A Letter to the Woman I Postponed

On Italy, belonging, and the tables that shape us

A few years ago, my son looked at me across a table in Italy and said: "Mum, you're like a round peg in a round hole here."

I laughed.

Then I realised he was right.

And then I realised I had been waiting thirty years to hear it.

I was born and raised in England. My parents came from Minori on the Amalfi Coast, and our life was in Lancashire. I went to school in England, spoke English every day and understood all the references everyone else understood.

On paper, there was nothing unusual about my childhood.

Yet our home existed in a world of its own.

The food was Italian. The language was Italian. The conversations, the values, the humour and the rhythms of family life all came from somewhere else. My mother would call from the kitchen “a tavola!” and whatever was happening, we came. The table was where life gathered. News was shared. Opinions were offered whether anybody wanted them or not. There was laughter, disagreement, gossip, celebration and the reassuring sense that however chaotic life felt outside, everybody had a place there.

I assumed every family lived this way.

Then I started visiting friends' houses and realised they didn't. I remember feeling quietly puzzled by how quickly meals came and went. Everyone would eat and disappear. The evening continued, but the gathering ended.

At home, the gathering was the point.

At fifteen I didn't have the language for culture, identity or belonging. I simply knew that whenever I was in Italy I felt different. Lighter. More certain. More at ease in my own skin.

England was where I lived.

Italy was where I made sense.

I knew it when I spent almost a year studying in Pavia in Italy, and wanted desperately to stay. I knew it every time I returned and felt something inside me settle.

My mother died when my children were young. I built a business so I could be there for them. There were school runs, deadlines, responsibilities, practicalities and all the years when other people need you. I do not look back on those years with anything other than gratitude. They were real, important and I would not have them any other way.

But there is a difference between abandoning something and postponing it.

I did not lose myself.

I postponed myself.

The part of me that made sense in Italy, that exhaled at the table, that heard something familiar in the language, that understood the humour and the hospitality and the instinct to feed people, that part did not disappear.

It waited.

For years I told people I missed Italy.

What I have come to understand is something slightly different.

When I am in Italy, I hear my mother's voice. I hear her language. I see the culture that shaped her and, through her, shaped me. I understand why she cooked the way she did, loved the way she did and gathered people the way she did.

It is not a country I miss.

It is the place where I remain most connected to the part of myself formed by her.

Sometimes travel brings us back to who we have always been.

The tables of our lives are always changing. The family table we grew up around becomes something different. The one we create for our own children eventually grows quieter. Parents leave us. Children build lives of their own. Friendships evolve. Through no fault of our own, the shape of our lives change and, with it, the shape of the table.

And somewhere in that shifting, many of us begin to ask questions we never expected to ask.

Who am I now?

What comes next?

Where do I belong?

A few months ago, I sat at my Zia Giovanna's table in Minori.

I had expected lunch for a few people.

Instead, the table had been extended. Children, grandchildren, friends and neighbours drifted in and out throughout the afternoon. Lunch became coffee. Coffee became conversation. Conversation became stories. More chairs appeared when they were needed.

Life has not been easy on my aunt. She has experienced loss and grief and disappointment. Time has taken things from her.

Yet she continues to gather people.

She continues to make room.

Watching her move between the kitchen and the people she loves, I realised that what moved me had nothing to do with food.

The table is not really where we just eat.

It is where belonging becomes tangible.

She would never describe it that way, of course. She would tell me to stop overthinking and come and eat. But I think she understands something that took me much longer to see.

The tables of our lives will always change. People will come and go. Seasons will open and close. And sometimes entire chapters will end before we are ready.

What we can choose is whether we keep setting the table.