The Loss OF My Italian Family

      When my parents divorced, all ties with my dad's side of the family were severed.

      My brother, sister, and I thought that my father's family quit loving us because of my parents’ break-up. Especially since we never received any correspondence from that side of the family. Years later, my mother told me that my father had forbidden her to interact with his family. She claimed that he threatened to hurt her if she did. Remembering when he hit her, I could understand why she took him seriously.

      Initially however, when we were forced to move to North Carolina, my siblings and I told ourselves that our relatives had trouble finding the time and money to contact us because of the distance. Years later, my mother told me that she felt that my father had lied to a lot of his relatives, his friends, and their mutual friends. I have no reason to disbelieve her, since I have never caught her in a lie. We all felt that, if his relatives had really wanted to see us, they would have moved Heaven and Earth to do so.

       In addition to not hearing from my Italian family after the divorce, There was many times I would wake up to the sound of my poor mother weeping on the phone; pouring her heart out to a friend or relative or Father McDermac, complaining about the fact that my father was not sending any child support. She was frantic because the lack of child support crippled her ability to care for us.

      As I lay in the darkness, hearing my mother complaining cause confusion and despair. Confusion, because my father had bragged many times to family and friends that he was made sixty thousand a year.

I felt despair, because I felt that this meant he did not care about my siblings and me. Whenever someone asked my mother about a possible reason as to why he would not pay child support, my mother simply said that my father thought that she had brought the punishment upon herself by divorcing him.

      By my father's own admission, his hurt and rage over my mother leaving him clouded his thinking and caused him to do things that he was not proud of.

      My father acted like the leaders of countries that willfully force economic sanctions against countries that they feel have wronged them. They may be sorry that the citizens feel the pain, but this does not cause them to hesitate to use innocents as hostages of misery.

      I am not bringing all of this forth because I still harbor a grudge against my father. I am merely explaining why my siblings and I came to the logical conclusion that, if our father did not love us enough to be concerned with our health and welfare, there was no reason anyone else in his family should.

“After all, we thought, why should they... seeing as they were one or more people removed from us?”

“Why should they...since we were not their children?”

      It really hurt us to see that other kids had fathers who, despite feeling hateful towards their ex-wives, gladly paid child support, and these men rarely made one-fourth the amount my father made. As a matter of fact, they seemed to go out of their way to spend time with their kids.

      Before the divorce, it wasn’t like our father interacted with us that much. He couldn’t because the merchant marines kept him away and busy most of the time. We understood and accepted this.

However, when he was not at sea, he rarely interacted with us, the few times he did, he was fun, unless I was on the receiving end of a football. To be honest, I missed my dad when he was at sea, but mostly it was low level, because it was all we knew. I guess we felt he was away because he loved us. However, finding out that our dad cared so little about us that he would rather see us starve or suffer just to get revenge on my mother, hurt the three of us kids more than we could ever truly describe.

      The comparisons between our father and other kids fathers did much to amplify our grief, our pain, and sometimes, I suppose a sense of unworthiness.

      Years after the divorce years, my father got in the habit of taking us out to big expensive and fancy dinners. I did not like the fact that my father preferred to spend a lot of money on us when we would have been just as pleased (more pleased, actually) to go to the zoo instead.

      Another reason that I felt uncomfortable about those dinners was that my dad would always imply that, if it were not for my mother, we would be spending all of this quality time together, times ten.

      In addition, whenever he took us to these expensive restaurants, he always had a nice looking woman with him. I felt as if we were somehow being used as window dressing, part of a display to impress the woman. I could be wrong.