Oh, ma

Oh, ma!

Your mom is always your mom.

My son dropped by – he’s in his sixties – and handed me a shirt and — a button. I suppose he could have attached it himself, although my eyesight is a lot better than his despite my years. My younger son would certainly have pulled out his sewing kit, but then he is also the one who adjusted the length of his jeans and used my antediluvian foot pedal sewing machine to make himself a druid outfit for carnival one year.

Not that my older son isn’t practical. One year he and his daughter put together an IKEA bookcase, a badly needed Christmas present, and one can say they both almost died laughing in trying to follow the instructions. Still a mom is always a mom and a son is always a son and some things are best left to one and some to the other. Aside from that, they are both excellent cooks and good at cleaning up the kitchen. And the mechanics of computers hold no secrets for them, unlike for me, their mother.

Growing up, they realized that I was not an Italian mom. I often left them pretty much to fend for themselves since I had to earn a living for them and me. As an American mother in Italy, I couldn’t help them in their homework for I was not versed in Italian history, although I did know who Garibaldi and Cavour were thanks to a course on the making of Italy I’d had in college, nor did I know much about the kind of Italian literature they studied in school – had never read I Promessi Sposi.  In a sense, I had run into similar stumbling blocks when my mother tried to help me with Latin, which she had studied in a gymnasium in Germany, and her pronunciation and that of my American teacher were completely different. She was however able to explain equations to me when I was in tears after having skipped from the 7^th to the 8^th grade. Math is not the same as Latin. So much so for mothers.

Of course, one’s child is always one’s child. Whether the child is two or three or whether it is getting on in years. One’s child is always one’s child, unwillingly or not, as they bridle at being treated, well not really like a child, but not as the adult they think they are either. “Oh, ma!”. How many times have I heard that said, with a mote of impatience. I may not have understood, or remembered, or heard what was said (since my hearing is not what it used to be). What may seem obvious to them, is an “oh ma!” situation. They are after all my kids and I can only ask them to be patient. As I was (hopefully) when they were small. Now, if I need them, I know they are there.

Aftermath: Then the next day, he came by with another shirt, this time orphaned of its button.