The Things We Inherit Without Being Given

On mothers, daughters, and the invisible things women pass down

When I picture my mother, I see her hands first.

Long fingers. Her wedding ring, perhaps one other. Nothing more. At the table she crossed her legs and rested her hands in front of her, fingers laced, or laid them flat on the table, or folded them in her lap. There was something orderly about them, as there was about almost everything in the way she carried herself.

Even late in the evening, in the kitchen, in her house clothes, she was tidy. Her hair was always neat. Not hairdresser neat. Just neat. She wore skirts beautifully, and almost no makeup.

I am not like this.

At home my hair goes up in a clip. I live in trousers and long dresses and have never felt comfortable in a skirt. I cannot cross my legs at a table. I am perfectly capable of walking around my own house naked, something my mother would never have done.

But she almost always wore a touch of lipstick. A clean face, and a little colour on the mouth to brighten it.

That, somehow, stayed.

✦

I recently finished Aurora Tamigio’s novel Il cognome delle donne, which translates roughly as The Women’s Surname.

It follows generations of women in one family: Rosa, Selma, Patrizia, Lavinia and Marinella, and the things that pass from one life into another.

Tamigio has said she hoped readers would finish it wanting to ask about their own mothers, aunts and grandmothers: what those women did, what they endured, what they learned and passed on.

She has also named a paradox I keep returning to.

For much of history, many women had little property of their own to leave behind, and yet families are full of things that came down through women.

Knowledge.

Habits.

Objects.

Ways of being a woman.

I closed the book thinking less about what families formally leave one another and more about everything that passes between women without anyone deciding to pass it on.

How much of the woman I am began before me?

I began thinking about my mother.

When I was a child, her world was my parents’ ferramenta agraria, a hardware and farm supply shop in Fiaschetti di Caneva.

Officially it was my father’s business.

The shop, the warehouses and our apartment were all part of the same property, and the line between home and work was far thinner than anyone would draw it today.

In my memory the shop smells of bolts and nuts and cat and dog food.

My mother served customers and worked the till. She placed orders with the sales agents, priced the merchandise and put it away where it belonged. She went down to the warehouse to help people load what they had bought.

She knew the stock.

She handled the money.

Customers knew she knew the business, and when they asked for my father instead, it was usually because they hoped he would give them the discount she wouldn’t.

I have never needed to write that my mother was a competent woman.

Her customers had already worked it out.

Then there was the work nobody called work.

The priest came to eat with us after Mass almost every Sunday. The sales agents were offered a coffee or a drink once the order was placed, because that was simply what one did. My father’s mother and his elderly aunt needed looking after.

And on Sundays, when all I wanted was for us to go and do something fun together, my mother was unpacking and pricing merchandise.

I helped whenever I could, every Saturday afternoon when there was no school, and some Sundays, which I resented.

When my mother was behind the counter, I was the one looking after my three younger sisters.

Once a year she took the four of us to the seaside for two weeks, along with the cousins and relatives who always seemed to join us.

My father came once in those two weeks.

There was too much to do at home.

I will say this plainly.

I sometimes hated that shop.

It kept my mother away from me.

I admired her, I loved her, and I wanted her back.

✦

I don’t remember her teaching me any of the things I now do exactly as she did them.

I make the bed because she never left a bed unmade.

I fold laundry the way she did, or I try to. Most days my folding is a poor imitation of hers.

I straighten a room before anyone arrives.

I dress a salad the way she dressed it: salt, pepper, extra virgin olive oil, red wine vinegar, nothing else.

Nobody comes into my house without being offered something, because nobody ever came into hers without it.

Feeding a guest was how you cared for them.

I welcome people with a smile even when I am tired.

My hands know how to make her tiramisu.
I have never needed the recipe.

The place I hear her most clearly, though, is in the way I speak to my son Anthony.

I catch myself choosing words of encouragement and love even when I am exhausted, even when I have very little left to give.

She must have been so tired, and still she found the encouraging word.

What she rarely said was “I love you.”

Her love came another way.

Money slipped into my hand.

A phone call to check that I had arrived safely.

My laundry, done.

Something kept aside for me.

Worry.

A kiss now and then.

Not much more in words.

I have always been more affectionate in words with my own children.

That was deliberate.

So I did not simply copy her.

I took what she did and translated it.

She loved through action.

I kept the action, and I added the words.

✦

Not everything I absorbed was worth keeping.

My mother never told me what a good woman was.

She didn’t need to.

A good woman is patient.

She never belittles her children in front of others.

She follows her husband’s lead.

She keeps the family together.

She shows competence, because anything less looks like weakness.

Those were the rules I saw her live by.

Mostly.

My father considered wasting food close to a sin, and when he wasn’t there, my mother would sometimes quietly throw leftovers away.

I love knowing that.

Even the most dutiful woman kept a small private self.

Along with the rules, I took things I have spent years trying to put down.

Guilt when I rest.

The habit of measuring love by usefulness.

The need for everything to be in order.

The belief that a good woman copes quietly.

I don’t think any of this began with me.

I don’t think it began with her either.

My mother believed a good woman knew how to endure.

For fifteen years she cared for my father as Parkinson’s disease gradually took more from him.

Then she lived for six years with ovarian cancer herself.

I don’t remember her indulging in self-pity.

I learned endurance from her.

I am less certain now that endurance is always a virtue.

We inherit rules about feelings, too.

In my family, women did not shout.

They did not slam doors or complain while they worked, and they rarely cried.

The silent treatment, though, was allowed.

Men could shout and criticise.

My mother’s anger was rare, and when it came, you noticed.

I am not a quiet woman.

I shout when I am angry, though less these days.

Families pass down more than values.

They pass down emotional choreography, and I have been changing some of the steps.

Some of the changes are tiny.

My mother would never have left dishes in the sink overnight.

Sometimes I do.

Some are larger.

I am learning that not every free moment has to be turned into something useful, though part of me still insists that it should.

And some things changed simply because I left.

I married a man in the American military, and his life took us around the world.

Over the years I lived in Russia, Germany, England and North Carolina, and I watched people live in ways that made my inheritance look suddenly local.

I stopped assuming that a full meal had to be cooked every day and eaten at fixed hours, that you went to church to be seen going, that doing nothing was suspicious.

I watched television in the middle of the morning.

I laughed more.

I made friends in other languages.

My mother made some of this possible.

She encouraged her daughters to travel and see the world, even though her own life had taken a very different shape.

Later, she came to visit us and travelled with us.

I had wanted, a little, to escape the boredom of a small place.

In the end, a small place was what I wanted.

✦

Only much later did I remember that my grandmother wore lipstick too.

My grandmother Maria lived across the yard from us.

She had raised my father after his father died when he was seven, and the family remembered her as a strong woman.

She was always kind to us girls.

She died when I was thirteen, so what I have of her is small and scattered.

But I have one afternoon.

Shortly before she went into hospital for the last time, she put me in her Fiat 500 and drove me out to see her vineyards.

My uncle Marcello joined us there.

He had rolled her a cigarette, and I watched her smoke it.

I asked if I could have a puff.

To my astonishment, she let me.

She kept a good lipstick on her dresser, always some shade of bright red, and she put it on before she left her bedroom.

So my mother’s lipstick did not begin with my mother.
And mine did not begin with me.

There is another woman I carry.

My aunt Ernesta, the wife of my father’s brother Silvio, was the one the family considered difficult.

Too loud.

Every year she went dancing at the annual festa in town, which was organised by the Communist Party, in a family of churchgoers who voted Democrazia Cristiana.

It was taken as an insult to the family and a defiance of her husband.

She went anyway.

“I can’t help it,” she told me. “I love watching people dance, and I love to dance.”

She also made zucchini fritters and sent a plate up to us.

At the mountain house, before there was electricity, she would take a candle, bring us children to bed with her and tell us stories.

Maybe some of what we inherit does not come from the obedient women at all.

Maybe some of it comes from the aunt everyone thought was a little too much.

✦

There is an electric blue Columbia jacket that used to be mine.

When it became too small for me, I gave it to my mother, and she wore it for years.

Now my sister Resi wears it.

I am glad it stayed in the family.

It touched my mother’s skin.

I left Italy at twenty-seven.

It took me a long time to register that my mother was much younger than that when she left for Switzerland to work in a factory, saving her wages so that one day she could open her own hairdressing shop.

There is a photograph of her at about the age I am now.

When I look at it, she seems so young.

And elegant, of course.

There are questions I wish I had asked her.

Not about the family, or the shop, or us.

About her.

Were you happy?

Did you ever want to leave?

Did you fall in love before Dad?

What did you want when you were my age?

I can’t answer them.

I knew her my whole life, and I can’t.

So much of what we carry comes from women whose inner lives we never fully knew.

Lately I have been wondering what my sons have absorbed from living beside me.

Curiosity, I hope.

A love of languages and other cultures.

Independence.

The belief that a person can begin again.

And the unshakeable conviction that Mum will solve it.

Whatever has gone wrong, Mum will know what to do.

I laugh at that.

Then I stop laughing, because there she is again.

My mother going down to the warehouse.

My mother knowing the stock by heart.

My mother solving the problem.

And now me.

Some mornings I stand at the mirror and put on lipstick.

There is nothing ceremonial about it.

I don’t think of my grandmother.

I don’t think of my mother.

I simply put it on.

Sometimes I wonder what I have already passed on without knowing it.

— S.A. Sterling
Women Rising Strong