My husband was from North Jersey. He was an Italian-American, born and raised in Essex County, NJ. His family is Italian. I mean his whole family. There wasn't a speck of non-Italian in the man. I, however, am not Italian; in the words of his family, a 'merican (pronounced meh-di-gan). That means regular, plain ol' white kid, not blessed with the napoleatan genes. We are a special group of people that apparently always wish we could be Italian.
Tony and I were together for 14 years. In these 14 years, I have learned so much about the Italian-American community in N. Jersey; enough to know that no matter how good I become at pronouncing moppine, Maddon' and schahl macaron' (you've got to forgvie the spelling... it's not like I can google these words, and they're not in an Italian-English dictionary) I know that I will never be part of that community.
My family is Scottish-Irish-French-German; in his words, a mutt. We came from a family that had only a few cousins here and there, and everyone lived out of state. Tony's family, however, all lived within 30 minutes of one another in North Jersey. And there were dozens of them... literally. There was Big Sal and Little Sal, Big Joe and Little Joey, Vinnie, Nicky, Mario, Mikey, Paulie, big Domenick, Little Domenick, you get the picture. Every holiday, when we would visit, it was like a train station. It was so busy, with a million people, talking, laughing and yelling and everyone kisses you (it doesn't really matter if they knew you, you were getting kissed- no doubt). And it's so loud. I remember thinking the first time I was there, "Holy cow, these are the loudest people I have ever met..."... I didn't know what to think.
I knew that my love for him would forever tether me to these people, but I never thought I would be tied to them alone. Now, I go back, and it is without him, it's just me trying to teach his daughter the importance of the healthy parts of the NJ Italian heritage while dodging the negative bullshit that goes along with it.
We just got back from there. I have discovered that I need to work on becoming a more artful dodger.
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