Mother’s Day is hard for me. The fact that it falls in the very same time frame as Mental Health Awareness month makes it even harder.
As fresh-off-the-boat Sicilians, my parents practiced their own form of Cosa Nostra, and we were taught that what happened within the family, stayed inside the family. It was “Our Thing” and nobody else’s business. As a result, I became a master at keeping secrets, making it all the way to the 8th grade before anyone discovered ours.
Then came Christmas morning 1979.
Like all good Catholics, my father, my siblings and I were racing to leave the house and get to our local church for ten a.m. mass. The church was notorious for being “standing room only” on this one day of the year. Mamma hadn’t joined us for years, so when she appeared at the top of our staircase, dressed from head to toe in Scarlet O’Hara red (the very color she never wore and didn’t approve of her girls wearing), I knew we were in trouble. My father, on the other hand, chose to believe it was a Christmas miracle, gifted to him by God after years of prayer, asking for an end to the demons that tormented his wife.
Mamma spent her nights sitting in the dark on the sofa, screaming profanities in Italian, swearing that she would murder us all, plotting and pleading with voices only she could hear. She stashed sharp kitchen knives and my brother’s wooden baseball bats under the bed she shared with Papá, promising to use them if he dared to close his eyes or step one foot into the bedroom. Papá ignored the potential danger, always choosing to sleep in their bed, while I rarely did in mine, trying to stay awake and keep vigil for fear of Mamma following through on her threats. [Read more…]
