Alessandra tells us about her life, about her past relationships and how she managed to stick to her idea of a full and indipendent lifestyle, thanks also to the precence of her niece Maya.
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ALESSANDRA: «Since I was a young girl, playing with dolls… mind you, I did like them, but all this fuss about being my son or my daughter, it was never really for me, I enjoyed doing other things. And I was really surprised by the sheer contrast between my sister and me. She is older than me and lives in Spain, and she always knew that she wanted a daughter, that she would have named Maya: and so it was. I never felt that way, and I never felt it as a problem or a limitation, as for me it was absolutely natural. Then when you have your first relationships, and your partners start talking about having a child. I even had a Spanish boyfriend who told me he wanted to have seven daughters!
Talks about marriage and children always caused me anxiety, because I said: “we are good together, I want to be with you, but you want something I don’t feel”. Therefore, I could foresee the end of the relationship.
Once, joking with my aunt… I fell in love with a guy who was half Somali and half Italian, when I told my aunt who used to live in Spain, “How lovely, we’ll have a sweet dark-skinned nephew”! Just that, she did not ask me: “Do you want children”? Nobody ever brought it up as a problem or as question, not even out of curiosity.
Of course, when you talk with your friends, when you meet again years after finishing school, and 98% of them have husbands and children, you are happy for them, if they are happy about it, and a little less if they are not, or if you feel that they are not. Anyway, I always felt it kind of weird thinking that I am happy for you if you want to have a child, why can’t you be happy for me if I don’t? Why do I get asked things like: “Don’t you have husband and children?”, “No”, very peacefully.
Over the years this thing evolves, because you change and have new experiences. I often like to tell of this memory I have from when I was around twenty-five, I had a boyfriend who was a lawyer, who was very meticulous and who made me laugh a lot. Once, talking about this because he was maybe the fifth boyfriend telling me: “I would like to get married, have children,” I told him, “I don’t want children, I am not interested, it’s not really my thing, and as such I tell you straightforwardly. Talking about marriage also unsettles me. So he told me: “well, you can’t know now that you will never want children ever” “you are right, I’ll rephrase it: up to now, I never desired to have children”. Up to today, and many years have gone by, I still feel the same. I love children…When I was younger I found it difficult to relate to children, they scared me a bit, probably because I struggled to feel like a child myself again. Then when I started to have children around in my life, first of all my niece, who lives in Spain, and who I love deeply, I kind of found this channel again. So, it is not something like: “children are a pain, and they are fussy”. Children are wonderful, other people’s are. I love them, and especialy with Maya, I am there when she needs me, we meet as often as we can. She called me the other night, for a nice long chat, we laughed, she told me things, although she doesn’t like talking on the phone. She is not my daughter, I understand that the profound instinctive relationship must be incredibly intense, and I admire those women who had children and who are great mothers, which is difficult to say what this really means. So I won’t experience that special bond. You can’t experience everything, you must find your own directions.
However beautiful this is, it is not the direction I took, I might even envy it, at times, but this doesn’t prevent me from experiencing other bonds, other emotions, other intense feelings.
That’s the way it is… I also worked on it in therapy, maybe it is because I was very protective towards my family of origin, and this may have taken up a space that I could have directed towards motherhood. But it was filled up with a father, a mother, a brother, a sister, an uncle and so forth… It was full, so I never gave it too much thought. It could be, I’ve thought about it, I don’t rule it out, but that’s the way it is, up to now. Up to now, I have consciously chosen not to have children.
I’ve had this amazing aunt, who did not have children, who has been for me, especially in those moments when I felt my family not too close, my second mother. She was a complicated woman, an artist, she used to draw and wrote children’s books. She had no children, also due to her health conditions, she had a terrible car accident when she was twenty, but despite the challenges she had to face, she led such an amazing life that many healthy people don’t even dream of. She travelled, she got married, she is my mum’s sister and married my father’s brother. Then they split up, but always felt like husband and wife till the end, from afar, they kept seeing each other and loving each other. She was definitely a great role model. You could love her or hate her at times, because she was very direct. She would make you feel she was there for you, she was one of a kind. I can say that, clearly over the years, going back to motherhood, probably at twenty in case of an unwanted pregnancy, I would have had an abortion, for sure. Now it would be different, as your perception of the world around you changes, and also the way you relate with the world. All the times I said: if I’d ever have a daughter, if I’d ever change my mind, if it’d ever happen even if not planned, I would have named her after my aunt, Asun. Yes, a real role model for independence and very lively creativity.
I tell you what happened to me once, going for a work meeting, with some teachers. One teacher, on the brink of retirement, so let’s say I can understand the cultural and generational gap. I was with my father: “This is my daughter”.
“Ah, nice to meet you. What do you do?”
“I work with my father” “Are you married? Any children”: typical question.
I answered very calmly: “No”.
“Well, then you are incomplete as a woman”.
Clearly, I couldn’t say much, being a work meeting, but I really wanted to tell him to go to hell! How dare you? I felt really puzzled, I wasn’t upset, but I thought: if this is still the level of conversation… Tough luck! What’s important is that it is my decision, and that I feel at peace with my choice. I don’t care if the others don’t understand, or keep asking… I’ve often been told: “You’d make a great mum”. Yes, maybe, maybe not, I don’t know. What I know is that twenty years ago, one of the reasons for not having children, was that I did not feel I had much to teach them. Clearly now I could certainly teach them something.
I work as a publisher of books to teach Italian as a foreign language. I have inherited this work from my father, the publishing house was founded by my grandfather, and in my spare time I discovered this great passion for photography. I am a pretty silent observer, especially when I was a child, and when I went through a really rough patch in my life, this helped me externalise. Little by little, first with a small camera, then to a more professional one I started to really get into it. You know what I am doing now? I am trying to create a calendar to give to friends and family.
Last year I made a really nice one which everybody loved it, but this year I can’t seem to find pictures as good as last year. So I am taking out all my stuff, hoping to find something. I’ve often felt like the weird one, for certain things, but not for others. So you ask yourself, beside motherhood, why that person finds happiness in that, and I feel nothing at all. And why do I get moved instead when I find a shoe print with a small leave, and I say: “Don’t move!”, and I protect it, and the other person says: “what are you doing?”. As I mentioned before, regarding motherhood, when you are a kid, you play around, but when you are twenty or thirty, everybody chooses their own direction, and most choose that path, but you don’t feel like it. So, yes, I have thought about it. I am very curious about it, for sure, but so does my best male friend… My best girl friend doesn’t have children either, and our mutual friend says: “well, sooner or later!” We looked at each other: “what about sooner or later”? For now, neither sooner nor later, so either you think about it or… but he doesn’t have children either, so… Anyway, I don’t find it an embarrassing question, because I don’t feel uneasy answering it. Clearly, if I am at ease, I am ok for you to ask, and even dig deeper.
This boyfriend of mine who was a lawyer, who was really keen on digging into things, and built everything up to formulate this statement, for which I am still grateful for: “you can’t know now what you will be later on”. Thank you! Really thanks, because this gives me an extra piece of myself. I can say what’s true up to now, but I can’t possibly know if in the future I will meet a man with whom I would want to have children, but maybe not on the same page regarding a common project of other kind. So, I was never not at ease.
Of course, sometime you feel that some are not open enough to accept an answer that they don’t like, I do notice that, and I try to convince them that I am at ease with it, I didn’t miss out on anything, it’s not out of rebellion, and neither a feminist action. I haven’t understood well what feminism is, anyway, of course I have my idea about it. But if I see someone too inflexible, asking a certain type of questions to make you crumble, well, then it’s your problem. I certainly don’t go back home thinking “Why didn’t I?”. Nope. You can have children, nobody stops you. So, where’s the problem?
Sometimes it’s too much, sometimes you talk about things that I have experienced really very little. When Maya was a toddler, and she came here with Elena… I understand your need to talk about it non-stop, it’s the centre of your life now, it’s fine with me. From the outside, sometime I’d love to talk about something else, I know that in that phase you don’t go to the cinema, nothing else grabs your attention so much, or at least it’s mostly like that. So what else can I do? I listen. I am a good listener, I don’t need to have my say every time. When I was a kid, all kept telling me “Has the cat got your tongue?” “Can’t you speak? What’s your problem”? I loved listening, and I felt uneasy when I had to speak up, as I still did not have my own opinion, it took me sometime. Yes, sometime I find it boring, some other time I am amused, amused by stories not only about: “it was too hard, or too soft, it was the perfect brown shade”. That’s too much for me. But it is a world of its own, and it must be respected, the same respect I expect for my world. As I mentioned I haven’t encountered many obstacles or embarrassment.
Of course, I do think about inheritance, I already know that I will leave many things to my niece. Soon I will have another niece, from my brother’s side, who knows what relationship ‘ll have with her? I hope as beautiful and intense as the one with Maya. Maya already knows she’ll have some of my things. We’ve already agreed on that, we have a deal.
In my house you can find various hints, that could make you think that there is a child here.
In the entrance there is a tentative tale that I have written with Maya, some years ago. I was working on myself, in order to become visible, be less invisible, which is something that defined me for long, in some situations. Since I see in her some of myself, and since we both love chameleons, I told her: “why don’t we write a tale where there is a chameleon who no longer wants to camouflage”. And so I have it there in the entrance. Or also a drawing she did for me when she was really small, here, on a canvas. She also likes drawing, she inherited this that runs in the family. We have pictures together, I have her books here, her colours, her first silver ballerinas shoes… Luckily, it’s not a house full of Peppa Pig and company, but there are elements that speak of a childhood, of a small presence who is growing up, learning to move her first steps. I have her Christmas cards, where she tells me how much she loves me.
We have fun together, we play and laugh a lot. I would like to be for her, and sometime it is, I would like to be for her what Asun has been for me, listening with an open heart, when you need to open up, although Maya has a very direct relationship with her mother, and this is really nice. But sometimes she needs another ear, and I like to be that a lot.
My first boyfriend had some cousins who were much younger, because his uncle married again later in life. Once I went there, I struggle to remember exactly as it happened ages ago. I went there to babysit, because the parents had to go out. And with one of these girls, I can’t recall her name now, one was called Carmen, you know when you feel you have an open connection, without having to work to open such a channel. There was a feeling, not a maternal one as I was only seventeen, but a special kind of communication. And this is the amazing about children, you can communicate without thinking too much, just with a gesture, with your heart, your gaze, your face, or just playing. That was kind of a unique moment. Later on, nothing I can remember right now, I don’t have a good memory. Things come and go. But when Maya was born, she was born in Spain, obviously my mother went there first, to assist her during pregnancy. Then as soon as she was born, my father went to Barcelona. Maya was born the same day as my father, so they have their birthday in common. When my father comes back I fly to Spain to meet her. There is this beautiful picture, me on the bed lifting her up, this tiny creature who cried non-stop. It was of the most intense moments in my life, seeing that tiny thing full of life, full of potential. I remember that back from Barcelona, for two or three days, or maybe even five, whatever you told me I would break down and cry, because it had touched me really deeply. I had met her, I had found her. I remember when I got back to work, with my father and my brother, and my brother said something inappropriate, he was in a bad mood, and me: “You can’t tell me anything, I am truly overwhelmed”! I have these moments from time to time, and that was an unforgettable moment.
Thinking of dead branches I don’t really recognize myself in this image, if anybody ever called me a dead branch behind my back. I see myself as a branch that generates other kind of flowers, but a dead branch really… although some dead branches are very beautiful. What I like in my pictures is trying to see, as my friend Sandra was saying, who was our connection, “You must have something in your camera a lens that turns ugly things into beautiful things”. So even if a dead branch may seem horrible, if you get closer, you turn it around and look at it, you can certainly find a different perspective, a certain light that makes it unique. So even if they call me dead branch, I take it as a compliment.
You even want me to empty my bag, something I hate to do because it’s full of stuff, but as I am grateful for this nice chat… What do you want to know? This is a personal letter; this is my hard-disk for my pictures, layouts, back up, prints I carry back and forth, so I always carry it around with me. Crumbs scattered around, loose change, a mobile case, a bus ticket, as the other day someone hit the back of my car. Glasses, gloves, wallet.
These are the lyrics of a song I really like, by the ‘Cinematic Orchestra’, do you know them?
There was this documentary ‘The Crimson Wing’, they made the soundtrack, this song is very beautiful, about the life of flamingos, migrations, life and death. Money scattered around, complete mess, my mother’s medical exemption, it may come in handy. Communication of the trade fair today at EUR, of small and medium publishing houses, where I’ll go later on. Notebooks for my thoughts and dreams, which I often carry with me; music…which I can’t live without, my uncle’s keys, bells, gloves, asthma medication, Tachifludec that lately on and off I have temperature. And a lot of loose change.»
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