The Dots Connect
Unexpected Expectations
I was probably ten or eleven years old. We lived in an apartment on the top floor of a seven-story building. My family was no different from any other middle-class family of that period. We lacked nothing essential, but what we had was not always of the best quality, and we couldn't afford the latest and greatest. Superfluous expenses didn't have a place in our single-salary budget.
Mother was raised in a working class family and came from the middle of Italy. She once had a stable nursing position, which she quit under pressure from both my father and his family when their first was born, my older brother. She stopped dreaming about returning to a job she truly loved when I was born three years later. She regretted that decision all her life, putting the blame on a husband she discovered was not Prince Charming only weeks after they got married.
Father had squandered a good education. For lack of ambition, or just laziness, he resolved to work at the family business. My father's family small enterprise allowed my grandparents to live a wealthy life...and they dilapidated a fortune. By the time my parents got married, the business only allowed an average life, just above struggling.
Father must have cultivated an inner frustration, and made sure his wife was there to pay the price, too. He felt superior due to her humble origins.
I discovered the anguish and the sadness of my mother only later when, still young, I became her confidante. She felt guilty she had no one else to talk about her pains but me. She knew it wasn't right to open up the way she did with her son, but she couldn't do without: she had no family members close by, having moved hundreds of miles away from home to follow her work aspirations. In the fifties, that was no meager accomplishment for a young woman. Her family, too, made her pay the price.
She managed to keep everything to herself for years and then decided to release it all on me before exploding or committing suicide. She tried a few times, as she once admitted amid tears. She had stepped back from the balcony barrier at the last minute. She told me the void almost talked to her in an assuaging voice..."a few seconds and all will be over." The crude and painful image of my father getting remarried, her children raised by a stepmother who didn't care about them prevented her from taking her own life.
She was raised Catholic, my mother, and for years after the marriage she had been observant. My father had his own ideas about God and spirituality, and he kept searching obsessively for a path of faith that could provide answers to his unrest and tormented soul.
My mother stuck to her Catholicism, and that was a reason for fights and cruel criticisms from m