Housewife

Giulio's surgery went very well, and yesterday, four days after the fact, he went back to school. Lorenzo was also granted time off because his son was having surgery, so we were able to actually have a normal weekend with Daddy home the whole time. Home of course is a relative term. Lorenzo never just hangs out at home. If he is here he is doing some sort of home improvement, putting up a book shelf, fixing a tap, painting a chipped corner of the wall, or calling around about getting new blinds for our tiny study. Otherwise he is making sandwiches and hustling us out the door to go somewhere and have a picnic or a big meal, or a hike. In two days we went up to Lake Garda for a picnic and up to the Valle Brembana which is on the edge of the Alps for lunch and a walk. He only flops on the couch, tv remote in his hand when it is too late in the evening to do anything else, and of course within minutes he is asleep. It is hard to be lazy with some one like that around, but then my life grants me few possibilities to sit around and do nothing, as does most people's, as there is always something to be done. Only a few weeks ago, both children were sick, the laundry was piling up, the house was messy, and I was sick too. As Livia whined and squirmed in my lap I turned to Lorenzo and told him that I was tired of being the Mommy, I wanted someone to come and take care of me. I was fed up with finding piles of clean laundry on the bed and knowing that if I didn't fold them, no one else would. He laughed and gave me a kiss, but what I wanted was someone to come in and whisk the children away, clean the house and let me sleep right through it. In other words I wanted my mommy. Lorenzo could keep his kisses, they weren't going to let me stay in bed for another two hours.
I am grateful that my job gives me free hours at odd times of the day, so that way I can get things done while the kids are at school. Things stay put away when Giulio is not a home, crumbs do not accumulate in and around the kitchen with Livia at daycare. Because one thing I've learned living in Italy is that housekeeping is not something done on the weekend when you have a free half hour. No, it is an on-going full time job keeping a household up to Italian standards. I always thought Americans were clean people, we pride ourselves on our cleanliness, and admit it, the first thing that we like to imply about Europeans is that they are perhaps not as clean as us. Now I can't speak for the rest of Europe, but Italians are CLEAN. Yes, it is true, they smell different from Americans, but I'm speaking to you as a shower taking-deodorant/anti-perspirant wearing-US citizen, and I've notice that I smell differently here as compared to when I am in the US, so obviously it's diet and not lack of hygene that causes this.
At any rate, when it comes to housecleaning, I have never met women so driven about cleaning as Italians. In the US, we vacuum our wall-to-wall carpet, we do laundry, we dust, and we clean the bathrooms. For most of us, if the house looks orderly, doesn't smell, and the floors aren't sticky, well, we've done a good job. House cleaning in Italy means lifting up couches each week to clean underneath them, wiping down the hood over the stove for any grease that may have gotten there, and cleaning all windows at least twice a month. Wall-to-wall carpeting is viewed as unsanitary, and so in its place there is parquet, tile, or marble, which is vacuumed and dusted once a day and washed at least once a week. Every morning the bedroom windows are flung open and the bedding is hung out the window to allow it to air out. Carpets are taken off the floors, vaccumed, and the hung outside. Sticky fingerprints are wiped off of doors and lightswitches, and children's toys are carefully cleaned and dusted off. When the show "Wife Swap" came to Italy, ( a show where for 7 days two women switch houses and families to see what happens) it shows women in their daily routine as wives and mothers, the one thing I couldn't get over was how many women get up at 6 am so they can clean the house before going to work. I'm lucky if I get all the dishes out of the sink and into the dishwasher first thing in the morning. The ultimate insult on that show is for a woman to say that she had found dust in the other woman's home, implying the ultimate shame: you keep a dirty house. Cleanliness does not stop at the inside, there are women who weekly wipe down the shutters on the exterior of the house or apartment, and mop all outside patios and balconies. Gardens, no matter how small, are tended to with military precision and are often tider than most American's living rooms. When I think of an American housewife, I think of her pushing a huge grocery cart through the supermarket, folding laundry from the drier, or driving little Cadyn to soccer practise. When I think of an Italian housewife I think of a woman dressed in old clothes down on her hands and knees cleaning the dirt that has accumulated behind her oven. And then we compare notes about it. Never in my life I thought I would have conversations with other people about housework, other than the basic, "today I cleaned the house." Now I find myself down at Terry's, having long connversations that contain phrases like," Well, I just vaccumed the floors, now I have to go mop the kitchen and outside balcony." Or I listen to Terry run down the list of things she accomplished that morning, "I mopped the whole house, organized the kids' bedroom. Now I just have to clean all the kitchen counters with bleach." Just to clarify, I clean my house once a week, with the occasional touch-up on the floor when I see too many crumbs overflowing from the kitchen,
And then of course there is the laundry. Yes, laundry is a cross that women all over the world have to bear. Men think, including my husband, that because they have put dirty clothes into the machine and pressed a few buttons they have "done" the laundry, but that is like saying because they were present at conception a man has given birth to a baby. In Italy the button pushing part is the easiest part, it's what comes after that is so time consuming and tiring. I do have a drier, but because it causes spikes in my electric bills I try to use it sparingly, only in the months when clothes take a long time to dry on their own. Therefore for the rest of the year, and especially right now, all clothes are hung up to dry, either on a drying rack on my balcony or on the clotheslines we have down in the yard. There is something suprisingly satisifying about hanging up clothes on the line, you can see all your hard work and effort right before your eyes, and there is something so wholesome about white sheets flapping in the breeze. If it's hot the clothes I hang up in the late morning are bone dry by early evening, but if the weather is sort of iffy and damp it can take several days, and while you are waiting for that load to dry more clothes pile up until you have mountains of laundry to deal with. Lorenzo is a good guy, works hard, helps in the house, but he has no problem walking right past laundry piled on the bed waiting to folded, ironed, and put away. For some reason this is "my" job, though in a pinch he will help me fold if I ask. But ironing is my responsibility. What's the big deal? you may ask. So you iron a few shirts, big whoop. In my house growing up ironing was all do it yourself, clothes came out of the dryer relatively wrinkle free, were folded and put away. Occasionally, the morning before some big meeting I would find my father ironing his dress shirt on top of a towel on one end of the kitchen counter, or my mother would drag out the board to freshen up something of ours that we wanted to wear to church minutes before tearing out the door saying we were going to be late. Ironing was optional, something done only in extremely needy cases. Imagine my surprise when coming to Italy to find that ironing wasn't just mandatory, it was a competitive sport. My neighbor irons EVERYTHING. Shirts, pants, underwear, socks, sheets, towels, baby bibs, and believe me she is not the only one. I, unable to break free from my non-ironing roots, take a more moderate approach. If it can't be seen outside the house, I don't iron it. Therefore, I iron basically "only" shirts and pants, I leave my sheets and towels with wrinkles and hope that no one will ever discover the shameful fact that I don't iron everyone's underwear. I do however have a secret weapon: I have a five star iron. Before I had your basic iron, with the little platic vial that holds about half a cup of water. Using that I felt at times like I had decided to climb Mount Everest wearing only a pair of Keds. The wrinkles, perhaps made more resistant by our calcium-heavy water, simply deepened, one shirt could take 30 minutes. My loathing of ironing made me simply avoid doing it, while Lorenzo's work shirts piled up in the closet. Then I found what I suppose would be a called a "professional" iron, basically its a small metal iron with a long tube attached that feeds into a small 1-liter tank. The iron sits on top of the tank when not in use. The tank heats the water and keeps it under pressure so the steam shoots out of the iron in hot powerful gusts. It's like watering your garden with a fire hose. Nothing stands a chance against this work of superior craftsmanship, and in under an hour I can do my week's quota. Just to prove how great this iron is, my mother when she came to visit last spring enjoyed using it so much I had to hold her back from ironing our underwear. My father said she had ironed more in those three months than she had in her entire life. It was truly a miracle.
And now I have a pile of Giulio's shirts I must attack. Sigh. An Italian woman's work is never done........