Daimones

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 other middle-class families 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-income budget.

Mother was raised in a working-class family in the heart of Italy. She once had a stable nursing position, which she quit under pressure from both my father and his family when their first child, my brother, was born. 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 only weeks after they got married was not Prince Charming.

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’s 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.

My mother was raised Catholic and had been observant for years after marrying. 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 my father. It made him exceedingly bitter toward his wife whose only blame was that she didn’t need to follow him on his anguished spiritual quests.

In different periods of his life, my father followed and experienced the Mennonites, Mormons and the Latter Days Saints Church, the Lutherans, and then Freemasonry and Rosicrucians. He ended up in outright esotericism when he finally decided confessions were all wrong in one way or another, and swarmed with fanatics, heretics who didn’t understand the true message of Jesus Christ, or whatever Master he was involved with at the moment. He believed true spiritual dimensions were accessible only to those who truly wanted to learn and believe.

He had beaten my mother at least one time that I know of, when she vehemently opposed that we children were to be raised as anything but Catholics, especially after seeing my father changing churches and faith so often. If it were up to him, I would have been baptized multiple times, with multiple confessions, and introduced to different rituals because the previous ones had to be “erased” and amended for with the new ones.

When he got into esoteric practices, he scared my mom by conducting séances at home. He befriended various mediums who came and went, sometimes without warning. Of course, he had planned for those visits, but he didn’t care to communicate or share with his wife. Once, my mother confessed to me, she came out of the shower dressed only in a baby doll nightie and faced a total stranger. It was the scare of her life, not to talk about the humiliation of being seen practically naked.