Italian Grandmothers Shared My Pregnancy by Deborah Clark Vance
My morning queasiness, motion sickness, fatigue, bloated abdomen, two missed periods—heck, even my shrinking pants—were telling me, in fact screaming, that I was pregnant. At twenty-one, “mother” wasn’t something I felt ready to be, but I thought my two pregnancy and childbirth books would help.
Where I lived, the townswomen—all of them widowed during World War Two and still in black mourning dresses twenty-five years later—treated me like a daughter. I’d met them while passing the spring-fed stone fountain where they often scrubbed clothes. As a blond American, I stood out in that small medieval village in the foothills above Trent, Italy. As a woman, they expected me to resemble them.
Once they learned I was pregnant, they set aside their brown bar soap when they saw me, and swarmed around my belly like bees on honey, looking soulfully into my eyes and stroking my cheek, sorry for my living far from my mother at such a time. I tried to reassure them this wasn’t unusual in the States, adding that my mother was drugged during four deliveries and claimed to know nothing about childbirth. They clucked disapprovingly, shaking their heads.
Elsa and Adele, our closest neighbors, became part of my daily life. Their mission was to teach me pregnancy rules, the ones everyone around there had heard for generations. At first, I didn’t take them seriously. But as I grew to feel Elsa and Adele’s earnestness, I took note. The rules warned of consequences: the aunt who almost died from washing her hair during the quarantena—the forty days of rest after childbirth—ignoring the rule that said not to get your head wet because it could cause illness; the sister’s permanent pain since putting her hands in cold water; the grandmother who miscarried days after sitting on a cold stone. And they fortified me with woolen undershirts to protect my kidneys from cold drafts, stressing the dangers of extreme heat and cold.
Though modern-day skeptics would dismiss these old wives’ tales, I figured that such observations over who-knows-how-many years might have validity. Besides, I reasoned, isn’t the term “old wives’ tales” another way to dismiss women? These were their scientific findings based on observing effects and causes over hundreds of years.
When I started showing, Elsa insisted I visit the antenatal clinic a few towns away, and in my seventh month, she warned me not to travel down the mountain because of the change in air pressure. In my eighth month she and Adele cleaned our house. I awkwardly scrubbed the kitchen table while they barreled past to stoop, crawl, lift furniture and scour the walls and floors, all the while wondering aloud where my mother was. Meanwhile, Mom’s letters referred to the yet unborn “little stranger”, an old-fashioned term expressing that feeling of the unknown person inside, and repeated how she’d be more helpless than I was and would just be a nuisance.
When my contractions started, my husband sped us down the mountain to the hospital. I was assigned to a room with two other women in labor, one whose moaning quickly accelerated to screaming, “I want drugs! Mamma mia! Madonna mia! Dio mio! In Florence they give you drugs! Take me to Florence!”
When my pains grew stronger and more regular, I tried a method from my childbirth book about controlling pain by singing. So when a contraction came, I quietly sang, “Both Sides Now”, a favorite song by Joni Mitchell. As I reached the end of the first verse, “but clouds got in my way,” the distressed woman shouted, “Madonna mia, stai zitta per favore! Please shut up! Basta! Enough with the singing!” Chagrined, I complied. Before long, nurses came and wheeled her away.
“About time,” said my other roommate. “I’ve listened to her screaming since yesterday.” We later learned she had a C-section.
In the delivery room, my baby pushed her way out quickly and the doctor held her up high, exclaiming, “Che bambina bellissima! A beautiful baby girl!” I had zero experience with newborns and hadn’t realized how funny-looking they were. She seemed like a being from an alien world, and though that world was inside me, it was actually her world, not mine. This little stranger had been intimately close, pulsing with my heartbeat, excreting into my body. And now after being hidden except for my bulbous belly and the rippling, fluttering kicks, she was out in the open.
A few weeks after delivery, I could no longer tolerate my hair. And though Elsa had said to wait forty days, I washed it. After a few days, my fever rose so high I hallucinated. With a careworn, “I told you so,” Elsa called the doctor who put me on a strict diet. I was housebound, sick, bored and concerned. But as I convalesced, she taught me to cook polenta, potato gnocchi, risotto and all kinds of soup.
Years later in the States and apart from that tribe of Italian grandmothers, I shared the rules with my daughter. But my lone voice wasn’t enough during her first pregnancy. She didn’t want my advice since Google knew much more. At least that’s what she maintained until her baby was born and she needed information Google didn’t have.
My maternal line doesn’t share folk wisdom. However, we scrutinize the budding personalities among us and find patterns. My mother said I reminded her of her mother who read a lot and tried out new ideas, like learning yoga techniques introduced to the US in the 1920s. When my daughter was little, she started telling me how to clean—it was like I’d given birth to my mother! My granddaughter reminds me of me.
So my family’s only saying (not even a rule) about pregnancy is to see the unborn as a “little stranger.” But if my daughter is like my mother and my granddaughter and I are like my grandmother, our babies aren’t strangers at all.
Deborah Clark Vance earned a Ph.D. in Intercultural Communication and served as a tenured professor at McDaniel College. She raised four children, lived off the grid, operated a garden design business, taught piano, translated Italian, sold original paintings and published widely. She now devotes herself to writing. Her novel, “Sylvie Denied” was published in 2021.