Have a good one, Robbie

The beauty of writing a story or taking a photo is writing it and taking a picture.

The judgment of others is not so important.

Because “no criticism and no enthusiastic review“, it can, however, be compared with the moment when the pen runs smoothy on the white sheet or when you hear the click of the camera.

That’s the moment that leads me to try to write or take pictures, nothing else.

Say with words and with a picture what I feel and show what I see.

But more than anything else I’m telling story about myself something.

Looking inside myself and see what I could find.

What then ends up on a blog is just “a detail“: a persona need.

Many stories are in a notebook that I have at home, all mine—a diary, which maybe someone will read one day.

I had recently written on a notebook, about the sound of my daughter’s crying when she was so young.

It’s come back on my mind today, because it’s her birthday.

Was a cry that often resulted in screams and smothered my confidence whenever she was alone with me.

Probably she did not feel safe alone with me, possible that she thought my insecurity of how to act if something did not go the right way.

It was a cry of despair, and with the time that has passed, I believe that in that year she took the measures of me.

She was crying to study me. I’m sure about that.

As soon as she started walking and talking, she knew me very well, and I was immediately entirely in her hands.

Here, right now, this is precisely the classic case that you take a sheet of paper and write for yourself.

To measure yourself with yourself. To look inside yourself very deep.

But sometimes “accidentally” everything finishes on the blog, and a “personal” story become “a story“.

One morning the tram was late in arriving, there was an accident upstream of the line, and many moved to reach the centre with an alternative tram line.

I didn’t. Instead, I sat alone, took a notebook and pen and started to reflect why I have a very “determined and confident” daughter when it comes to measuring myself.

“You look like her brother, more than her father“, a recurring accusation I had for years.

But in reality, that’s not true, I often looked (worst) like her son.

Clearly a reversal of our roles.

A situation that has determined my mood and my actions more than once in the past years.

If I rest well in the evening or if I can’t sleep, it’s because I feel at peace with myself or not with my daughter.

I have learned over time that the uncertainty that arises in us, with the relationships with the people we love, do not know any Herbal Tea that mitigates them.

Years ago, our relationships were stormy and complicated, and I didn’t have long nights with my eyes closed.

My sister recommended a herbal tea consisting of two teaspoons of lemon balm, one of passionflower, some leaves of Bay Laurel, two lemon peels and a touch of honey.

I found out to be a deadly herbal tea, but it didn’t work in those days.

Between the tense threads of a relationship pass fears, uncertainties, anger and the awareness that one must be mature even in the panic of the moment and stop feeling guilty or innocent.

You need to put a new brick on the ground and build a new house with what you have.

But this is the moment you look at what you have to build the new house, you have pretty much all the ingredients you need.

First of all, we are still alive, and we have to stay so because, in the end, I am not my daughter’s brother, but her father.

The hope is that she too now feels that I am her father, especially now that, for the circumstances of life, we live in two different places.

When my daughter was around at a age of seven/nine, for all of us she was “Robbie”.

I haven’t called her with that name since then, but today, in her 28th birthday have been so much in my head.

I hope she has some idea how proud I’m of her.

She had a tough time because of me.

Still, she manages to pass by and make significant decisions in her life.

Now she starts a new chapter, not too much in her plan less of one year ago, but circumstances change her and our life.

In my mind, there is always that day in July in Brighton, when she has been graduated at the Sussex University in English Literature.

Still, I remember the goosebumps I had the day, all day long.

When we moved to England and she was almost seven, she didn’t know how was the name of the food or the numbers or the colours in English.

She doesn’t have any idea either what England or London was on the map.

In just a few months she was speaking better of us in the new language.

Since then she improved so much till the point to study first law and after Literature in one of the most crucial colleges in the United Kingdom.

She underestimates that so many times, but to me, this is proof that she could do everything she wants, and this is why I’m relaxed with her and with my life.

I don’t care about anything else, but just about she is ok, fair and positive all the way.

Because she could be positive either when she is down as every normal human being should sometimes be.

Today, as I said above, it’s her birthday and this is my wish to her:

“have a good one, Robbie “

Massimo, Your Dad

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