My kids put the “din” in dinner. I don’t mind the cacophony, most of the time. Being a city girl, I’ve always found the sound of silence deeply unsettling and if I had to choose, I’d opt for a vibrant racket over a tense, quiet meal any day. Of course, if there were a middle-of-the-road option, a little-light-conversation-peppered-with-soft-chuckling option, I’d go with that.
But when you have three firecracker children—aged eight, six, and one—and one high-strung Italian grandmother—aged eighty-three—any family gathering is likely to be loud. Particularly when this gathering happens at your grandmother’s one bedroom apartment, which it does, in our case, two or three times a week.
My grandmother, Nonny, could out-cook Mario Batali. Stick the two of them in front of a hard surface with fire, water, flour, and tomatoes and she’d have him begging for tricks of the trade within the hour. When you pair her skill in the kitchen with her indefatigable work ethic and a post-retirement lack of work, what you end up with is an open invitation to dinner. I like to think it’s a win-win situation—that she benefits from the arrangement by seeing her great-grandkids and feeling purposeful—but really it’s me who wins twice, being able to give my kids a home-cooked meal without having to cook any of it myself. And the only price I have to pay is a raging headache.
Nonny sets the volume level for dinner and her lowest setting is “blaring.” This is not because she is hard of hearing—she can perceive a child’s sniffle from fifty feet away: “I TOLE you to put a schweater on dat baby!”—it is just because she, like every other member of my family, only knows how to communicate via shouting.
“WAT KINDA PASTA YOU WANT?” she bellows to my eight-year-old son, affectionately known as Primo, who is doing his cursive homework at the coffee table.
You’d think this kind of yelling would be impossible to ignore, but Primo’s accustomed to it by now and does just that.
“Primo!” I call from the couch, where I’m attempting to change the baby’s diaper, “Primo! PRIMO!”
Finally, I extend my foot and nudge him, which gets his attention. “Yes?” he inquires casually, as if we haven’t been shouting his name for three minutes.
“YOU WANNA RAVIOLI OR TORTELLINI?” Nonny repeats.
“Tortellini! Tortelllni! Tortellini!” my six-year-old, aka Seconda, chants as she tears through the living room.
“But I want ravioli!” Primo protests.
“BUT RAVIOLI MAKE ME NAUSEOUS!”
“BUT SHE GOT TO CHOOSE LAST TIME!”
“EE-AI-EE-AI-OOOOO!” yells the baby, Terza, not be outdone just because she lacks all vocabulary. She is frantically trying to roll off the couch to escape the crushing indignity of having a fresh diaper put on.
In the middle of the debate, Nonny’s home phone rings, so loudly it surely wakes at least a couple of dead people over at Green-Wood.
“WHERE’S DA PHONE??” Nonny shouts. I’ve tried to get her to screen her calls, have tried to demonstrate that the answering machine will take a message, but she is not comfortable with this laissez-faire approach. As soon as the phone rings, she drops everything to find it—no small feat considering that Terza’s life’s mission is to hide the handset. Once she tossed it in the garbage. Once, in the freezer. Usually, though, it’s behind the couch.
“GET OFFA DA COUCH!” Nonny orders, “I GOTTA MOVA DA COUCH!”
Which she does, despite me yelling, “You’re going to break a hip!” She locates the handset, just as the answering machine picks up, which means we get to hear her conversation on speakerphone.
“OH MARIA!” she shouts, “CIAO BELLA! CHE ME DICI?”
“OH VERA! INDOVINA CHE E SUCCESSO CON QUELLO FIGLIO DI PUTANA!” her best friend Maria shouts back, at which point I hit the off button on the machine.
Ten minutes later, the pasta is ready (ravioli—we had tortellini the night before), the places are set, Nonnie’s deeply entrenched in the story of Maria’s good-for-nothing son-in-law who had an affair with a younger woman, and also, it is suspected, has a gambling problem. My husband, David, walks through the front door as I’m strapping the baby in her high chair and pulling her over to the crowded kitchen table, which seats three comfortably but is forced to seat six.
Primo is sitting to my right, providing Ein Klein Nachtmusik.
“Just a city boy,” he croons, “born and raised in SOUTH DETROOOIT—”
“Its MY turn to sing!” Seconda runs up to the table and furrows her brow to form her patented Hell-Hath-No-Fury-Like-A-Little-Sister-Skipped-Over face.
“It goes ON and ON and ON—“
“Someday you’ll FIND it,” she bellows louder than one might think possible for a child with her size lungs, “The RAIN-bow con-NECT-tion—”
“MAKE HER STOP! SHE’S ANNOYING ME ON PURPOSE!”
“NO, HE’S ANNOYING ME!”
The baby lets forth a barbaric yawp which I take to mean, “Dude, they are BOTH annoying me,” and frankly, I could not agree more.
“NO SINGING!” I proclaim, “NO ONE IS ALLOWED TO SING!” Then, envisioning the kids relaying these words to their therapists in fifteen years, I hasten to add, ‘Until further notice!”
“MADONNA!” Nonnie shrieks, the phone cradled under her ear as she sprinkles Parmigiano on the ravioli: “She should spit in his face! She should throw him in the street like an animal!”
So much for a little light dinner conversation.
“So, kids,” I say, taking a deep breath and channeling the spirit of June Cleaver, “what’d you do in school?”
Then the singing is replaced with talking. From the way the words pour of my children, you’d think it was the first words they’d spoken after taking a year-long vow of silence.
“No, no, Horrorland is a series he developed much later. This is something TOTALLY different. I am talking about Night of the Living Dummy which is a Goosebumps classic. I can’t believe you never read that Dad, I just can’t believe you never heard of Slappy the dummy!!”
“Disgraziata! Stronzo che non e altro!”
“It was a COCKROACH!!!! I am NOT kidding you! Right in the middle of Center Time! Well, it’s really called a ‘water bug,’ actually, that’s what my teacher said. And then all the kids starting screaming like this: AAHHHHHHHHHHH!”
“AHHHHHHHHHH!” parrots the baby. This much, she can say.
“The baby’s interrupting me!” Seconda protests, “And that is VERY rude.”
Somehow, even with all this talking, the children manage to eat, though I can’t say the same for myself, since I’m refilling plates of pasta and forcing people to eat their spinach and wiping up juice spills and handing out napkin after napkin. Oh, and feeding the baby.
Terza, a year old, is not a big fan of food: At every bite, she clamps her mouth shut, arches her back, and shakes her head violently back and forth like a person having an exorcism. it sometimes feels like she is in the clutches of a paranoid delusion that I am trying to poison her food. If she could talk, I am fairly certain she’d say: “Do you think I’m BLIND? I saw you sprinkle arsenic on these beans—and don’t you even TRY to tell me it was salt! I may be a baby but I am no moron!”
In order to feed her, David and I have to, literally, put on a show. With puppets. With one hand I make funny little gestures with the wizard puppet, and then when she’s laughing I shove a spoonful of spinach in her mouth with the other hand. Half the time she’ll be outraged and spit the spinach out right in my face, but half the time she’ll chew it suspiciously, agree to swallow, realize she is ravenous and beg frantically for more. Even if the kids weren’t hogging the dinner conversation, I couldn’t take part since I’m focused on tricking the baby into not starving to death.
Feeding the baby is not just stressful but messy, since in her fight-to-the-finish she hurls large handfuls of pasta and spinach and fruit all over the kitchen/living room. Including in my hair.
“MOMMY!” laughs Primo, “You have [chortle chortle] BANANA [chortle chortle] in your HAIR!”
Seconda throws her head back and laughs, too. The report of it sounds vaguely like a shotgun.
“HA HA, ha, HA HA, ha, ha ha, HA!”
The baby’s not sure what the joke is, but she’s always up for a good guffaw, so she crinkles her nose up and laughs, a little tinny giggle.
Everyone is laughing in a loud, discordant chorus, even David and I. Only Nonny abstains and that is because she is too busy yelling expletives, which are thankfully in Italian: “PUTANA! VAGABONDO!”
The children are quiet when eating dessert, so I use this opportunity to shovel as much food as I can into my maw as quickly as possible because it’s getting late and if I don’t toss these kids into bed soon the threadbare fabric of my sanity will rip to shreds.
Then I make a show of putting some dishes in the dishwasher and Nonny yells: “PUT DA DISHES DOWN! I tole you I don’t lika da way you do it! Please just letta me do it!” So instead, I pester the kids into collecting their homework and headbands and My Little Ponies and beloved comic books that don’t seem so terribly beloved when they are abandoned on the floor by the bathroom.
Dinner is over. It was delicious—I think. Really, I’m guessing because I didn’t taste much as it shot down my gullet. Regardless, we spent precious time together. Yelling about whose turn it was to talk mostly, and listening to Nonny advise her friend on retribution tactics, but still, together, all of us. Side by side. Breaking bread.
If I could lower the volume a few notches or dial down the chaos, I would. But then, I’d probably miss it too. Not the ulcer I’m likely developing, but the fullness of it all. Full mouths, full stomachs, full hearts.
Read more of Nicole’s adventures in Mommyland—all of them loud—on her blog A Mom Amok at amomamok.com.
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