Mamma Mia

Here we go again...

I suspect it happens to everyone visiting Italy, whether you’re a casual visitor following the blue flag of the tour guide or a professor of art history. Sooner or later, you find yourself in the Uffizi  in Florence or Venice’s Museo Correr in St. Marks Square and all you want do is lift your eyes and cry out to the heavens:

“Enough with the Madonna and Child!!!! Basta.”

There’s no question that Italy in particular has elevated the worship of the maternal icon— the cradling arms, the adoring gaze, the ever-patient demeanor focused rapturously on what can range from a cherubic infant to a bobble-headed mini-man— to a level that permeates the whole culture. After a few days,  all you want is a dark, unruly Caravaggio or even a  Venetian harbor scene, or for that matter, a stark, Arte Povera installation of metal and burlap. Just to remind you of how real life looks.

We like to romanticize moms.  It’s even difficult to find a good Mother’s Day card, when everything on the rack is devoted to our contemporary version of the Madonna:

Mom, you were always there. Watching me grow.  Taking care of me. Celebrating and suffering with me. You were always my rock. You were perfect in every way.

To someone who’s never been a parent, it sounds pretty schmaltzy. To someone who’s a mother, it must feel like a lot of pressure.

I wonder sometimes if that pressure is part of the explanation behind the plunge in birthrates across Western Europe. Society’s expectations of mothers, including mothers’ expectations of mothers (what could be more merciless than that?), must seem pretty daunting to a 21st century woman. Could Santa Maria maintain her beatific composure amidst the TikTok-posting, cyber-bullying, college loan computer-crashing, video-game-obsessing childhoods that mothers preside over now? By the time the kid was 11, Our Lady would probably be one of those crazy soccer moms screaming on the sidelines.

Faced with a demographic disaster, some governments are now trying to ease the challenges of parenting by providing young families with income supplements, inexpensive daycare, and flexible work rules.  In Italy, where the national birthrate is one of the lowest in Europe, the town of Bolzano is being heralded as an example of the potential for child-friendly policies to reverse the baby drought. Still, next door in Trentino, the same programs haven’t sparked any growth at all. In our little town, population 300, the faces at the bar look older every year.

Maybe the problem goes deeper, into our own understanding of our parents, the sacrifices they made, and the identity they had to reimagine when we showed up. As children, it’s pretty normal to put Mom & Dad on a pedestal. Yet I’m not sure we’re doing them any favors up there.

My mother was every bit the  maternal ideal circa 1970, to me and every kid in the neighborhood, along with the children of her friends, my friends, her daughter-in-law, and eventually her own elderly parents. Of my high-school friends, more stayed in touch with her than me. I don’t blame them. She had a radiant spirit that people wanted to soak up like the sun.

It was years later when I realized there was a price for that warmth. It’s an exhausting gig— trying to make everything right, everybody comfortable, every celebration beautiful, every ending happy. Like the bambino in the paintings, I grabbed center stage without giving much thought to the back story.

Only as I watched her grow older did I understand. She had sacrificed at least some of who she was in order to be who she was to me. Every parent does. As much as I appreciated it, I couldn’t replace it. Nor could she.

Maybe the best gift we could give mothers everywhere this year would be to see them minus the golden halo. To acknowledge them not as figures of authority, or mentors, or our pet rock, but for what they are: complex people making hard decisions in real time, often with pretty limited information.

Happy Mother’s Day then to our real mothers. Not just the one with her picture on a wall in Venice, but also the one mopping up the gelato disaster on the sidewalk or taking an emergency call in the middle of the Ponte Rialto.

Or slumping into the back of a gondola after a long day of sightseeing and finally letting her hair blow free in the evening breeze. A mother, but also somebody else’s child. Not a symbol or a saint, but a story unto herself.

Sharon Beall (1938-2022)