Change is Good

Change is good for you.

There are those who deal with it better than others, those who have more experience, and those who stress out.  I’ve always considered myself a woman of the world, what with four moves on my resume, time spent living abroad, and intercontinental voyages since I was a teenager.

But I’m nothing compared to my husband.

Three days after our wild and wooly move to Liguria in a minivan filled to the brim with boxes, things stuffed into every last cranny of the car, two daughters who couldn’t even see one another for all the stuff, and one cat riding shotgun and meowing all the way, I’ve aged a decade while Doug is like a kid on his first trip to Six Flags.

He’s got this dopey grin stamped on his face, he keeps blurting out sentences of uncontainable enthusiasm, and he’s generally above the clouds.  For an American, living on the Mediterranean is one of those exotic dreams that one imagines all his life.

Having moved only one hour and forty minutes from where we lived before is barely even a move for him, who is used to traveling the world with just a couple of bags, from West Africa to Kazakhstan, from South Africa to Morocco.

And anyway, Americans already start out with a gigantic head start in the race for cosmopolitanism.  Very few of them stay at home beyond their 18th birthday.  Most of them say goodbye to their friends and family and leave home forever, returning only once or twice a year for a few days.

When I move away from my hometown a few days ago, my sister cried like a baby, friends who I never see anymore organized a “last” evening out, and our neighbor’s mother even told us sadly that this was “the end,” forcing me to underline the fact that this was in reality only the beginning … somewhere else.

Yes, change is good.

In almost every child psychology book that you can find there is a chapter about the effect of moving on children, in which the child is depicted as experiencing a small trauma, becoming irritable, and sometimes regressing to earlier stages of behavior.

Well, my girls must be an exception to the rule, because since we arrived in the new house, they have slept the night through, played with and annoyed each other like before, and are basically exactly as they were in the old house.  Either they are Martians, or their experiences traveling long distances from a very young age, getting used to changing beds, houses, and references has made them comfortable with change, always knowing that even when the surroundings are different, the family remains as tight-knit as ever (Booboo and Lamb included).

So, aside from the sun-drenched valley that I see from my porch instead of the walls of the municipal hospital, the twenty-year-old palm tree instead of an anonymous hedge, the unfamiliar Ligurian dialect instead of my beloved Emilian cadences, and the beach only 1 mile away instead of 100, everything seems the same.

I don’t want to put this in terms of culture-clash, but it seems as though my daughters have displayed an elevated quantity of Yankee blood during this Ligurian caper.

… at the end of the day, it could have gone worse.

Venice

The choice to keep on traveling with small children (and without lowering yourself to the Family-Fun-Friendly-Mega-Resorts built specifically with the little nippers in mind) is a way to stay linked to your past life before kids, a stubborn refusal against giving up the pleasures of seeing the world.  It won’t be the same as before, it will certainly be more complicated, but it will still be yours.

And it will be exhausting.

Even before you get out the front door: pack four suitcases, the stroller, the Baby Bjorn, the diaper bag, the food bag, the bag for Sofia’s toys, the bag for Julia’s books, blankets and raincoats, and even bottles of wine for evening-guzzling by listless parents.  At the end of the car ride, which includes songs and diversionary tactics for children so as to avoid hysterical fits (some opt for the on-board DVD player, which aside from being a classic American import also worries me quite a bit), we are treated to Julia’s inevitable puking.

The first thing that I feel I have the responsibility to state after having gained a bit of experience on the subject is: don’t go to Venice if you have children who aren’t walking yet.  Do you have any idea how many bridges there are in Venice?  Fuck me for having removed that bit of information from my brain.  From the parking lot in Piazzale Roma to the hotel off Piazza San Marco we looked like a bunch of pack mules at every damned bridge and if at the end of it someone had given me a swift kick in the ass to boot I wouldn’t have even objected.

Oh well, some might say, at least you made it to the hotel.  Right.  The miniscule rooms with two extra cribs were easily 100 degrees: in spite of the monsoon rains that had fallen on the entirety of North-eastern Italy over the past two days, Venice was being belted by the Sirocco and we were sweating to death in our winter coats and heavy wool sweaters.

We left the windows wide open all day, which cooled things off but gave an unrestricted fly zone to a dozen or so mosquitoes in our improvised Bedouin camp: we had hung a long piece of African cloth (packed in advance for just this purpose) as a separating screen between our bed and Julia’s.

Even though the girls were wonderful that first night and slept like logs, we got barely a wink of sleep due to the permanent state of war that we declared on the mosquitoes.  Every time we finally drifted back to sleep thinking we had squashed the last one, we were reawakened by that ungodly bzzzzz.

The highlight of the vacation was reached when every night we turned off the lights at 8 o’clock and waited in bed in religious silence for the girls to fall asleep before we could turn on a carefully shaded lamp and reach for the aforementioned bottles of wine.

So you’re probably wondering … what were you thinking by going to Venice?

Well, Venice is always Venice.  And when you let these little inconveniences, however monumental they may seem in the moment, slide off like water from a duck’s back, the beauty of the trip remains.  The thrill of being on the road becomes even more intense when your luggage includes two wonderful creatures who will never abandon you and who add something inconceivably immense to your experience.

Kids throw you into a totally new dimension comprised of us and no longer of just me.  So it is comforting to know that no matter how much our life has been permanently changed with their arrival, there are still things that keep us anchored to our past, and that part of our identity will continue to travel along the road with them.