My mom always hated that she was referred to as “Angelo’s wife”. There were many instances when that’s how she was introduced; there were times when she wasn’t even given a first name. Plenty of people in the parish and around town only knew her by that moniker. And she hated it. I think every year it got a little bit more painful for her because she complained more and more about it. She thought it would be gone, for the most part, when they moved away but that didn’t last very long. As my dad became involved in his new parish and in his new community, it came back. And then, she died. And on the homepage of our home parish was the announcement of her funeral mass – “Eileen O., wife of Angelo”.
My dad was quite the presence at that church, and is one in his new parish. Everyone knew my dad at the old parish and because of that, everyone knew us. I still remember when the boy I was kind of dating in high school, who knew my dad for many years because he was an alter server and worked in the parish office, found out that was my father. We had been dropped off at church after a youth group activity and he saw my dad; I remember saying “oh, there’s my dad now” and his face went white. He was a very tall, very Italian boy so for him to go white was pretty impressive. The sound of his voice when he said, “THAT’S your DAD?” was something that remains with me still, and it still makes me giggle like the 15 or 16 year old girl I was then. I was his daughter, she was his wife, that’s just how we were known. But she never liked it. My mom was very independent, which was a rarity for women her age, and I think that’s what caused some of her struggles. She wanted to go to college, but couldn’t. She wanted to have a job, but couldn’t. She wanted a lot more out of her life than what was allowed because of the time that she was born in. And that’s a shame. I hope that legacy is one that never gets revived; much like bell bottom jeans, it belongs in the past or in the bottom of someone’s closet collecting dust.
I hope that she knew, or knows, that she was never just Angelo’s wife to us. As my mom, well, she was my mom. She wasn’t the typical or TV mom that everyone wishes they had. We never had a heart-to-heart conversation, she never sat with me as I cried over a broken heart. Hell she didn’t even tell me about the birds and the bees; she asked I had learned about it at school but that’s as far as that conversation went. But she was there with shock and amazement when I told her I was pregnant, she was there with the phone next to the bed every night as my due date approached and she was there to listen when I called to tell her and my dad that my best friend from college was killed in a car accident along with her mom and her aunt. She was there as best she could be; I wonder now if she had ever really wanted to be a mom. She wasn’t the most maternal woman in the world. When I sit on the couch in the morning with my daughter, enjoying the quiet snuggles that we share, I can’t imagine her doing that with any of us. Maybe my brother because he was the first, but I wonder if she only wanted children because that’s what everyone wanted and did back then. Everyone got married young, had a family, the woman stayed home and the man worked. That’s just what you did. I hope that my daughter never feels like she has to conform to some social norm like my mom did. I have to wonder if my mom would have turned out to be a different person, a happier person, had she followed her dreams instead of expectations.
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