Nonna

 

Some researchers believe that the reason for menopause - found only among the human species – is to create nurturers who will help care for and support new parents.  (October 18, 2025 NYT)

It has been a great gift of my life to be raised in an extended family.  My mother, father, and me lived in the bottom apartment of a two-family house owned by my maternal grandparents, Phylly and Nunzio, who lived upstairs with my teen age aunt. We lived in a blended way eating meals together, sharing household chores, watching the black and white console TV.  All was intertwined with family stories, fights, food, and made-up on the fly Catholic faith.  As an only child, I lived among grownups, at times the center of attention and at other times sliding through days unnoticed.  Some things were rigid while other things were loose.  There was the expectation of loyalty to the family, our way of life, the church but it wasn’t so rigid that I had to go to church every Sunday or couldn’t, as a girl, wear high top Ked sneakers and dungarees and ride a purple banana seat Schwin to the farthest corners of the busy town. 

The family didn’t always get along.  At dinner in the small kitchen which was barely bigger than the kitchen table fights that curdled my stomach would break out between different constellations of adults. I mostly stayed apart from the arguing but sometimes was dragged in to take sides, defend a position or protect myself for being scapegoated. If things got really pitched – as they did every few days - there would be slamming doors, storming out of rooms, plates of leftovers thrown onto the floor.  

While Phylly could get angry and start some of these fights, she never yelled at me.  Her presence in the room kept my father’s anger in check.  He was like the sun to me. I craved the light of my father’s attention probably because it did not always shine.  His kind and generous heart was sometimes clouded by wounds and trauma never held gently enough to heal. The light from my mother, like the moon, was often too slim and cold to fill in when my father’s light went black  - or worse red hot to the point of burning things up. 

Philly filled in the gaps with sweetness and protection. She came into this family without much -  wealth, education, experiences, protection - and knew loss from an early age. She spent most of the time of her life in that small kitchen filling it with groceries, cooking, cleaning, hanging out the laundry from the back window or going up and down the back stairs between apartments for supplies, tools, or a midday cup of coffee and a cigarette with my mother.  In her time out of the kitchen, she worked various jobs cooking, cleaning, and childcaring for others. 

Her big body protected and loved me in an unconditional childlike way that helped me to know that my worth did not depend on how well I did at school, if daddy was happy, if mommy was taking a long far orbit on the other side of the Earth. I always felt her warm presence filling that house. She did not seem to ask much of life doing for others because that was the role she understood she had been given, going on only a handful of vacations, playing Wisk at the Italian American club on a night out. In the middle of any hard and lonely day, she would be so happy to see me when I came home from school.