left me stunned for a while.

The impossible had happened.

I had become my mother!

So often parents lose themselves in the latest moral, pedagogical, or psychological theory about raising children in the modern age, all the time forgetting that the only real life lessons that a child will learn are those that they see day in and day out in the acts and words in their home.

If the parents have bad eating habits, it will be difficult for a child to learn to eat the right things.  If the parents are anti-social, the children will copy their example.  If a home is filled with joy, the kids will be light-hearted and happy too.

Expecting a child to act differently than the example in front of him or her is a mistake, and yet parents keep on confusing them with verbal commands that don’t reflect the reality that they see around them.

The nicest thing about giving a good example (that horrid phrase that all of us first-borns have heard millions of times in relation to our younger siblings) is that it lasts forever.

I don’t remember anyone ever telling me that when you enter a house in Italy for the first time, you always ask permission of the owners before you pass the threshold.  Nor do I recall being instructed to take off my sunglasses when speaking with someone so that they can look me in the eyes.

I do it because it’s what I always saw being done.

The worst thing about giving a bad example is that it lasts forever too.

Unconsciously passing on your own personal fears to your children can be unhealthy.

It’s no wonder that my husband is afraid of flying, after seeing his parents throughout his childhood take two different flights to the same destination when they were traveling without the kids (so that at least one of them would be saved).  And I am a hypochondriac because my father passed it on to me in thousands of small, subtle ways … even if he will never admit it, not even under torture in Guantanamo.

My parents’ generation is not familiar or comfortable with self-analysis, with getting to know yourself, or with going to analysis.  They raised their kids the best they knew how, often at a very young age, and so now they find it difficult to be judged by their children and live with the sense that maybe they made some crucial error.

But if we make the effort to understand ourselves, we can discover along the way where it is that our innate characteristics come from, and then knowingly choose which ones to preserve and which ones to discard.  In the end, it will give us the tools to raise healthier children.

And who knows, maybe it will even help us save some money on psychologist bills.

Tags: actions, children, choose, example, family, follow, life, parents, words

The Unpredictability of Events

Putting down the phone with my sister last Saturday afternoon, I felt an acute sense of envy and frustration.  She had just finished telling me (from beside the indoor pool) about how her boyfriend had whisked her off, unannounced, to a world-class hotel in Montecarlo.

He had awakened her at six in the morning, bags already packed and in the car, and said nothing about their destination until they were parked at the Hermitage Hotel.

In comparison, I had parked my two daughters with their grandparents so as to cut through brush and brambles on our very steep, very beautiful, and very useless piece of steep hill in the pouring rain.

She couldn’t have played me any better.

For at five-thirty p.m., while I was getting thumped by my mother at a hand of Gin, the door to our house burst open and my sister yelled, “Surprise!” with a dopey grin on her face.

My jaw dropped like in the cartoons and for a good two minutes the giggles got the best of me and I couldn’t get out a single word.

My plans for a quiet evening with my parents had been permanently (and pleasantly) changed.

I was already thinking about how the girls would go off to bed at their usual hour after dinner, and I was salivating over an evening of raucous Spades tournaments and watching “El Clasico” between Real Madrid and Barcelona with everyone on our brand-new fire-red couch, delivered that very day by two muscular Romanians.

Julia, who is usually the difficult one to get into bed when there’s company, fell asleep like a log; Sofia, who usually conks out with her stuffed lamb held tightly in her arms, started screaming all hell.

And away we go!

Yell at her, hug her, pick her up, put her down, let her watch us play cards a bit, put her back down, yell at her, pick her back up, have her fall asleep on my shoulder, put her down, she wakes up, she cries, everyone pretends to leave the house saying loudly “Bye-bye Sofia” (when in reality they were stuffed into our 10-square-foot bathroom), put her down, pick her up, it seemed to never end.

My plans for a fun, entertaining evening with no big complications flew right out the window.

It was not until after 11 p.m. that Sofia finally gave up her struggles and stoically fell asleep while standing and gripping on to the bars of her crib.  But her surrender came too late for all of us.

The more you plan things, the more events will muck up your plans, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.

It’s when you think you already know everything about your husband and then discover that he is still capable of surprising you, it’s when you are so close to victory but someone gets there a second before you, it’s when you thought all was lost but an unexpected phone call gives you the strength to go on, it’s that dream vacation you’ve been planning for months that is washed away by a natural disaster, it’s the child that arrives when you had given up trying to have one.

Losing our long-trusted and comfortable bearings can be frightening, but the new things that swoop down in their place can add a bright, unexpected color to our lives.

Tags: events, family, life, new, plan, sister, surprise

The World Before Caregivers

Thirty or so years ago, the world was a different place.

The Fiat 127 and 500 zipped up and down narrow Italian streets, TVs were gigantic boxes about three-feet deep, people still had party-line telephones in their homes (if you don’t remember, those were the phone lines shared by more than one family), and private caregivers hadn’t yet darkened the doors of most Italian houses.

There was less disposable income, or at least people made less of a show of it, vacations were taken strictly in August, “long weekends” didn’t exist, and “low cost” meant hotels on the Adriatic coast with full-board.

Today, when no one is ever ready to do without, more wealth equals less compassion.

In the past, when parents became widowed, the family got together (often to its detriment) so as to take care of them, making them feel less alone.  They didn’t go running impatiently to the first 24-hour caretaker service – which have sprung up like weeds during this last decade – so as to find a corpulent Eastern European nurse to take care of their loved ones.  The public gardens of my city have been full of them for years now: groups of women speaking one Slavic language or another amongst themselves as they push wheelchairs around the park with loving and genuine patience.

When my grandmother fell ill, and the dark clouds of old age began to gather around all of us, my parents made a decision that met with silent disapproval from all those around them.  They sold their home (the mortgage of which they had only just finished paying off) and moved into a new one that would be big enough to host my grandparents.

Greater personal wealth, whether real or just imagined, has made it ever less appealing to let our conscience be our guide, and opting to throw our lives into disarray for the good of others has become unthinkable.

It’s a bit like choosing not to have children.

You often hear the Italian media (repeating itself ad nauseam) talking about how couples today are not having kids (or are starting to have them at later and later ages) because they are in an unstable job market, which is no doubt true.  And yet, even in the past, in moments that were assuredly less auspicious than today, children were brought into the world by young couples.

Maybe they had fewer expectations, maybe they were less drawn to material things; certainly they had to grow up faster than now.

It was no doubt easier to go without many of the world’s luxuries when there were no iPads and IPhones, and you had never heard of hot stone massages, sushi bars, or baristas.

When my mother became pregnant with me at age 19, she was unemployed, my father was working as a substitute teacher in an elementary school, and they didn’t have a house of their own to live in.  And yet they never once hesitated in having me.

Instead, they made sacrifices (what a taboo word for my generation).  Like living for one year with her in-laws in a miniscule room that they shared with a little whippersnapper that they had to raise.

Spending a life together for better or worse, in good times and bad, wasn’t always a cakewalk.  Families had their fault-lines, children watched their parents fight over suspicions of third-parties, but at the end of the day, the family stuck together, in part because the referendum that had legalized divorce was still a recent happening.

Everything is more ephemeral now.  Couples function as if they were working at it part-time, always ready to pack it in and head off to find someone else, just to repeat the same scenario over and over.  Anymore, Italy looks exactly like the America.

Look, ma, we’re free too!

Free to get married and divorced within a month, only to re-marry and re-divorce within another year, free to create our own extended families – so popular with journalists and TV sitcom writers, so much less popular with the children who find themselves in them.

The Americanized extended family means having (under the best of circumstances), eight grandparents, a bevy of half-sibling and step-siblings, three days at dad’s, five days with mom, five days at dad’s, three days with mom, new wives in the home, fighting exes all around, and family dynamics that would make even Woody Allen raise an eyebrow.

Once upon a time, times were tough and often unpleasant, but there was an implicit, collective sense of duty.

It seems that today we have much much more, and have become much much less.

Tags: America, caregivers, children, family, Italy, life, live, old age, parents, Society

When Christmas Comes Every Day

When I was a kid, the best day of the year was December 13, the day that Santa Lucia arrived on the back of her donkey and brought presents to all the good boys and girls.

On the Eve of Santa Lucia, I always went to bed early and spent hours awake under the covers, far too excited to fall asleep.  And it was a shocking moment when a 2^nd Grade classmate told the last few of us who still believed in her that it was really Mom and Dad who brought the gifts.

That day, in the blink of an eye, I grew up.

Even after discovering my parent’s unthinkable betrayal, for years I kept on writing letters to Santa Lucia with a list of gifts I was hoping for, and placing it on the windowsill with a glass of milk for her donkey.  My little sister, seven years younger than me, gave me the excuse to still be able to believe.

When the first rays of dawn began to gleam through the shutters, I snuck my hand out from under the covers to touch my slippers and …

Surprise!

They were full of gummy candies and chocolates.  That was the first, unmistakable sign that there would be presents – assembled in religious silence the night before by my parents – waiting for me in the kitchen.

“Mom!” I yelled, impatient for them to get out of bed.  The rule was that everyone had to enter the kitchen at the same time.

A few minutes later, my parents got up, switched on the light, and I discovered that the kitchen had been transformed into a magical Neverland.  Hidden under chairs, piled onto the table, or wedged into the space next to the sink were the most wonderful games and toys on the planet, toys that Santa Lucia had bought just for me!

What a wonderful world!

But those were other times.

The economic limitations of a family with a single income, a mortgage that had to be paid, and a daughter to raise, didn’t leave us much space to buy gifts very often.  Shoes were purchased only once a season, and designer clothes never passed through our door.

My grandparents, who had lived through the War, counted every lira of their meager Social Security, and the value of money was a concept that even I, just a child, understood very well.

But it was precisely for this reason that when Santa Lucia arrived, she brought not only gifts but a truly special day, different from all 364 other days, and which I looked forward to with great expectation all year long.

This week, there is a battle going on between my daughter and myself.  After writing the letter to Santa Lucia, Julia (who isn’t yet 4 years old) forgot about it completely.  Every morning, after pointing out to her that the letter is still there on the windowsill and saying in faux-shock “Look! Santa Lucia still hasn’t come to pick up the letter,” Julia glances in that direction and says with total nonchalance, “Nope!”

That “Nope” expresses about as much interest as if I had asked her if she needed to go to the bathroom or if she ate her vegetables at nursery school.

The possibility that Santa Lucia might not bring her any gifts doesn’t worry her in the slightest.

In her shoes, I would have been distraught.

Julia understands perfectly well how Santa Lucia and Santa Claus work, but like so many children of parents who are not-so-young, of grandparents who waited years to have their first grandchildren, and of a well-to-do society, she doesn’t have to wait for Santa Lucia in order to get a present.

For her, every day is Santa Lucia: from her doting father who comes home with a new dress for her Barbie, from her grandmother who never arrives without something special and new for her, from her aunt who doesn’t have her own children and wants to spoil her rotten.

Julia will never have to live under the economic limitations that I did at her age and which, in part, made me into the woman that I am today, but I’m afraid that because of this, the world will never be quite as wonderful a place as it was for me every December 13^th.

Tags: children, christmas, donkey, gifts, grandchildren, grandparents, santa claus, santa lucia