A cultural gap I am afraid I will not able to bridge - Un gap culturale ho paura non potro' colmare

I have been in Boston for more than a week now and I still feel unadjusted. I have been sitting at the computer looking for fun things to do with Tronk in the afternoon in our neighborhood, so far with little success. The truth is that there aren't many things to do with children outside the house that don't involve waking up at dawn and eating outside. Yes because here waking up at 8 am is late.  In more than one occasions, nurses from the hospital and survey guys turned up at my house at around 8:20 am and apologized for not arriving earlier. And the majority of people here (with or without children) eat outside the house. This is precisely the kind of thing I have been trying to avoid from the very first day I have been back in Boston.

Lunch (and dinner) in Boston

Apparently, in the US, it is legal to give children the left overs from dinner. No, they didn't tell me this. I figured this out when the moms at the playground unveiled the morning snack for their children: fried chicken. Perhaps it was  lunch, I am not sure. It didn't look very fresh though. When you think it cannot get any worse, you see the child sitting next to yours eating cold pasta with the hands, chips style. Second course: raw carrots, raw broccoli and raw onions! By the way, these are healthy moms, they shop at Wholefoods and don't give their children coca cola instead of milk for breakfast!

Aha, Boston, the land of freedom! Next time I will pack the tail of the fish from Tronk's dinner and will not miss that 9 am music class I always wanted to attend.

Robe di Kappa vs Trucker Girl - Robe di Kappa vs Donna del Camionista

I will never buy Robe Di Kappa sportswear for my son and I'll tell you why.

You might be up for some serious disappointment if you are planning to wear your collection of preppy Robe di Kappa sportswear in the US - In Italy wearing Kappa is a bit like wearing Lacoste (or maybe A&F) in the US. This is what happened to the father of one of Tronk's friend, a man in his forties who was living in Italy until few months ago. According to what this man told me at the playground, when he started his new job here in Boston, his boss was initially ignoring him and so were other work mates. He was getting a few dirty looks here and there. It was only a couple of months later that a bit of truth came out when two work mates (unsuccessfully) tried to explain to him with diplomacy the connotations that the Kappa symbol has in the US.

What is really sad is that the Italian guy said he came up with a great "politically correct" answer: "the symbol can be interpreted as one may prefer to interpret it”. He proudly told me that his explanation left everyone silent. Poor guy! He thought they did not appreciate his style. Now he has hundreds of euros worth of clothing but the Americans here assume he is a sexist douchebag. I can already picture him in his flashy black Robe di Kappa tracksuit while he is discussing the termination of his contract in the office of his boss.

This brand really cannot win in the United States. Even if you were wearing the more subtle sweatshirt with the Kappa logoscript on it, you would still be misunderstood here as they would think you are a guy in a college fraternity!

Italian: I am preppy

American: I am in a College Fraternity

The feeling of home - Il sentirsi a casa

There is a feeling of "home" in every person. Each time I go to see my parents in Turin, I am filled with an incredible amount of joy each time I see the mountains below from the porthole.

Sono quasi a casa, sigh! - I am almost at home, sigh!

We finally land and I am usually greeted by a pale but unexpectedly warm sun and all of a sudden, I see the things that make me feel at home: the bright light coming from the courtyard in the morning, the light blue sky slightly dirty from the fumes of the city, the crying of the child and the grandmother talking just after that, the old lady that says "buongiorno signora!" on my way out of the condo, the mountains in the background behind the houses I am looking at, the jangling of the market, the smell outside the bakery shop in the morning, the bells ringing at the nearby Church, giving me a rough idea of the time, the friendly "buondi'"(goodmorning in piemontese) of the local tobacco shop owner. It is the same guy but with grey hair. He still remembers me and my grandmother.

As my friend Laura once wrote in her psychology thesis, knowledge, memories and affections are strongly connected with the places where we lived. I read her thesis while I was living in London. Turin had become a stranger to me and I had become a stranger to her. I remember thinking that I had grown into a different person and that my home town had changed from a shelter of  bigots to a multi-cultural city of unconventional people (more traveled, more knowledgeable and more open to new experiences). Yet, as my mother often says, "a volte l'apparenza inganna" (sometimes appearances deceive). When I was visiting my parents in Turin, although I remember trying to act as if Turin was still my home, as a matter of fact, while I was there, I was spending most of my time complaining:

What? There isn't a single store open where I can buy food at night?
Dirty old man! I can't believe I overheard the cheese guy at the farmers' market saying to his wife that I could be as tasty as some of his old cheeses!
Another pathetic communist talking about his rights to be on vacation for a month! Give me a break
Elegantly dressed men with sweat dripping all over their suits! Is it a sin to take off the jacket here?

"Aha, the technologies of these modern days!" High-school kid, do you realize that you are talking like an old man??

Each time I was visiting my parents, I was feeling as if everyone was getting on my nerves and on my third day in Turin I was already looking forward to flying back to London. Turin was no longer my home or perhaps it had never been. Yet, now and then, I was constantly searching for cheap Ryanair fares to go enjoy a weekend of aperitivi and cioccolata con biccerin in Turin. Perhaps my old friend Elena was right. My choice to abandon Turin was the best I ever made. I discovered the luxury of living in one of the coolest cities in the world (London) only two hours away from home. And I could always take a few days off to go home (and complain of course).

Living thousand of miles away from home (Boston) has made it all different. Not only it has made me realize why an old English friend was always calling me “the Torino girl”! when he was drunk and that Turin is indeed my real home, the place that has shaped my heart, thoughts and decisions. It has also made me realize that now it only takes a few encounters like these to produce tears in my eyes:

 

 

 

"Eh cara mia, all'estero cose cosi' te le puoi sognare!" (eh, my dear, abroad, you can only dream of things like these!), my mother used to say. Now, ten years later, I can't agree with her more.

Do you want the finger mom? - Vuoi il dito mamma?

Vuoi il dito? (Do you want the finger?)

This posting will be brief as it is only meant to record yet another, hopefully transitory, strange obsession of my son. In the last few weeks Tronk has discovered the most exciting thing ever: "il dito" (the finger) and our reactions when he moves his index finger up and down towards us. He does that to copy his dad, who likes to tickle him. When Tronk first raised his little finger towards us John and I couldn't help showing him that we were scared; typical reaction of the parent treating the child as a grown up! The problem is that he got a real kick out of it while we were in Italy and continued to raise his little finger to nonno and nonna (the Italian grandparents) and even to strangers in the street, hoping to get the same reactions from them.

Unfortunately, nonno turned out to be the only one who went along with the game, by producing a fake expression of terror and a scream (causing us to be scared) each time Tronk's finger was approaching. Strangely, nonna's reaction instead turned out to be an attempt to eat the finger. Sadly, everyone else Tronk came across in the two weeks he spent in Turin, did not get the message.

We are now back in Boston, still trying to escape from the little finger and get some sleep.

A Lost Dream - Un Sogno Abbandonato

Warning: Sorry, Folks, but this posting DOES NOT end with my decision to finish my PhD.

Last night I dreamt that I was having lunch with other students at the Imperial College canteen, as usual, and that nobody (supervisor included) could explain to me what "normalization" is and when is needed or not in an equation. Everyone looked so confused and lost at the table. I left the room totally frustrated, then I woke up. The memory of that dream (with the recursive Bayesian equations mentioned in the dream) was haunting me while I was feeding Tronk breakfast this morning.

Recursive Bayesian Equations

My Facebook Status:

I dreamt that I was working on the last chapter of my doctoral thesis and that nobody at Uni (supervisor included) knew what normalization is for. Painful dream.

Comments:

You need to get back to studying...

You need to finish

You can do both, just have to wait until William is a tiny bit older and at school

There is no reason why Enrica can't finish once William goes to school. The first baby is most certainly not dead. Just hibernating. : )
4 solid hours a day over 6 months. I bet you finish

Here is my reply to these comments and to all the people who will ever raise the question why I didn't, whether I should, should have or will have to finish my PhD at some point in my life.

I'll start by telling you this. One month ago, a PhD student at Harvard emailed me to ask me to go to her office to talk about  "the state of the art in automated human behavior analysis", a chapter of my PhD dissertation, the thesis I never finished writing. Buried under negative thoughts, I said "NO", with all the pain resulting from that reply. To be frank, the sole idea of having to reopen and look through my ex PhD work was putting me in a state of anxiety and was making me feel bad. The reason is hard to explain.

Since I had William, for a year or so, I could not accept my decision to stop working on my PhD thesis. That PhD in Bioengineering was all it mattered in my life until I met my husband. I had already published three papers with promising results obtained from the analysis of 220 programs I wrote from scratch in Matlab and run on ten different subjects (of which three were real), with complicated equations of Bayesian Inference and of particle filtering.  And I had already completed four chapters of my PhD thesis, that my PhD supervisor had already read and edited. All I was missing was the last two chapters, the one containing the final analysis of the data sets (work which was killing my back) and the chapter drawing the conclusions. I had difficulties understanding some aspects of the complex wavelets that I used in my first year to implement the face detector but I was slowly overcoming these difficulties as I have overcome others. I knew on the other hand that without some foundations in maths, science or social sciences, with or without the PhD,  I could not go very far. See? The more I talk about this the more I feel bad. 

Before I had William, I was hoping to finish my PhD in Boston. Then, after talking to two Professors, one at MIT and another one at Brandeis University, I realized that if I had decided to finish my PhD here in Boston, practically, I would have had to start it all over again and I really couldn't bare such weight, both financially and physically. I have had enough with the four years spent working in the lab, sometimes until 10 pm, sometimes until later. I reached a point  all I wanted was to be done with my PhD, to recover from my back problem, to get a job, to pay my debts and have my personal life back.

But life took a different spin for me. At the end, I was forced to choose between two options: (1) to continue to destroy my health in London with an herniated disk, bank debts and a long distance relationship (2) to move to the US and have a family. I chose to have a family and by family I mean a husband, not a child. My initial plan was to recover from my back problem, get used to living in the US and find a job. I had not excluded, however, the possibility of having a child later in life.

Yet I became pregnant as soon as I moved to the US and this is the first question I had to answer: who is going to be always at home with my child? No doubts it would be me, as John was in full time employment and my parents could not help me from Italy. So I chose to give my child a full-time mom for as long as I can and I don't regret this choice. I am glad my child has a mom at home who feels the duty to take care of his needs and education full-time.

I often wonder what I will do when my child goes to school in two and half years time. I ask myself how my life will change. This is the scenario I often imagine:  me taking William to school, then going back home to hurry to prepare lunch to then go to pick him up and take him home to give him lunch. Then find things to do with him in the afternoon. In this scenario I really cannot see my thoughts going on Bayesian equations and on particle filters. 

I am only certain this: I will not be that permissive working mom saying "yes" all the time to overcome the feelings of guilt from not being at home when my child comes home from school and this by itself is worth a thousand PhDs.

At the same time, when someone asks me what I do for a living, when I am thinking of going back to work or someone mentions something that even for few seconds brings my mind back to the PhD I never finished, there is a fire inside me that starts burning. And I feel the urge of talking about my past research experiments as if talking about it could serve the purpose of making me feel better.  As a matter of fact, by doing this, all I accomplish  is make myself feel bad.

So, to make it clear to you, the PhD I have not finished is a bit like a baby that I have not been able to save, a baby who died. After that I had a second (far better) child and I am now responsible for taking care of this second child. Remembering the days (or dreaming of) when my first baby was alive no longer makes sense and it only makes me feel bad.

To John, for his birthday - A John, per il suo compleanno

This posting is dedicated to my husband John. Happy birthday dear husband and amazing dad!!!

Tronk has learned a rather strong expression from his dad: God Dammit! It all started in the car when Tronk started imitating his father expressing his anger against the well known aggressive Massachusetts car drivers (see video below)

This wasn't a single episode. Tronk is in love with this expression and I initially found it rather embarrassing to stand next to him at the doctor's office while he was greeting the people next to us with his sweet loud God Damnit. Not that it was making me feel any better to hear that on the train. In those situations it was always the parent (me) who was getting the dirty look from the old lady, not Tronk!

Today, I was typing an email on the computer when Tronk came to me with a rather frustrated expression of the face and said these exact words as loud as he could possibly do: 

"Questo computer! God Damnit Mamma!" (This computer! God Damnit  mom!)

I know very well that cursing (swearing or cussing, as you prefer to name it) is a form of disrespect towards other people but when I hear him say God Damnit these days, all I can do is hide and burst into laughter, hopefully without Tronk seeing me. It is funny and I don't see a reason for telling him to stop saying what his father says all the time. Not to defend my husband's colorful language but God Damnit does not seem to be such a bad expression, according to the Urban Dictionary:

"The expression God Dammit is used in situations relating to anger, annoyance, or frustration. It is a phrase used to ask God to damn something, usually a situation, and it in no way means that you want to damn God. Also, when used at a person, it does not mean that you want God to damn that particular person, it means that you want God to damn the situation that the person caused, indirectly damning him or her."

Italian readers, would you be concerned if your children used the expression "Maledetto!" in public? Not really. So stop giving me that dirty look, old lady. Let my child be and wait until real cursing begins.

Tronk, would you please sing happy birthday to daddy? Below are our first and last attempt.

Houses with the roof - Case con il tetto

So Tronk has a new obsession. It started in early January just after Santa's arrival (Tronk's former obsession). This time, there isn't a cartoon character involved, nor a car. I don't know what has triggered this new obsession but Tronk seems to be in love with houses and roofs. One day he discovered that there was a house with a roof. He was convinced that all the other houses didn't have one. I had to point at several houses in our neighborhood to explain to him that all houses come with roofs, except in Ireland of course, but he did get the concept.

Few days later, we were in the car for a trip and Tronk was pointing at every single house with the roof he could see going past. "Mamma, una casa con il tetto! C'e' una casa con il tetto! Oh, un'altra casa con il tetto! Qui c'e' una casa con il tetto e qui c'e' un'altra casa con il tetto! Che bello!" (Mom, a house with the roof! Here there is a house with the roof! Oh, another house with the roof! Here there is a house with the roof and here there is another house with the roof! How beautiful!). Comments of this kind went on and on for at least fifteen minutes. That was only the beginning, unfortunately. Not only I have had to conduct a thorough analysis of the roofs in our neighborhood each time we took a walk outside our house. More recently, Tronk has come to the conclusion that "mamma ha il tetto!" (mom has the roof), while daddy hasn't. He is not quite sure whether nonno and nonna have one but he is working on this one to find the answer.

I had days when I really didn't want to hear talking about roofs. It is easy to say "ignore him". As soon as Tronk was pointing at a brand new roof with his little hand and was asking if I liked the roof with his irresistibly sweet voice, I was back in the same exact dynamic I described six months ago; I couldn't help showing him excitement,  no matter how frustrated I was. "Oh si', che bella!" (Oh yes, how beautiful!), even if the house he had just pointed out was covered with peeling, dirty white paint. 

But today I came across these roofs of Turin, my home town, bathed in the kind of snow that I saw few times in my life. These sunshine lit white roofs bring up memories of high-school mates throwing snow balls at each other, scared of getting their coats dirty, while waiting for the 64 bus in Corso Vittorio Emanuele, cups of hot chocolate with friends and the infinite pleasure of waking up at 10 am the day after and realize, with surprise, that I didn't have to go to school.

I wonder where the chimney sweep has gone

Could be Via Accademia Albertina, the street where I used to live in a loft

Ci sono due campanili, hai ragione! (There are two bell towers, that's right!)

Thanks to these photos, my whole perspective on houses and roofs changed. I was ready to share my excitement with Tronk but instead, as soon as he saw the pictures, he went: "Che bello il campanile che fa din don dan! Fra Martino Campanaro..." (how beautiful is the bell tower that goes din don dan!  Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques...). No matter the effort I made in getting him to appreciate the beauty of my favorite roofs, Tronk got excited with the bell towers and continued to talk about them. Luckily, there are not many bell towers that look like that in Arlington, Massachusetts.