Woman, Mother, Daughter: from grief and guilt to compassion and gratitude.

My mom just left; I am at LAX, in the elevator that takes me to my car, section 4G, the roof, in the already blazing sun.

I can smell the ocean from here, and a light breeze tickles my skin; if Ben and Catherine were not waiting for me at home, I would say that I am not looking forward to returning to the valley. The ocean helps me deal with my emotions like nothing else can. I can cry and know that everything will be fine; I can be sad, angry, hopeful, happy, frightened, disappointed, and know that just like the waves, life comes and goes, it never stops, it keeps changing, it keeps dying and being reborn.

I step out of the elevator and I continue to write. A woman calls for her friend Sharon loud and clear; I keep typing.

It’s hot.

I am sad.

In a way, my mom, represented my last link to Italy and to my family after the summer spent with them.

It’s the end of July; Catherine is almost eight months old. I feel as if, with her and Ben, also real life is waiting for me in the valley. I love my life, but there is a dark cloud that never leaves the portion of sky over my head. We have found a nanny, I have a book to finish, and Ben has a creative year ahead; our routine keeps changing, evolving, and nothing is wrong.

“It’s both exciting and frightening,” I told my therapists last week. “I have no more excuses, or out-of-the-ordinary to look forward to.” It was almost the end of our session, so we didn’t go very deep into the issue.

I mentioned “out-of-the-ordinary” because my mom also represented the last link to the extraordinary, in a way. She was the last link to my roots, to my memories, to my old life.

How many lives do we have? Or is it one so big that can contain an infinite number of ordinary and extraordinary experiences?

I don’t want to write about time again, but I know that with this essay, in a way, I will. Every time that I leave my parents I am afraid I will not see them again. I had this thought when I kissed my 96-years old grandmother before returning to the United States, and also with my father, a few days later; knowing that my mom was coming to Los Angeles the following week, my fear took a step back and waited, to visit me today.

It seems like it was only yesterday that I picked her up at the very same airport; with iced coffee in our hands we had headed home, where Ben and Catherine were waiting.

Today my mother left.

Initially, I wanted to write about something else, but as I drove back home along the 405 North toward Sacramento, I realized that there was so much to say about my mom, about these three weeks spent together, and about what they have left in my heart. For one thing I understood while she was here, is that there is always something to learn, even about the people I think I know the most. In order to do so, however, I have to stay in the temporary distress, which perhaps I should call vulnerability. I want to write about what I have learned.

For years now, I have been ambivalent about my relationship with my family. I have always loved them, but at a certain point in my life a disconnection occurred. I went my own way, I adopted a different cultural lifestyle, discovered a new political identity that was different from theirs, etc. In essence, we grew increasingly distant, so far apart that the only feeling left between us seemed to be discomfort.

I felt uncomfortable to even hug them, to tell them I much I loved them no matter what had been, no matter the differences, the mistakes, and the misunderstandings. It was uncomfortable just being with them in the same room, at times. I always looked forward to flying back to see my family, but I have also always been anxious and frightened for what lingered, what hovered over our relationship.

“Don’t leave me alone,” I’d ask Ben. His presence has always meant shelter and protection.

Things hadn’t gotten better with sobriety; on the contrary, feelings without the barrier of my anesthetics of choice were unfamiliar, and painful.

I never thought that I could spend three weeks with my mom.

“Would you like to come here for a month until we find a nanny?” I had asked her shortly before Ben, Catherine and I had flown to Italy for our vacation.

We wanted my mom to spend some time with her granddaughter, and we also needed help while we looked for a new nanny.  My dad had to stay home with their dog, especially after Giulio, our pug, had died the month before.

When I got shingles, a few days after her arrival, my mother’s presence in the house became somewhat essential, godsend.

That’s how it happened: she flew by herself from Turin to Los Angeles, scared because she didn’t speak much English, and yet much braver that she thought of herself.

It was July 7th, a Saturday afternoon when I had miscalculated the time that would take me to go from Malibu, where Ben and I were supposed to be for a barbecue, to LAX, where my mom would land at 5 pm.

I drove from the valley to Malibu, and then from Malibu to the airport without actually stopping at the barbecue. Traffic was intense, but I had made it on time to see her walking up the arrivals ramp at Tom Bradley International. She was wearing beige trousers with a black blouse, the brown leather purse she had bought in Los Angeles the year before, and back sandals. Nothing she wore was designer clothing, and yet she was smiling, beautiful, real.

She doesn’t have designer clothes.

In fact, we never had anything even close to an important name printed on a label; my mom made all our clothes. My parents bought me the first pair of Converse in 2012, on Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. I had a pair of blue Dr. Martens when I was a teen, and a grey Jansport that seemed expensive (probably was), and that made me feel really cool in high school, but that’s pretty much it. My parents gave my brother and me all they could and all they had; we always had all we needed.

Excited to start the adventure together, not sure yet about what it would bring, we ordered an iced coffee at a nearby Coffee Bean, and we headed to my car.

Ben and I had bought a sofa bed for her, so she could stay at our place; I had decorated the room so that she would feel pampered and welcome. I had put flowers on a speaker that we had turned into her nightstand, relaxing essential oils, face masks, champagne-flavored gummy bears, and Ferrero Rocher.

The room is empty now, the room that is also my office and Ben’s music room; she left a trace of her perfume, but the room feels empty.  I am writing the remaining part of this essay in that room. Some of the flowers are still in the jar, they are purple in color, and she taught me how to keep them alive. Because I still want to talk about what I’ve learned.

I learned about my mom’s childhood, her youth, the difficulties she encountered that made her the woman she is today, and I also learned about the relationship she had with her mother, that grandmother I knew apparently not as deeply as I thought.

Often, learning is for me a form of remembering. And in these three weeks with my mother I remembered where I come from. I don’t come from a place of material bounty, I don’t come from a place where people care much about the latest trend, or what designer purse you wear. I come from a place where we stop what we are doing to sit at the table and have lunch, where we dramatically argue a lot raising our voice, where we still hang clothes on a rack to dry, and where we don’t have AC. I come from a place that probably doesn’t have much to offer in terms of career and possibilities, but where luxury – for as cliché as it may sound – is in the small things, those small things that can easily be forgotten.

I cry as I write this, because I feel distant from where I come from. My mom was my last link to where I come from, while she was here. Now I am in the hands of Skype, FaceTime, or of a WatsApp I am always too busy to check.

“Your life has really changed,” she had said to me a while back. We were leaving Neiman Marcus where I had returned a leather jacket, and I could perceive both sadness and happiness in her voice, in the way she said those words. I felt guilty for the life I had. And I judged the life my parents had, “the same old one.”

I had gone through therapy, sobriety, healing and growth, and I wanted to impose my way on theirs. But who was I to judge, and from afar? I felt even more guilty.

I don’t know if it is because I am a mother now, or just because I have grown, done a lot of work on myself, and processed the past so that I could move on, but during these three weeks with my mother I learned that when I accept people and things as they are, instead of judging, fighting, or trying to change them, the feeling of guilt and discomfort becomes compassion and gratitude.

And it is compassion and immense gratitude that grew in my heart as these three weeks went by. And admiration, too, for things I had never noticed before — things I didn’t know, things I was too busy judging to see.

Every time that I have to leave my parents, even more so now that I have a daughter, I am filled with a sense of regret for not having done enough for them, for not having shown my love enough.

But this is the first time that — as I now leave the Los Angeles International Airport alone — I don’t have regrets. Something has lifted; something has changed.

I am sad to see my mother go, to have my family so far away from me, but free from grief I can fill my heart with the ocean breeze that always blows at LAX, whether it’s hot or cold, whether you are leaving or returning.

The ocean breeze is there to embrace you. So you can either get on a plane after kissing your daughter goodbye, or drive back home to a husband and a daughter, to real life, with a smile on your face.

I don’t have regrets today. And that is worth more than all the designer clothes I can buy.