Grown Up Ideas

Lisa Minucci

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2 min read

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Jul 27, 2023

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“Nobody likes a mouthy broad.”
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Odd advice spilt from the curled lips of a man surrounded by strong women. Maybe that was how my father held tightly to his identity in an ever-shifting world. How did those words shape how I interact with teachers, bosses, contractors, friends, lovers, partners?
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My wife calls them my ‘gringa ideas’; my ways of wanting something done, specific thoughts and prejudices now expressed in remedial words in a rural, male-dominated culture where things have been done a certain way for generations.
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A girl can want. But what the girl wants and what the girl gets can be quite different. Often finding peace in that proves elusive. Perhaps fundamentally, I’m just not a very good collaborator. And this culture, in this deeply rural area, is based upon connection, reciprocity, interaction. Truly, I don’t even like to let people taste food off my plate. Thank gawd for my evolved wife, who, quite literally, wrote a best-selling book on sharing (she’s my beard). This Italian adventure, however, has been all about collaboration in a way that often chafes my shingles. There have been so, so many hands involved in shaping our home, our property, our lives here; each with their own thoughts and ideas about what is best for us. And as a foreigner who does not yet have a firm grasp of the language or culture, as a woman, as a woman with a woman, and as an American (and all of the preconceived notions that are packed into those heavy bags), I have been forced to acquiesce, to smile, to be pleasant, to agree to their ways of doing things, because ultimately, it’s going to go down that way anyway.
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Don’t tell my father.