Incontinent on the Continent Read online

  Incontinent on the Continent

  Jane Christmas

  INCONTINENT

  ON THE

  CONTINENT

  My Mother, Her Walker, and

  Our Grand Tour of Italy

  Copyright © 2009 by Jane Christmas

  09 10 11 12 13 5 4 3 2 1

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Greystone Books

  A division of D&M Publishers Inc.

  2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201

  Vancouver bc Canada V5T 4s7

  www.greystonebooks.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Christmas, Jane

  Incontinent on the continent : my mother, her walker,

  and our grand tour of Italy / Jane Christmas.

  ISBN 978-1-55365-400 -1

  1. Christmas, Jane—Travel—Italy. 2. Italy—Description and travel.

  3. Mothers and daughters. i. Title.

  DG430.2.c57 2009 914.504’93 c2009 - 903507-3

  Editing by Nancy Flight

  Copyediting by Eve Rickert

  Cover design by Peter Cocking

  Text design by Naomi MacDougall

  Cover photograph by R. Ian Lloyd/Masterfile

  Map by Stuart Daniel Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens Printed on acid-free paper that is forest friendly (100% post-consumer

  recycled paper) and has been processed chlorine free

  Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West

  We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities.

  For my mother, Valeria, of course

  Contents

  1 · Extending the Olive Branch

  2 · En Route to Italy

  3 · Alberobello, Martina Franca, Locorotondo

  4 · Alberobello

  5 · San Mango d’Aquino, Reggio di Calabria, Taormina

  6 · Sicily: Racalmuto, Agrigento

  7 · Messina, Catanzaro Marina

  8 · Alberobello, Matera

  9 · Castel del Monte, Potenza

  10 · Amalfi Coast, Sorrento, Capri

  11 · Pompeii, Mount Vesuvius

  12 · Viterbo

  13 · Foligno, Montefalco, Santa Maria degli Angeli

  14 · Civita Castellana, Siena, San Gimignano

  15 · Pisa, Florence

  16 · Rome

  17 · Venice

  18 · Making the Effort

  Acknowledgments

  1

  Extending the Olive Branch

  NOW, WHAT are you going to do about that hair?”

  This was my mother’s immediate reaction when I broached the idea of our going to Italy. Just her and me. For six weeks.

  “Nothing,” I replied. I picked up a magazine from the coffee table and began to leaf through it, pretending not to be bothered by her comment. “I’m not doing anything about my hair.”

  Even with my eyes averted I knew Mom’s jaw was tightening and her head was shaking with disapproval. She is convinced that if she could just fix my hair she could fix my life. As if it were that easy.

  Mom is five feet two inches short with a soft, plump body and a round face that exudes a charming, effervescent sweetness. Beneath that sugary exterior, however, is a tough cookie. Imagine, if you will, a cross between Queen Victoria and Hyacinth Bucket (“It’s pronounced ‘bouquet,’ dear,” the fussy, social-climbing character on the Britcom Keeping Up Appearances constantly reminds people).

  She has a thoroughly determined personality, my mom. Her opinions and beliefs are so entrenched that a tidal wave of evidence to the contrary cannot dissuade her. Her faith in God is as unwavering as her certainty that she will win the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes. She pooh-poohs the notion that man ever set foot on the moon: according to my mother, the lunar landing was staged in a movie studio.

  Mom’s hair is blond—ash blond, according to the product description—and she has maintained the same hairstyle for as long as I can remember: short, frothy, and layered. She likes it shorter at the back of her neck because she complains that that area gets hot. The front is swept off her face to reveal a smooth forehead; the sides are slightly curled.

  To my mom, a tidy hairstyle signifies order, control, maturity (the very qualities, coincidentally, she feels I lack), and she trots out her theory like religious dogma at every opportunity.

  Whether watching tv, stopped at a traffic light, sitting in a church pew, reading the newspaper, or getting groceries, my mother monitors the world’s hairstyles. No one escapes her appraisal: the Queen (“A bit too severe”), Adolph Hitler (“I hope he shot his barber”), the Woman in the Street (“That style does nothing for her”), Robert Redford (“Perfect”). Wander into my mother’s range of vision and you’ll get an immediate, no-charge assessment.

  Men I have dated and introduced to my mother have been accepted or rejected—mostly rejected—on the basis of their hair: “I didn’t know whether to let him in or sweep him off the doorstep. That hair!” Or, “You tell him that he’s not sitting at my dining room table unless he gets a haircut.” Or, “He’d look much better if he parted his hair on the side.” Or, “His hair is his best feature, and that’s not saying much.” On rare occasions, she has confided: “Oh, I do like his hair.” The guy could be a serial killer but that would only register as a minor concern.

  To my mom, hair is the yardstick by which civilized people are measured—and that includes me. She scolds me if my hair drifts into my eyes (“Get it off your face”), for not getting it cut short enough (“I hope the hairdresser paid you for that cut”), or for not having age-appropriate hair (“A woman your age should have a neat, smart hairstyle”).

  When she spots an agreeable style in a magazine or in a shopping mall she shoots me a baleful look and says: “There’s a nice style for you.” A tight smile or a nod indicating total agreement from me is usually sufficient to end the conversation— until she hones in on another passing hairstyle. Lately, she’s been pushing a short streaky blond bob as the elixir to happiness. The fact that such a hairstyle would not work with my face shape, my personality, or my impossibly fine, unpredictable dark hair is inconsequential.

  If I have learned anything in life, it is that my one-day-limp, next-day-curly hair is best left alone. Over the years, I have made peace with my hair, but I have not done so with my mother. I wanted us to go to Italy to see if I could finally fall in love with her. This trip was my olive branch.

  I wasn’t going to allow her question about my hair to bug me. Not one bit.

  I looked up nonchalantly from the magazine I was perusing and flashed a calm smile to mask the emotional maelstrom that was swirling and slopping inside me like the contents of the boiling cauldron being stirred by the Three Witches.

  “Dishevelled is my look,” I said playfully, tousling my hair as I prepared to shift the conversation to our travel itinerary.

  “Your hair looks like your life,” she said.

  WHAT WOULD possess anyone to go to Italy, the Land of Love, with a sparring partner?

  The answer: it was part détente, part deathbed request.

  It has been a source of sadness and perplexity that my mother and I have n
ot been able to get along. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not always a battle. The wary coolness between us has evaporated during moments of laughter or when we have weathered loss together. She never turned down a request to look after my children when I was struggling to adapt to single parenthood; she has always been a kind and generous grandparent. I, too, have been there for her: when she falls ill or when she needs my help around her home. She has even been known to seek my opinion.

  Still, the tectonic plates of our relationship have never stopped shifting, and the fault lines—there’s an interesting metaphor—have, according to my mom, been entirely my creations. She also thinks I am too sensitive—and there is no question that I am—but she doesn’t think she needs to modify her tact when dealing with me.

  “You take my words too seriously,” she scolds impatiently.

  “Really?” I reply. “So when you say that my hair looks like a rat’s nest I should just laugh it off?”

  “No,” she answers thoughtfully. “You should go to a hairdresser and do something about it.”

  It’s that sort of no-win bickering.

  Then there is the matter of the deathbed request:

  “Make friends with your mother,” my father had instructed as I sat on the edge of his hospital bed a few weeks before he died.

  I had wanted to scream, “CAN’T YOU JUST ASK ME TO WIN THE NOBEL PRIZE IN MEDICINE? THAT WOULD BE EASIER!”

  When my father died in 1999, Mom and I lost our mediator and our buffer. We were left to soldier on through the minefield of our relationship as best we could. We maintained an awkward truce while marching to the beat of old drums.

  Now, with life ebbing away and my mother’s health issues mounting, I decided to be proactive and use what time we had left to set things right—if that were at all possible. So I came up with this ingenious idea of a trip to Italy. I wanted to see whether my mother and I could spend six weeks together without biting off each other’s head, six weeks so distracted by art and antiquity that we could see each other as the individual works of art—flaws and all—that we are. I wanted to get to know this woman I call Mom, a woman I’m pretty certain, deep down, I love—but have had trouble liking. I hoped that in Italy the conversations I’ve always wanted to have with my mother would bubble up and help ease, if not resolve, decades of discontent.

  I believe we take two trips when we embark on a journey of almost any duration: there’s the physical trip, with its attendant need for schedules, accommodations, maps, and fretting about what to pack, how much money to bring, where to go and what to see, all the while anticipating possible calamities. Then there’s the parallel journey, the internal journey. We talk about “leaving it all behind,” but in reality a lot of emotional and primal baggage accompanies us on our travels. Trips are as much about testing ourselves or seeing how we adapt to a new place or to unfamiliar circumstances as they are about exploring new territory. Removing ourselves from our daily routines, from day-to-day relationships, from regimentation, allows us to see ourselves and others more clearly in new surroundings. Sometimes it allows us to resolve a gnawing problem or to find clarity about a situation or event from our present or our past. In this, I was no different: I wanted to resolve the mother-daughter dilemma.

  Most daughters have an uneasy or tempestuous relationship with their moms. Just ask them, and stand by for a torrent of venting. It’s usually a one-sided complaint—most mothers will rarely admit to difficulties with their daughters (and being the mother of a daughter I know of what I speak). Show me a mother who claims to have a great relationship with her daughter, and I’ll show you a daughter in therapy.

  Privately, many mothers fret about their relationships with their daughters. Maybe that’s because mothers see themselves most clearly in their daughters. When they are successful we feel a shared sense of accomplishment; when an argument flares between mother and daughter it is like arguing with ourselves. I gleaned this handy bit of insight from Don the electrician. An electrician. How apropos.

  One morning, while Don was fishing wires through a wall in my home, my daughter’s fuse blew. I can’t remember what the issue was, but I do clearly recall trying to keep the argument quiet because, well, I really dislike public displays of aggression. Zoë had no such reservations, and our quarrel regrettably escalated to the point where the electrician felt it prudent to intervene.

  “You know why you two are arguing, don’t you?” Don interrupted, straining to be heard above our raised voices.

  Zoë and I froze, a bit shocked by the intrusion but nonetheless curious about what he had to say.

  “Because you’re both exactly the same!” he said with exasperation.

  Zoë stormed off, horrified by the verdict. My reaction was quite different: The Little Voice Inside let out a victory cry of “Yes!” Deep down, mothers yearn for their daughters to be mirror images of themselves. For daughters, it’s different.

  There’s nothing worse for a woman than to be told, “You’re just like your mother.” Not even when it is said in a nice way.

  I’ll admit: I sometimes live vicariously through my daughter. Zoë is the type of young woman I wanted to be at her age: smart, confident, unafraid to push back against authority. (She also does amazing, twisty things with her hair, a knack I can’t even begin to learn). I was very much a late bloomer when it came to finding my groove. Seriously late: like, in my forties. Some of that emotional growth spurt occurred while Zoë was flexing her teenage spirit, and her newfound feistiness occasionally clashed with mine. It was a marked contrast to my teenage rebellion and my own mother’s midlife awakening. Whereas I let the reins on my daughter slacken slightly, my mother gripped them tighter and yanked on them. She was often strict and sharp with me and never short on advice about how to improve my life or my appearance. Handwritten notes accompanied by pertinent newspaper clippings or religious homilies frequently appeared in my mailbox.

  I just knew that another side of my mother existed, a fun-loving character with an intrepid nature. I wanted to spend time with that person.

  Like me, my mother found her voice late in life. Her boundless creativity and can-do spirit was out of step with the times. The 1960s, for all the psychedelic talk of freedom and “doing your own thing,” were still a time of repression, not least for women. Proper women stayed home to raise their children and do volunteer work; they didn’t make waves, and those who defied convention would have their husbands’ masculinity called into question. My mother managed to maintain the status quo on the home and volunteer fronts, but she also wrote a newspaper column and cultivated hobbies that weren’t typical of a suburban mother in those days. She was different from any other mother I knew.

  Along with my father, she developed a passion for preserving old homes. When no one could be found to assume old ruins slated for demolition, our family would move in. No house was deemed too run-down to save—not even if the place lacked running water. It bears reminding that in the early 1960s, the term “home renovation” was not in the lexicon.

  Mom also had an insatiable appetite for antiques and was adept at scouring the back rooms and basements of dusty antique shops in parts of downtown Toronto where no other mother dared to tread. She cared not that the rest of civilized North America was swooning over the Swedish Modern look or that the color palate of the ’60s favored hot-pink and fluorescent green: Our family lived in a 19th-century time warp of ball-and-claw-footed chairs, brocade and damask upholstery, inlaid walnut tables, and mahogany dining room suites that could seat twelve people. Our home resembled the set of The Addams Family. I was the only eight-year-old who knew that crewel work was not a reference to torture. Frequently my mom would drag me into shop after shop on her endless but unspecified quest for “a piece.” When something caught her eye—a china platter or a carved medallion, for instance—she would lovingly examine it, running a delicate finger slowly and reverently around its detailed scalloped edges while marvelling at its beauty. It made me flush with jeal
ousy; I craved for her to touch, admire, and notice me in the same way.

  We operate differently as parents, my mother and I, and yet—and it pains me to admit this—there are undeniable similarities, just like Don the electrician said about Zoë and me. In an effort to be our own people we will deny any similarities and even try to make them look like differences.

  Later in life, when I had children of my own, some of my mother’s criticism waned, but the wounds never healed. All it took was one comment about my hair, my housekeeping standards, or my parenting skills to reopen the scars. I adopted unconsciously her insistence on perfection in everything and everyone around me, including her.

  I also inherited my mother’s penchant for busyness. Single parenting for much of my adult life was a frightening juggling act of keeping my head above water financially while maintaining the facade that the lack of a husband/father was but a minor inconvenience. I tossed more balls in the air just to prove my point. I enlisted my children to help out so we could all appear productive, respectable, and on our toes. I subscribe to the belief that chores and responsibilities are important to a child’s development, but the memory of my own chore-filled childhood was a reminder to go easy on them and to cultivate within them, and within me, gentleness, helpfulness, and forgiveness. I didn’t always succeed but I tried.

  Somehow, I could not bring myself to be gentle with my mother.

  Not that it was all miserable between my mom and me. We’re white Anglo-Saxons after all; we are able to hide vast amounts of emotional damage behind stiff upper lips, fake smiles, and forced laughter. Still, an awkward detachment exists.

  The question that has always bedevilled me—besides, Was I adopted?—is, How did my mother and I fall off the rails so early in our relationship and why was there no attempt to mend our rift? Instead, we let things drift and accepted dysfunction as the status quo. Whenever we locked eyes it was like the bell had been struck to begin another round. Still, no matter how bitter things got we never left the ring. We kept swinging and bouncing off the ropes till we all but exhausted ourselves.