I'm tired of being Italian, It's exhausting

That being said, we leave for Rome in a few hours. I am pretty much the only one, except for few others, that have never been to the "homeland" as my family insists on calling it. Nevermind, that I have other homelands: Ireland and Germany and God knows where else. And I' not even ITALIAN. My grandmother was Sicilian by way of Northern Africa and France. My grandfather never considered her a true Italian. Seems to me, I have many homelands.

So, to the point and the reason why I have avoided Italy to this point: I already feel as though I have been in Italy my entire life minus the art and random groping by Italian men. My mother's parents lived with us. Let me explain what this means. Close your eyes and picture this: an old lady hunched over something in a pot on the stove that smells like nothing I can compare it to. Nothing ever went to waste. There were fights at the dinner table between my mom, her aunts, and my grandmother over who got to eat the ass of the chicken, known to us as the "pope's nose". If there was nothing for salad, no worries: grandma was in the backyard picking dandilions to make up for the missing greens. I have plowed serious gardens, made sausage when my grandmother's hands didn't work as well any more, all done at an age where if the authorities were alerted, the old woman would have been taken away in the paddy wagon for breaking child labor laws.

Dinner time went something like this: grandfather sitting across from my little sister without blinking in case she should start choking on something. No talking...unless it was politics. Otherwise, quiet, because grandpa's little sister once almost choked to death while eating supper. (love you pop pop rip, i loved all our checker games and golf lessons..nice try)

No one dared touch there plate until my grandfather and father were served first. If you reached for a serving spoon before that you got a crooked old man finger in your face stating the first line of grace "In the name of the FATHER". Spoon was dropped promptly. And this absolutely had to be explained to friends who were visiting at meal time. After every meal, if there were left overs, my grandmother would proclaim" Joe Schieve will eat it" (my father ,who she insisted on always using his last name). And should he protest, he would be dealing with not only an old Sicilian woman but a also a Leo.. My father has lost a good amount of weight since her death. He looks quite trim if you don't ask my mother.

If a friend or young man were to come pick me up and beeped the horn for me to come out, I was instruucted that I was not a dog and that I do not respond to horns or whistles. This had the potential to get quite awkward as the friend waited in the car beeping and I waited in the house unable to communicate my grandfather's decree to them.

Now onto the Uncles. Three of them. My mother was the only girl of four. Every Sunday was family dinner. Cousins...aunts...uncles....and me trying to find a place to disappear. The passion of conversation, the yelling, the bullying of drunken older men....not my style. I dreaded Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, and every Sunday. Being the shy black sheep, I was prime meat for anyone in a drunken stupor to pick on which usually came around dessert. I suppose this gave my mother a break since she was the one usually bullied, and so she let them say whatever they would to me. And a little girl never talks back to her elder Italian relatives. Trust me...I tried. Probably why my mother swore at a young age that she would never marry Italian, and so she didn't. And how grateful am I for the father she chose.

All this and a lot more I can't remember or choose not to, are the reasons why I stayed away from the homeland. As far as I was concerned, I was trapped in Italy my whole life.

So, I guess tomorrow I face one of my fears. Going to a place inside me that I've been trying to scrape out for a long time....trying to suck that part of my dna out from my veins. Maybe I'm afraid I'll remember all the love ,too ,that came with my grandparents when they moved in with us. I'll be reminded of the distance I purposefully put between myself and numerous relatives. One thing is certain, I wil be reminded of my grandmother and her faith in God, and falling asleep at the end of her bed at night, of her beautiful singing, and her nickname for me: Bella. I will be reminded of childhood. Something I suppose all of us want to forget bits and pieces of.