A practical guide to living with a properly educated Italian

My mother-in-law doesn't give advice.
Draft constitutions.

It does not suggest.
It dictates universal rules that, mysteriously, coincide exactly with its way of doing things since 1963.

Thanks to her I learned that:

Sheets don't just get changed:
👉 They are changed an exact number of times a month, no more and no less, because excessive hygiene generates moral weakness.

Furthermore, the sheets are only put on one correct way, which just happens to be yours.
Any variation is textile heresy.

The floor is not swept:
👉 She sweeps as she sweeps, in a specific order, with precise intensity and almost spiritual concentration.

Colorful plates are dangerous.
Not because they're ugly.
Because they are potentially toxic, because at some point in history someone painted something wrong somewhere in the world and that's enough.

The oil bottle must have a paper around its neck, not for aesthetic reasons, but for a deep ethical stance against the rebellious drop.
A drop that falls without permission is the beginning of chaos.

My husband's underwear should be ironed.
Not because they need it.
But because she would do it.

I, of course, shouldn't eat breakfast.
Not even to have a snack.
Because the human body functions better without too much joy.

Sleeping with a pillow is suspicious.
Eating at odd hours is decadent.
Having animals, plants, or any form of uncontrollable life is directly dangerous.

At home, the only acceptable living being is his son.
My husband.

The adult man who does not own a sweater because "wool is warm.".
The same one who, even though it's -5 degrees outside, walks around the house in a t-shirt and summer pants, convinced that the cold is an opinion and not a physical fact.

For years, he didn't feel cold.
Never.
Winter was an exaggerated rumor that affected other people, clearly less thermally organized.

Until one day he said, with a mixture of surprise and bodily betrayal:

—My feet feel cold.

He didn't say it as a request.
He said it as if reporting an inexplicable phenomenon.

She didn't ask for stockings.
I would never ask for stockings.

So I did what wise women do:
I looked for them
and I strategically placed them within their reach,
as if they had appeared on their own.

He looked at them.
He did not deny them.
She did not celebrate them.
A step forward.

Then came the bronchitis.

A historic bout of bronchitis, unprecedented in his personal history.
A bronchitis that he didn't understand.

—I don't know what happened to me.

Of course I didn't know.

Outside it was -5,
He was annoyed by some irrelevant nonsense.
—because Italians don't get cold, but they do get indignant—
And as he was leaving, I shouted to him from the doorway:

—Put on your jacket!

And he replied, with his thermal pride undiminished:

—What do I care?!

He cared later.
He cared with a cough.
He cared for it with antibiotics.
It mattered to him when the body, that traitor with no respect for tradition, decided to align itself with physics.

Now he keeps saying he's not cold.
But sometimes she wears stockings.
He still doesn't believe in wool.
But it accepts blankets.
Eventually.

The kitchen, meanwhile, remains a laboratory.

The eggs are not used:
👉 They are read.

The dates are read, ordered by seniority, and hierarchies are respected.
A new egg can never, ever beat an old one.
That would be an injustice to the poultry industry.

Lasagna is only made with meat.
Mille-feuille is only eaten with pastry cream.
Pizza and pasta are mandatory, daily, and sacred.

The pasta is weighed.
Exactly.
Depending on the number of people.
Not a gram more, not a gram less.

The scale is not a tool:
It's a philosophy of life.

When the pasta is ready,
We have to run.
Run to sit down.
Run and eat it.
Because money doesn't wait.
And he who waits, loses.

My husband grew up like that.
Convinced that:

The world has only one right way.

Cold doesn't exist if you don't believe in it

and that everything, absolutely everything, can be controlled
If it's weighed, sorted, and done the way it's always been done

And yet… now we have a cat.

I don't know how I did it.
I don't know at what exact moment I broke an entire ideology.

Well.
Yes, I know how I did it.

I tried all kinds of threats,
which he reminds me of very often,
especially when the cat passes by.

Because he has a constant annoyance with the cat.

He doesn't hate her.
He tolerates it with philosophical effort.

He's obsessed with hair.
The hairs that fly.
Hairs that appear in the most unexpected places.

On the table.
About the clothes.
Regarding his library,
that sacred library that idolizes
with history books,
geopolitics
and Latin and Greek dictionaries
that now, inevitably,
They contain cat hairs.

Sometimes he shows them to me,
as irrefutable proof of civilizational collapse.

However—and this is the interesting part—
I think something started to happen.

Sometimes I think he started to love her.
Or perhaps the problem is that he had never touched an animal before.,
And he is learning a way of life that is not weighed, not ordered, and not obeyed.

Yes indeed:
She doesn't even recognize that she's a cat.
For him, it's "the cat".

Not because I don't know.
But why accept the feminine?
It would be accepting too many things at once.

Meanwhile, I still have breakfast whenever I want.,
using colored plates,
deliberately dropping a few drops of oil,
putting on stockings without asking permission,
and observing how, little by little,
The perfect order is crumbling
in the face of something impossible to control:

a warm body,
hairs in the books,
and a cat
—or cat—
sleeping where they shouldn't.

And I think, with a faint smile,
that perhaps living isn't about following instructions,
even if they come well ironed,
but learn to live together
with that which will never ask permission.