My big, loud, and out of control Sicilian Family.
Growing up, people often asked why I lived with my grandparents.
“Nonna and Nonno,” I’d always say, as if the absence of parents was no big deal. When I would sleep at a friend’s house, I did not have to call my mother but my grandmother whose voice would boom through the telephone: “NO NICE. NO SLEEPOVER.”
I rarely mentioned my mother to friends, unless she was bringing me on an audition, or had taken me to her boyfriend’s house that weekend, and I did not dare bring up my father. In fact, my grandparents told me to pretend he did not exist. “Your Nonno is your father,” my grandmother would declare. I was thankful that people never mentioned him. I would not know how to respond other than say, “He left a long time ago. I don’t know where he is.”
But most of the time, I knew exactly where my father was, and he did not disappear like those dads in the movies who abandoned their previous families to start a new one. Even though my situation was somewhat similar, my father was away, not living another life with a new family.
Growing up, I did not have one friend who did not live with at least one of their parents. Yes, maybe their grandparents also lived in the house, but at least one of their parents did as well. So yes, I grew up with my Nonna, Nonno, their siblings, and their siblings’ children who all either lived on our block or a few blocks away.
They watched me like hawks, all screaming, one louder than the other, making me hard of hearing. I became extremely loud myself, since I was used to no one listening to what I said. My family always talked over me.
One of my first memories was my mother coming home from her boyfriend’s house to say she was going to take me to another country to star in a movie about a mother and daughter who see a dog in a window.
My mother, who had left me when I was two years old to move to the Bronx, the woman who often disappeared — the one who would snatch me in the middle of the night without my grandparents knowing, only to have them searching for me across the TriState area, now wanted us to star in a movie together in another country with an unknown production company — a movie she’d found in the Backstage newspaper.
You can imagine how Nonna and her sisters reacted to that.
This is one of my first memories.
And it was one that would never leave me, not for a moment, a trauma stuck in my body that I’m finally ready to let out.
