I was born in the Bronx to a Sicilian Roman-Catholic family. I was the oldest of 3 girls. My mother’s family lived in the Bronx and since she was one of 10 children I had a large group of cousins and aunts and uncles. I was told from a very young age that children should be seen and not heard and I listened. I was not a loud or rambunctious child, if someone told me to sit I sat and I did so quietly. My favorite places to sit were in corners and to this day I still like to sit on the corners of couches.
My family was so large that you had to yell to be heard, but I was not a yeller so I never said very much. Yelling was a way of life in my family. The yelling was not always done with anger many times it was done just to be heard and if you did not yell you were not heard.
As a small child I suffered from migraines. I don’t know why, all I knew is that I would have tremendous head pain and could not move.
My mom took to me a lot doctors and I even had my head x-rayed. It was a strange thing to be so small and lie on a table with a huge machine above my head moving around. It was finally decided that I was a nervous child and was given pills to calm me down. I am not a therapist or physiatrist so I have no knowledge as to what really caused my migraines. The only thing I know is that I had them and one day they went away and never came back.
What I do know is that I never felt like I fit in, but I was always trying to fit in with everyone. I never really spoke up for myself and would follow the herd. I wanted desperately to be liked and be a center of attention. But with so many cousins it was hard for me to shine as I was so damn withdrawn.
My dad was 21 years older than my mom and being Sicilian he wanted sons, unfortunately for him, and me and my two sisters, he had girls. Dad told me once that “You are girls so you are you mom’s problem”. “If I had sons I could do things with them but I have girls”. It still makes me sad when I think of his remark. He wrote us off.
