My mother’s hands

ANNA MONARDO is coming to terms with her parents’ traditional arranged marriage and their struggles to settle in the US and provide a good life for her family. In this brave account, she exposes the problems that many new immigrants face, and honors the roles her parents played in giving her a life free from the shackles of war-torn Europe.

There is a writing exercise I often had my students do in class: Write about your mother’s hands. This ten-minute prompt almost always yielded a fruitful rough draft full of details that were emotionally resonant. Yet, as often as I sat with students for this exercise, I avoided doing it myself. I didn’t want to put down on paper the truth of how I saw my mother’s hands: puffy, hesitant, unsure what to do. Instead, I’d spend the ten minutes writing about my father’s hands: intelligent, capable, chiseled knuckles, and the beautiful rising moons at the base of his fingernails. He was a surgeon, his hand movements confident, which gave me a feeling of safety. In contrast, I often had a feeling that my mother needed help—now!—and that I was the one who was supposed to provide it. There were times in my life when my mother and I spoke daily; still, I did what I could to keep some distance from her.

That’s pretty much where I was, emotionally, fifteen years ago when I began to write After Italy: A Family Memoir of Arranged Marriage. In random spurts, I’d been working on this family memoir for years, but in 2008, I committed to the project. Recently, I found this entry in a journal from that time: Writing this family memoir is the scariest story of my life.

Overall, we were a happy family; though, as a kid, I shied away from the fact that my parents had had an arranged marriage. I knew that my Italian father had married my Italian-American mother to facilitate his 1949 immigration to the US from Southern Italy, which had been devasted by World War II. I knew that my father was head of a family with six siblings, and that he believed he’d be better able to help his family if he established his medical career in the US and sent help back to them. I knew that, on my mother’s side, her parents were eager for her to marry a man from their native village; plus, as an 18-year-old, mom had thought the 28-year-old doctor handsome. Yes, it was a utilitarian marriage, but also, at first, a love match.

After a blissful courtship in Italy, the groom arrived in the US and faced enormous difficulty finding jobs. He was forced to leave his bride with her parents while he worked in various hospitals across the country, trying to fulfill his duty to his family. Meanwhile, the bride had a different vision: Marriage meant they were a unit of two, their first obligation to each other, and she felt abandoned. The worst was when her groom and her father argued over details of her dowry. Dowry? That part of her Old World arranged marriage caught her by surprise. Within the microcosm of one married couple, it was a classic clash of cultures, resulting in a five-year separation. In time, my parents reconciled; I was born, and then my brother, but the wounds from their separation never healed.

I always suspected there’d been a dark patch in my parents’ history, but I knew none of the details until I was in my mid-30s, sitting on the beach with my mother in the small Florida town where she and my dad had retired after he’d had a series of illnesses. I really hoped that at this juncture, married forty years, they’d be able to make a fresh start. But as my mother settled into her beach chair and I stretched out on my towel, she began reciting all the ways dad was driving her crazy, now more than ever. She’d recited these complaints before, but this time I pushed: “Why are you always so mad at him?”

And then she gave me the blow-by-blow of their long-ago five-year estrangement. The whole story? I had to write a 210-page memoir to unfurl it all, but what I remember of that Sunday at the beach with mom is watching the waves roll up closer as I wondered, “What can I do with this information?” As in most complex domestic disagreements, both sides were right, and also everyone was at fault. “I wrote a diary of those years,” my mother told me, “and I’m leaving it for you. You’ll see!”

Four years passed, and my dad died. Sixteen years later, my mom died. When I found the diary, I was still annoyed that she had foisted it on me. I cared enough to keep the diary safe in my metal file cabinet, but not enough to read it. Then, when she had been gone one year and seven months, my kitchen floor needed repair. The workmen slid the refrigerator into the dining area, and the table landed in my office, leaving me only a tiny patch of desk space. The dog’s bed was literally under my feet. I would be confined for four workdays, so I set myself the goal of reading my mother’s diary straight through, like a book.

And, as with any powerful book, the diary changed my life.

It also changed the family story I was writing. Now I saw all sides, and from every angle the story was sad. I couldn’t help thinking that, given their mutual commitment to stay together, my parents were just a few difficult conversations away from ironing out the misunderstandings between them; a few years of therapy away from healing. But those options were not available to them.

Love is not always something we can
gather up in our hands, but that
doesn’t necessarily mean
love is not there.

Now that I know the fuller story, what I feel for my parents is awe, something like admiration for their resilience, their tenacious hold. They’re long gone, but, while working on this book that is largely about their relationship, I’ve learned some of the most profound lessons they ever taught me. I realize I’ve had too narrow a vision for what love can be. Long-term love, like my parents’, is not always happy. It’s sometimes happy; over time, it’s many different things. Sometimes love doesn’t look like love. Sometimes it looks like fear or anger, maybe confounded misunderstanding. Love is not always something we can gather up in our hands, but that doesn’t necessarily mean love is not there.

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