It starts, usually, with a sniffle, a flush of the cheeks, a sore throat. It's winter, or cold spring, and my son is getting ill again. For a while we ward it off, repeating our well-worn platitudes like spells: "It'll go away soon," "It's just a cold," "You really are growing out of it." But year after year the fates tease us; snuffles turn to coughs and the coughs fill our flat; hard, rasping and dry, with indrawn breath like wind over gravel, coming every 20 seconds, or is it ten? My son is admirably resigned, but I live from cough to cough and cram the short spaces between with barely contained anxiety. Don't cough again, I implore him sometimes, please don't cough.
But he does, and by afternoon we are in the waiting room of our paediatrician Fabio Romoli, with the proud mothers of IVF twins, bonny toddlers in for check-ups, and cheesy music playing. Dr Romoli's desk is a humorous version of the wide cherry wood expanse that Italian professionals favour. Every inch is covered with stacking toys, wind-up animals and wooden trains. To one side sits the scatola magica, the special musical box with sweets inside that the children can open at the end of their visit. On the other is a row of soccer shirts on hangers. Dr Romoli played for Fiorentina Juniors in his youth and has never abandoned his love of the game; so much so, indeed, that during the last World Cup he brought a television into his office and kept it playing in consultations.
When we come in, Dr Romoli gives my son a long hug, something I cannot imagine his excellent English counterpart ever doing. "How are you, my friend?" he asks, and answers for us, "Mmm, not so good." My son has recurrent croup that develops out of a cold; his throat swells and narrows, making it difficult for air to get in and out. It's a condition that, before the production of steroids, killed many children. We know what the treatment will be: in England, pink pills that dissolve into water; in Italy, a complex contraption with a mask that hums like a hoover and sprays compressed air and medicines straight into his throat. If things get worse in the endless night, it is off to hospital for monitoring and oxygen.
In the days of the croup, ordinary life hovers at a distance. The rhythm of school and work is replaced by the illness's own pace—bad mornings, the false promise of the afternoons, the relief of administering the mask or pills, a long haul through the night. For me, and parents like me, our aspirations for our children come to this: be well, please be well, now, tomorrow, next year.
Sometimes I put two heavy doors between us so I can't hear the coughing. My ears still straining towards the silence, I retreat into British newspapers. The debates that are raging about work/life balance and the benefits and disadvantages of having children reach me like discordant music from another world. Anger and anxiety rise up off the writings of these professional women and much of it is directed at their peers. Mothers capture the moral high ground but it often seems barely worth holding.
From their first hours, children become ammunition in a competitive struggle between women that, with guilt and bitter self-knowledge, they alternately indulge and deny. From the question, "do you have?" and "how many?" all the way through to what primary school, what instrument or art class, which tutor, school and, at the end of the show, "what university?", women still define themselves by their children's progress, despite having professional identities and successes of their own. Arguments about bringing up children and about work/life balance are as much as anything unacknowledged struggles within women themselves about who they are and what they want.
Years ago I knew myself implicated when I found I was clenching my fists in my pockets as I sat with a friend watching our children learning to swim. Calm and Christ-like, the long-haired teacher stood in the shallow water while his little apostles practised their strokes around him. Two by two they flailed across the pool. My daughter, four years old, with her blue costume tight across her tummy, sank. "Swim," I heard myself ordering silently, "Swim, dammit, swim." Swim for me, was what I meant, swim for me and make me feel adequate in front of my friend.
This relational sense, so important to women's identity, is partly removed when you go to live abroad. You arrive without the social networks that sustain and define you, and the complex systems of hierarchy, identity and value in the new society are impenetrable, especially if you don't speak the language. Arriving in Italy without a word of Italian, all we could do was chuck our daughter into primary school, and there, all by herself, she swam. The desire that children have to assuage their mothers' anxieties can't have disappeared in her completely, but I count myself lucky that at moments when ways of thinking and desires from my old English life flicker up in me she walks over them without a second thought.
My son may not be so lucky. But for now it doesn't matter. Recurrent croup has cut us off from worlds outside and in. "I'm feeling better," he says, standing by my desk. Hope rises from somewhere in my stomach and spreads out along my arms. Cheek to shoulder we dance across the shiny parquet floor to the sofa. Cough; silence; cough again.
