What a difference ten years make!

Today marks my 10th anniversary at work, last week marked 10 years since Michele, Ellie, and I moved to Phoenix from Italy. It seems like yesterday. Ellie wasn’t even four years old yet, she was so cute going off to her first day of “American school” as she called it with a lunch box full of pasta and meatballs (we later learned from Ellie’s teacher that other kids had been offering her money for her lunch, evidently they were sick of their peanut butter and jelly!). Back then it was just the three of us with no plans whatsoever of staying in Phoenix long term. In fact we kept our home in Italy fully furnished and waiting for our return.

Michele spent half his time here and the other half back home, leaving us girls to fend for ourselves. During the summers I was alone (I can still hear the peace and quiet if I really concentrate) as Michele and Ellie past their days in Italy. It seemed we truly were living our lives between two continents, but in an instant everything changed. When Max was born we never really thought about the future, we were hunkered down in the trenches fighting for Max’s survival. Sometimes getting through an hour, a day, or a week was as long term as we could get. We learned very early on that it was useless to plan because Max was clearly running the show (not much has changed) and everything depended on how he was doing. His good days were our good days and his bad ones were our nightmares. Today Max defines his own sense of stable and we’ve slipped into what is our version of normalcy. The days come and go and many are uneventful, thank God. Yet after seven years of this we have come to realize that our future is now and it is here in Arizona.

This realization is somewhat tinged with sadness. It means we will not be going “home”, this is our home. Sometimes I think we have held on to the idea of Italy because it represents a period of time when our lives were less stressful, less complicated. We also held on to Italy because returning to Italy would signal that Max was healthy, whole, cured – however we want to put it. We told ourselves that once Max was stable we would go back. As time goes on and we realize that Max’s stable is a different stable we know that here is the best place for him to be and so we stay. Recently we have decided that this reality begged some concrete actions on our part. In the next week or two Michele will return to Italy to sell our house and pack up our belongings. Although none of us have stepped foot in that house since 2003 and Max has never stepped foot in it we all feel a bit like we’re selling the family home. When Michele signs those papers we will be losing our first home together, Ellie will be losing her childhood home, and Max will be losing the chance to know a place that has symbolized so much for us. While it’s bittersweet to loose something from your past it’s important to remember that you can’t have a future without letting go of your past.

What a difference ten years and a little boy can make!