This weekend marks our fourth wedding anniversary and notably the first as parents. In celebration, we had booked three nights at an agriturismo (hotel/farm) castle, with swimming pool, outside of Florence and then one night in the heart of Firenze. A nod to the four years ago visit we enjoyed during our monthlong honeymoon it Italy. I envisioned a relaxing day spent splashing around the pool, picking up my pen while Aleksander napped and reflecting on life as a married couple after a first child arrives. It’s a topic that Dalia and I have been discussing and dissecting quite a bit in the weeks leading up to our anniversary. And one that we both felt had not been shared with us by almost anyone, as first time parents, neither by personal acquaintances nor public figures.
Alas, after finishing work on Friday, we loaded up our recently purchased and serviced Subaru Outback and headed onto the A1 highway for a couple hundred beautiful Tuscan kilometres to Florence. If the foreshadowing hasn’t yet become apparent, our fairytale weekend didn’t get very far down the road. Little more than 30 minutes outside of Rome, the dashboard temperature indicator turned red, soon followed by a mysterious liquid explosion under the hood, then the three of us on the side of the 100 degree hot highway waiting for a two.
Two very friendly, helpful and modestly bilingual Italian service people showed up within half-an-hour and took us through the charming town of Orte, letting us know that our weekend plans would be heading in reverse, back to Rome via the train station. Update about the car to follow next week.
It was one of the most clear and salient ‘dad in the world’ moments I’ve had since being in Italy and somehow fit perfectly into the theme we had been reflecting on: living the unexpected hour to hour, day to day – every hour, every day.
Since about 24 hours before Aleksander was born, Dalia and I started the race of keeping him well, fed, thriving, comfortable, dry, clean, happy, rested, safe, loved, dressed, calm and secure. We didn’t exactly know we were starting such a race as first time parents but now, almost nine months later, there haven’t proven to be many breaks from it. Add in work for me, plus a pandemic, plus a move to a foreign country and it can, at times, feel like a triathlon that you were dropped into when you were just casually on the way for your morning coffee.
In comparison, our courtship and three some years of marriage were a stroll. Not always along the beach, but at least in the woods, or alongside a canal, or in the worst case, a partially shovelled sidewalk. We were fortunate in that way. People talked about the challenges of marriage, especially in the first year, and we’d usually share a glance and really not understand what they mean.
Well that stroll into triathlon nano-moment-transition has often left us out of breath, occasionally out of sync and rarely, out of it all. Nothing is as it was. And we’re constantly trying to navigate the new hyphenated reality of married couple-parents.
Weekends like this one we had planned allow us to momentarily take our feet off the gas, assumer a more leisurely pace and re-connect as a trio. Hence, the extra sourness of possibly having bought a silver Subaru lemon.
Just this past week, I began twice weekly Italian classes (nice thing), continued to study French grammar after Aleksander falls asleep (necessary for work thing), got an Italian text message saying that neither our cable or internet bills had been paid (baffling thing), tried unsuccessfully for hours to contact someone at my online-only European bank (infuriating thing) and kept the marriage-baby-work train on the rails (triathlon thing).
Then the newly purchased and recently serviced car goes bust. The dad-in-the-world highs are absolutely phenomenal but it’s not always only gelato, castles and sunsets on aquamarine seas.
Dad In The World 