The Speaker of the House

The things we do for our kids -- and how gifted we become at deflecting what's really going on at home.

My son, DJ-ing under Puglia’s olive trees.

For his 18th birthday, my son received his dream gift from friends and family: a DJ mixer set and a subwoofer speaker. Immediately, he dimmed the lights, pushed aside placemats, cutlery, and candlesticks, and transformed our kitchen table into his DJ pit. Within minutes, our home throbbed with house music. As I read in my bedroom, my bedside lampshade shook.

Throughout all of August, I spent as much time logisticating my son’s move to Milan as I did orchestrating the speaker’s travels all over Italy on our family vacation. Accommodating this cumbersome passenger proved how all parents seem to do anything and everything for their children, especially during that last summer before they leave home. As if every last, desperate gesture might ensure earned points for just a few more minutes of time spent together.

This August, my son travelled ahead of the rest of us to Puglia in order to help his Italian grandparents open up the family house for the season. I was still visiting my family in America when he called me to ask, ever so casually, if, upon my return, I wouldn’t mind picking up the fabled gift of the speaker from a music store in Rome. And, um, then driving it to Puglia.

Sure, I said, adding it to my list of 189 things to do in the 48 hours I’d have between my 18-hour return from Maine and my 8-hour-drive to Puglia. What’s one more errand for my beloved son?

Little did I know that I’d been suckered into driving half-way to Ostia to pick up the speaker somewhere along the Appia Antica while the city and car melted around me in torrid heat. Wilting in the shop’s whisper of air-conditioning among an orchestra of electric guitars, drum sets and synthesizers, I discovered the speaker not to be the size of a shoebox but, instead, of a household dishwasher. As our newest member of the family, the speaker would take up a good portion of our car’s backseat (and might even need a seatbelt). How could the three of us possibly fit our suitcases, ourselves, and the speaker in the car to Puglia? And, then, how would we ever get it back to Rome only, then, to transport it to my son’s new home in Milan?

The speaker’s spot in our family car.

Are you SURE you will really need this in Puglia, I asked my son. Absolutely, he quipped. He already had promised his presence as the DJ of two parties in the two weeks we planned to spend at the seaside.

Yet again, Dumb Mom caved, and packed the car with Dumb Dad, squishing their daughter between dog food, duffle bags, yoga mats, flippers, tennis rackets, the DJ mixer set, and The Subwoofer. Thank goodness the other Woofer was already in Puglia (another long story, for later). Even my daughter spoke up for the speaker — she swore it was worth traveling trash-compactor-style in stifling heat, and even composed her dream playlist for her DJ brother en route.

Once the speaker arrived in Puglia, it traveled from one cousin’s house to another (no easy, logistical feat, especially in the crippling heat), and became the keystone of at least five parties, with my son as DJ. Some were family dinners, some were teenage parties. At all of them, everyone danced, often under olive trees and a full moon, and ended up with cuffs of linen pants and hems of linen dresses turned the color of the terracotta-colored soil of Puglia. Eighty-year-old aunts and uncles did the twist, middle-aged-parents ignored their backaches and danced as if in their twenties, and the littles twirled in summer frocks. Most teenagers twerked, and some cringed as they watched their parents dance like kids. While disrupting the Salento’s chorus of croning cicadas, my son laughed as he mixed music, worlds and generations, with a smile punctuated by earphones that embraced his earlobes like exclamation points.

At the end of these informal summer dance parties, my 89-year-old uncle said to me, “Who would have ever thought that one present given to one teenager would actually be a gift to all of us.”

As time went by this summer, the speaker of the house helped me adjust to the real ballad playing sotto fondo, the blues I pretended I wasn’t singing as I planned for my son to move out of our home in Rome and on to university in Milan. All summer long, we continually pumped up the volume of the speaker to ignore the elephant dancing in the room.

We managed to get the speaker back to Rome by dumping it in the grandparents’ car. Then, in order to get all four of us to Milan plus the speaker (but minus the dog), we split up — the boys drove themselves, my son’s stuff, and the speaker while my daughter and I leisurely took the speedy train to Milan. Once reunited in Milan, we enlisted a cousin as a sherpa. Together with my son, they treated the speaker with the reverence of a small child, and kindly hauled it up four flights of stairs of my son’s new apartment building, which does not have an elevator. For the speaker’s next journey, my son will be on his own, as I hereby renounce my role as its travel agent.

Only recently, as the weather has finally turned in Milan from hot to cool, has my son admitted that he focused more on the speaker and DJ set than his fall wardrobe. Neither one of us minds that he will need to come home soon to exchange his summer t-shirts for winter sweaters.

Many Italians love telling me that I can’t complain about my son leaving Rome for Milan since I’d been “the American mom” who had encouraged him to move out of the house and try life in a new city. The truth is that many Italian moms are as “American” as I am now in that their Italian kids now choose to attend university outside of their home town, sometimes in another country. My two Italian sister-in-laws, both of whom live in Milan, have sent their teenage kids to university in London and Paris respectively. Close Italian friends of mine in Rome recently launched their teenage kids at university in Amsterdam, Madrid and Lisbon. I may encourage my kid to fly beyond Rome’s city walls but I’m not the only one. Opportunity — not my nationality — has everything to do with it.

Although I have not publicly bemoaned my son leaving home, I have quietly grieved it. As I see my son assuming his new responsibilities, I observe how he finally realizes how many we have had in raising him, and how reverent he has become in acknowledging what we now pass on to him.

Leading up to my son’s departure, I saw how he, too, was coping with his own confused feelings of should-I-stay-or-should-I-go. He manically charged around keeping himself busy, clearly feeling a need to do it all, learn it all, and squeeze it all in before he officially took off.

Kitchen lessons with his father moved me. My husband cooks for us on weekends, and we all crave his creative, delicious meals. My son photo-documented his father’s every weekend move in the kitchen so that he could recreate a home-cooked eggplant parmesan, spaghetti cacio e pepe, and cicoria ripassata in padella once on his own.

We went over how to do the laundry. How to fold sheets, and how often to wash them. We bought posters for his room that would identify him as Roman — from the Colosseo Carbonaro to an Er Romano place setting — and tossed in a throw pillow of the American flag. He stored away his eyeglasses prescription, pocketed his two passports, and added his new Milan keys to his set of home keys in Rome. I remembered how I held on to the keys to my parents’ home for several years after graduating from college, and reluctantly relinquished them when I moved to Rome at age 25. When will my son officially pass over his home keys to us? At the moment, I hope never so he continues to walk through our open door.

The night before we left Rome for Milan, my son set up his DJ set and speaker in the kitchen again, and the Italian nonni came over for dinner. We had all just watched Il Gattopardo, and the beautiful waltz scene in a Sicilian salotto was foremost in our mind. Nonna had recently also shared her favorite dance scene in modern cinema on our family chat — of Hugh Grant dancing in the film Love Actually. Nonna asked Luca if he could work on mixing the Pointer Sisters with a waltz.

He considered the challenge with a loving smile, just as he always does in mixing music, merging cultures and transitioning from one world to another. As my husband prepared another delicious dinner, my mother-in-law, daughter and I danced together, riffing off the mixed emotions of the moment, jumping for love with the Pointer Sisters in our last, complete, family supper for a while. We turned up the volume and boogied with that elephant in the room.

Nonna enjoying my son’s gift on the rooftop of the family summer house in Puglia with my DJ son and one of his many dancing cousins.

In 1998, I moved into my first apartment in Rome. By some twist of fate, it was after a family Christmas spent together in Rome, and my father and my brother were still around to help me move in my few belongings up three flights of stairs (again, no elevator). At one point, my brother and I were on the top floor and my father was three flights below us in the entranceway of my building. My brother had just hauled a huge duffle bag of my stuff up the steep stairs, threw it down like a professional wrestler, demanded that I acknowledge his body-building moment, and said to me, “Who’s your Daddy?”

The expression echoed off the Roman walls, and my father heard it from below.

“I’m right here, kids,” he said, thinking we had been asking for him.

It moved us both in that moment as we locked eyes and giggled. And, I guess that’s what I want my son to always remember, no matter where he ends up living.

We’re right here, kid.

My trio, huddling around our human speaker of the house.