I Think I Need a Bigger Box: How A Little Girl Grew Up and Accepted Her Roots

As a middle school girl, I had best friends with whom I spent endless amounts of time. We would call each other on massive, rotary dial phones and pull the tightly wound, curling cords to their limits across the house to talk "privately" about what middle school-aged girls incessantly talk about. We would schedule sleepovers and after school get-togethers as often as our parents allowed. I always preferred staying at their homes.

I loved being able to escape my weird, tiny, immigrant household to go to their trendy, American mini-mansions. We would eat native American fare like Kraft macaroni and cheese and have exotic meats like Oscar Meyer wieners. Their homes were not entirely furnished in tacky garage sale finds. They were often much larger than my own and with far fewer inhabitants. I was amazed with the homes of my American friends, and I was determined to live in one just like theirs when I grew up:

             A house where people bought new furniture and spoke whole sentences in English. 

                                                            All. The. Time.

My folks had immigrated to America in the mid to late 1950s. They both were so young, they were and fresh off the boat. They came to Michigan because they had sponsors here. My gorgeous, ill-prepared yet hopeful Italian folks came to chase the elusive American dream. 

After years of living with friends and sharing homes, my parents bought their first home in Detroit. They loved that home and had four of their five children while living there. Once the riots hit, and my parents became worried about their environs, they hit the road and bought the house where I grew up, in a nearby suburb. We did not look at all like most of the families in that neighborhood or in the surrounding city. By the time I arrived, that little house was bursting at the seams.

Imagine a home shaped like a Monopoly game house, an itty, bitty box with a detached two car garage almost as a large as the house. Now, imagine seven human beings living in that tiny ranch. Equipped with a chicken coop and rabbit habitat off a main road in a suburban neighborhood. Three bedrooms, one full bath and Italian as fuck. 

                      We stuck out like a sore thumb on a hand model.

I would invite my friends over and they'd look around my shabby chic (just shabby really and not at all chic, come to think of it) house and my parents would speak their hybrid Italian-English, and I would feel like the most out-of-place weirdo girl on the planet.

                        The misfits: Me, my equally weird siblings and my strange-ass immigrant parents in our tiny Monopoly box house with its garage sale decor and un-American foods.

My mother would serve up pasta dishes, braised meats (some of them our former pets) and sausages alongside a variety of homegrown greens, served raw, sauteed, or boiled into oblivion. We had several fruit trees, so we pressed our own juices and wines. We canned and froze much of the food my Dad grew. My entire childhood, I was forced to eat homegrown, organic, phenomenal meals made by my bonafide Italian mama. Oh, the inhumanity of it all!

I concede that all children likely find their homes and parents weird and feel awkward about themselves. However, imagine being the little girl whose parents had chickens and rabbits pooping and peeing all over their backyard which created a rather pungent and unpleasant odor for the neighbors' Brady Bunch-like backyard barbeques with Oscar Meyer wieners. 

                If I close my eyes I can almost smell the smoky charcoal briquets intermingled with the strong stench of chicken shit. I can hear the music of 80s metal hair bands pumped through the backyard radios as the chickens squawked their heads off.

My friends homes, on the other hand? Little American palaces. Two floors of rooms. Some of them with fireplaces. Attached garages and remote-controlled garage doors like the fucking Vanderbilts, the lot of them. My friends' moms made casseroles and Hamburger Helper. They ate Spaghettios. They enjoyed Chef Boyardee ravioli from cans that they bought without the assistance and quiet shame of food stamps. MY GOD THE DECADENCE!

One night, I sat at the dinner table with my friend Marie. We dined on pre-made hamburger patties, Ore Ida bagged fries and lima beans from a can. I felt like I was at a White House dinner. All of their plates matched. Their silverware? Yeah, you guessed it. It was all from the same matching set. They drank name brand fruit punch and had Heinz ketchup. I sat there in naïve wonderment and set my goal to live in a house just like that one when I grew up.

Years Later...

Fast forward to buying my first house with my fiancé. I chose a slightly larger box on a street not far from my parents, in the same neighborhood (it was also perilously near my soon-to-be in laws home). My Monopoly house felt a bit bigger with the small family room attached to it. I decorated it with brand new furniture and Target-variety décor. I loved the upgraded box in my childhood neighborhood. The realtor had said it was the perfect "starter house," the house that we would christen as newlyweds and outgrow as we made miniature human replicas of ourselves. Then, the realtor instructed us "we would need more space."

Between our civic duty as greedy, materialistically obsessed Americans and the cold hard fact that our parents were letting themselves into our house during our miniature human-making activities (BOUNDARIES PEOPLE), we quickly determined it was time to move.

 

                             RIGHT THE FUCK NOW.

We packed up stuff, drove a "For Sale" sign into the front lawn and sold our little nest in one day. Well, fuck. We had to hightail it to bigger, broader and better boxes for our family ASAFP because we were about to be homeless.

We wanted to stay close to our respective parents, because they were really pretty good when they weren't dropping by to interrupt our sex life. We narrowed our search to a three-mile radius. Turns out, the house we fell in love with was two streets away from middle school Marie's house.

                            Dreams can come true.

We had upgraded from a Monopoly house to a colonial-style Monopoly hotel. We moved into it on our sixth wedding anniversary, and I immediately began fixing the fucked up, ghastly walls of my dream home. Yes. We moved because we wanted more kids. Yes, we moved because we felt we had outgrown our starter home. And yes, we no longer knocked boots at the risk of hearing one of our parents playfully calling out "Yoo Hoo!" We had a lot of work to do. We were house poor but, in my little misfit kid mind, we had arrived.

We scraped the hideous wallpaper off the walls. Room by room, with a preschooler and baby playing, I soaked the walls in warm water mixed with fabric softener, and dragged off sheaths of baby blue metallic and shiny pussy willow patterned wallpaper. We painted walls in cheerful colors and slowly updated each room with DIY fervor and limited finances.

Soon, we had four sons running through our massive Monopoly hotel. My home was big and filled with my beautiful babies and my (mostly) new furnishings. Somewhere in the mad dash to be normal I learned there is no normal. I shifted from running from my immigrant heritage to embracing it and making it mine. Not my parents. Not my past. Mine to love and hold and to delight in.

And now...

"Look, little one." I say to the chubby, sweet, hopeful and displaced little girl who I still resides in my grown up heart and mind, "It was never about running away from who we are, it was about becoming who we are. It was about holding it dear and making it our very own." 

         I see her bright, broad and beaming smile in my mind's eye. I smile back at her. "We did all right, kid," I tell her before she runs out of sight.

Here I sit, almost 20 years later writing this and looking around my mini mansion which has now benefited from professional remodels and is a far cry decoratively from the mess it was when we first walked through it. I see my new things, the things money can buy but, more so, I see my beginnings shining through, polished by my acceptance. Now, I embrace the things that are gloriously weird. I see my rich legacy born from the passion, purpose and love of all the generations that came before me. Were they weird? Fuck, yeah. Am I weird? All. Damn. Day.

Today, I will erect a Low Country Boil propane cooker in my suburban garage and make peasant pasta sauce using a recipe that's close to what my mama used to make. This is a day we have come to laud and revere in my home as "Sauce Day." These days, I go through so much sauce I can't make it in the kitchen, so I make it old school Italian, outside, like my parents used to do. It is a whole operation in the garage and will take the majority of the day from start to finish, and I LOVE IT.

The neighborhood kids will ride their bikes, scooters, and skateboards past the house trying to locate the source of that divine smell. They'll slow down at the end of our drive, wave at me and shortly after, I'll get texts from neighbor friends, saying "Oh, the smell is heavenly...if you feel like sharing..." We load up some tubs and do a little sauce drop around the block. It has become a day I adore for a myriad of reasons.

I was reminded just today by a ride-or-die friend of mine who taught my eldest piano, that one time at a lesson, she'd asked him what he had going on that day and he excitedly shared, "Oh! Today is sauce day." She asked what that meant, and he explained. The words he used were, "Sauce day is everything. Not just the tomatoes, the smell of the onions, the garlic, the basil, the whole house just feels and smells so good. It's...everything."

It is everything! I love my bigger box, and more so, all the people in it. I have not only accepted my weirdness, I am perfecting it daily and now wear it like a badge of fucking honor.

Now, if you don't mind, I need to go make tomato sauce in the garage like the fucking weirdo I am.