When my daughter was born, we hadn’t picked a name or had a monogram done, but I secretly knew that my daughter would have an Italian name somewhere even if I had to slip it in on the birth certificate when my husband wasn’t looking. Growing up, my very Italian family mimicked My Big Fat Greek Wedding. My grandmother would get up at the crack of dawn to make breakfast for everyone which consisted of hand-rolled sausages, pancakes, eggs five different ways and thick bacon. Once breakfast was over, she began lunch. And so it went for the rest of my life. Food, family, lots of cheap Chianti and loud voices. Sunday night was spaghetti supper night and everyone ate at the dinner table. Sunday dinners lasted hours as we all talked and reminisced about our most embarrassing moments and relished in each others’ humor.
Friends would come to visit and my mother would insist they have something to eat – not a snack, but a full-on meal. My grandfather had a full on Italian accent and for some reason in my memories of him, he sounds just like Marlon Brando in “The Godfather”. His mixed language of Italian and English still seep out of my mouth on the rare occasion. I catch myself saying “capish” and “andiamo” to my daughter from time to time. All of these vibrant memories of my childhood rich with culture, tradition and pride are exactly what I want my daughter to experience.
My husband, on the other hand, is from an old-south family whose traditions and family dynamics are, for the lack of a better word, less vibrant than mine. So how do I strike the balance between the two? I don’t want to dominate my daughters’ identity, but I don’t want to deny her knowing who she is. I had to strike a balance and give her the tools to discover her own identity and cultivate a sense of pride about who she is and where she came from.
From the very beginning, I asked my mother-in-law to teach me special things she did for my husband and his siblings, songs they would sing, stories they would read and I weaved those into mine. Some nights I would sing my daughter an Italian lullaby my grandmother would sing me and some mornings I would wake her with a song my mother-in-law would sing to my husband. We do a family dinner every Sunday night, sometimes spaghetti with my family and sometimes take out with my husband’s family. My dad brought back from Italy two children’s books in Italian which I read to her every once in awhile and my mother-in-law gave me two story books that my husband loved as a child.
Finding the balance between our two very different cultures has been easier than I anticipated. I specifically looked for a Montessori program for our daughter that teaches foreign languages as well as has a diverse student body. Surprisingly, my husband really likes the fact that she is learning languages he doesn’t even know and even more impressed that she is starting to speak them.
For our family, our roots are an important part of who we are, but not the determinants of who we become. Our daughter will hopefully grow up with a strong appreciation for differences among others and be proud of being Italian and Texan. And if that turns out not to be the case, I still got my Italian name in there!