My Mother’s breakup Journey

       Over the last 9 years, my father had been commuting from our small town of Fairfield to Cedar Rapids. He rented a little apartment during the week and would come home on weekends. I remember when I was a senior in high school, my father would always be home on Friday’s for dinner and would leave Monday morning early to make the 1 ½ hour drive to Cedar Rapids. “It’s really just like I’m gone three days” I remember him saying to my mother and me while I was still in high school. After my first year of college, I remember visiting home, my father wouldn’t get home until Saturday afternoon and would leave Sunday afternoon.

      “So really it’s like one day,” I said to him as he was walking out the door to go back to Cedar Rapids one Sunday. My father talked constantly about two people named Jen and Pat. They had met at work and were clearly joined at the hip.

       “Everyone loves us!” my father said. “They call us the three amigos.”

        I could only think to myself that there was no way that could possibly be true. It was clear my father was in a state of delusion. These people were his mid-life crisis. There was something about them that made my father feel more important and more accepted than he ever had in his life. However, my mother and I were never allowed to meet either of them. We were simply only allowed to hear my father’s stories of their grandeur. According to my mother, Jen, the 35-year-old, had started dating Pat, the 60-year-old. Jen and Pat had originally met because Jen had started dating Pat’s youngest son. After Jen and Pat were found one evening under a blanket together by Pat’s wife, two age-appropriate relationships came crashing down and only one wildly age-inappropriate relationship survived out of the rubble. And of course, there was my father, tagging along with his friends that could do no wrong the entire way. My father of course never informed my mother about these things. However, she did track Pat’s ex-wife down and she met her for coffee on the day in Iowa City while I waited out in the car. My mother came out of the coffee shop an hour later with eyes filled with tears. I drove us back to Fairfield while she wailed, barely getting the story out the entire car ride. My parents filed for divorce my senior year of college. And my father, Pat, and Jen all moved into a home together that same year. “Our neighbors are really weird to us,” my father told me at our monthly dinners at the Village Inn. I can only imagine what they hell they think of those three weirdos I thought to myself. My mother’s devastation and most of all humiliation, from the entire experience, began to subside after a year. She loved having her home to herself without the constant judgment and ridicule my father gave her every time she did something herself. My father’s “throuple,” as we referred to them behind their backs, seemed to be doing better than ever. And both of my parents found an odd sense of happiness in their weird brand-new lives. After about a year my mother really began to try and embrace the single life. Even though the divorce was still fresh, she coped by diving into planning travel adventures. When I would visit her, her nightstand was filled with travel books from Europe and South America. She kept the house at a balmy 55 degrees, “the minimum so your pipes don’t freeze!” she would say happily. She did this during the harsh Iowa winters so she could save more money toward her traveling. She first wanted to go to Italy and then she said she would need to get into shape because she wanted to go to Peru to hike the Inca Trail. With my brother and sister starting new families I was left as her only travel companion. It would be rude of me not to go with her.

      So, we boarded a plane for Italy. My mother’s coping strategy was to be as positive as she could be at all times no matter what. I was glad to be gone from all of the trouble back home and would cringe every time my mother would talk about how absolutely disgusting it was that a young woman would ever consider being with an older man. My mother would dart back and forth between her hatred toward my father and exaggerating how beautiful everything was. Everything we saw was “the most beautiful things she had ever seen,” or, “the most delicious thing she had ever tasted.” It was clear she wasn’t being sincere which made every conversation uncomfortable.

“So how are ya doing mom” I would ask concerned.

“Great! Everything is so beautiful! I have never seen anything so beautiful in my whole life!” She would reply.

“I thought the last place was the most beautiful” I would joke.

“Every place here is the most beautiful” she would retort back sharply.

      It was impossible to talk to her about anything real. The experience being in Italy, surrounded by people who seemed to all be best friends, and we’re all speaking in a different language was difficult, and of course, I had my mother who was only speaking to me in embellishments. I felt alone with her and vowed to never travel with my mother again. Finally, she reached her breaking point. We were headed toward Naples on an extremely packed train. My mother seated herself next to an old clearly bitter Italian man. Once she sat down he skootched as far as he could toward the window while openly rolling his eyes and leaning as far away from my mother as humanly possible. Every so often he would look back at her in a: fucking tourist type of fashion and turn back toward the window. I joked with her about it later when we got off the train to possibly share a common complaint with her about how absurd and childish the man was being, and she asked me politely to stop talking about it. After we got home from the day I brought it up again and showed her the picture of the man acting like a child while she was just merely sitting there minding her own business. When I showed her the picture. She repeated again that she did not want me to talk about it and she went to go take a shower in the bathroom. I heard her in the shower bawling. Not crying tears of a sad moment on a train but crying out 32 years wasted on an unappreciative man, and an entire day in Italy wasted on another ungrateful man. That was on top of, trying to maintain some false inhuman like sense of positivity throughout the entire ordeal. My mother was clearly thinking if my words and my face are positive eventually my mind will be too. This, of course, was impossible and my mother wound up crying in the shower in the middle of Naples while I felt like a complete asshole for showing her that picture.

Meanwhile, I was lonely. Both my mother and I were absolutely miserable shuffling around the streets of Naples (the birthplace of pizza). We sauntered down the dirty streets and read about little places to go to in our Rick Steve’s guidebook, we drank sangria before noon and ate Margherita pizza for breakfast lunch and dinner.

The remainder of our pasts lingered over us with every step. I spent a lot of time alone with my thoughts. My mother stopped saying everything was “The most beautiful” while we were in Naples. Because even though Naples was full of history and was beautiful in its own way. It was dirty and violent as hell. 

Finally, we reached a place that wasn’t trying to be something it wasn’t. Naples wore itself on its sleeve and it was exactly what both of us needed to hear. Naples was a dirty asshole that served the best pizza on earth and didn’t give a fuck about anything else. It wasn’t Pisa where it glamorized by the fact that it’s only accomplishment was building a tower that was unstable and sold trinkets every 5 feet.

It wasn’t Rome which had been romanticized in every movie but once you arrived it was just a place where you needed to pay extra to sit down in café’s and got followed around by Indian men dressed as old women so they could get more money from you.

It wasn’t Cinque Terre where almost everyone’s jobs are dependent on tourism and you get treated like shit for even simply having the audacity to visit. Naples was what it was and nothing more or less. This was refreshing after being in, quite possibly, the most overly romanticized country in the world. I could tell my mother instantly stopped pretending to be anything she wasn’t.

Graffiti littered the streets and probably translated into things like “FUCK YOU JUST BECAUSE IT’S YOU!” and nothing more. I felt a personal attachment to the raw feeling Naples gave me. Naples was unapologetically pissed all the time and it didn’t try to hide anything. At this point in my life, wearing your imperfections on your sleeve was downright inspiring. The people of Naples didn’t just treat us like shit, but everyone around them too.

After getting a much-needed break from “fake nice” we headed to Cinque Terre. This actually was the most beautiful place we had ever visited. This time when my mother would proclaim, “it’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen” I believed her. The crystal-clear waters, combined with the houses each painted a bright fun color hovering from the seaside were stunning. Every picture taken looked like a postcard. Fisherman bringing in the daily catch, large igneous rocks in the water you could swim out to and then climb to watch the sun go down, all made this place seem too good to be true. Cinque Terre truly had everything.

And even though the locals, who almost solely depended on tourism as a form of income and absolutely hated us. It was the only place on earth I would move to in a heartbeat fully knowing I would be completely loathed the entire time. My mother and I spent New Year’s Eve here utterly kiss-less. My mother went to bed early and I wandered the streets with my own bottle of champagne. I was in the most romantic place on earth, during the most romantic time of year, wandering around with a bottle of booze, and was as lonely as I have ever been. The once beautiful streets were now dark and ominous.

The morning came slowly and I had received very little sleep. The loneliness that fell to the pit of my stomach felt terrible but at the same time was addicting. I stayed up late in order to wallow in it and nurse my bottle which had long since gotten warm and gone flat. I finally gave into defeat and dragged my half drank bottle home like a sad child would carry their comfort blanket. My mother and I woke up early in order to catch the train from Corniglia to Riomaggiore. The only problem was it was a national holiday and the trains weren’t running. There was a trail that went high up into the mountains that would take us to the next town but we were a little pushed for time. We decided waiting for a train that might never come would be more trouble than not doing anything and we started the long hike upward. The trail was jagged, almost straight upward in places, and the drop-offs were steep.

I walked slowly and carefully listening to my mother who felt the need to articulate every step with an, “Oo! Ah! Whoa! Ouch! UGH!” Once, we reached the summit of our climb, the rest of the trail was walking through terraced vineyards that filled in the gaps between the homes. The houses were run on solar panels and funded by wine and limoncello sales. We were making better time than we thought and decided to get the panini’s out of our packs and have them for breakfast. Sitting on the terraces eating our panini and drinking a little sippy box of wine at 8AM was probably the only time during the whole trip I can remember feeling content. It was clear that the cure to a break-up blues (or whatever the hell I was going through), was simply good old-fashioned exercise in the most beautiful place on earth. We climbed down the mountain we had climbed up and hopped on a train. Our trip was over. And I wish we had learned more than simply if you have problems when you leave a country, those problems do not get solved in the following country no matter how many times you watch Eat, Pray, Love or, Under the Tuscan Sun.

My mother and I left Italy to go cope with our personal issues and came back no better or worse than we had left. I pictured travel as being a transformative experience and Italy as the place where transformation has happened to others. Our expectations were unreasonably high and we suffered for it. I vowed to never travel with my mother again. However, after a year, I forgot this promise I made myself when my mother asked me to hike the Inca Trail.