I empower myself… and I'm going for more! Memoirs of a woman who learned to live at fifty. I

- Good morning, Glorita. I greet you and I want to tell you that we are together in this project… today we begin to work hard, with the flow of emotions to capture them in writing… many feelings will keep arising in us to complete, more and more, this passage through life. 

- I greeted myself with a sweet diminutive because this little girl, even today at fifty-six, still gets a tickle in her ear from loving words she never heard.

In these last few years, unforeseen circumstances (I will tell you about them later on) demanded that I focus my life on self-knowledge, personal transformation and the strengthening of my self-esteem. Reinventing myself was a completely healthy resource for venturing inside myself, deeper and deeper, as if I were peeling an onion, skin by skin until reaching the heart and knowing myself in my pure state. After stripping away those heavy masks I had been acquiring day by day, with the aim of pleasing others.

Duality is part of the reality in which we perceive two sides of the same coin.
I have laid bare my most intimate fibers in order to convey our lineage and origin; our roots are the foundation of what we are.

Revealing my life has not been an easy task because I tried to do it with the greatest possible authenticity. What I felt or lived through remained in the narrative of the events from my point of view, and with the memories that came to my mind. Likewise, my role as protagonist has put me in difficulties, more than once, when it came to discerning between the real and the subjective.
Each person creates their own sense of the world, based on a unique and unrepeatable perception, even though all the members of the family may have lived through the same situations.

Allow yourselves to release the feelings that these words stir in you, but avoid letting the dictates of your mind, tinged with judgments, prevail. Because behind this leading role there is a person who, in her humanity, has felt and lived as best she could, with the awareness she had.

 "To my older siblings"


One day someone made the decision for you.
I don't know whether you were ready to depart…our parents, without understanding, thought about the child who was not born.

—
My first older brother,
to you I could explain with tenderness,
what it feels like to have a living sister. The one who was born when you left, leaving our parents adrift.
I'll tell you that you would have been a boy.
And she was happily named our sister.
The beginning of parenthood gave them back their joy, and she came into the world with the purpose of making amends.
—
My second older brother.
You gave up your place to me…
and I lived.
Those caresses that were reserved for you,
I have been the one to enjoy them.
They thought of a girl's name, resigning themselves to the boy who could not be.
—
Brothers …
I have already seen them.
They exist in every corner of this eternity
and though life separates us, love unites us.

I am grateful that they light our way
when our own light dims their glow.
Ask the universe to remind us who we are each time doubt confuses us
or sorrows tighten our heart.

Sometimes we act
without understanding too much
and we feel that
when one of us becomes shadow,
the other, somehow,
also loses her light.
But it takes only one of us catching fire
for us to light each other up
once again.

Older siblings…
you are my delight, my treasure,

my confidants and my support.

You are right here beside me!

You are in the immensity like ageless angels
where distances do not exist.

You are my guardians of heaven
my sun in winter
my sustenance and my pillar
that I do not intend to forget.

White smoke that comes to me in my inspiration
and wraps me in the most sublime purity.
I speak to you and you listen to me,
the innermost connection to innocence,
I imagine you on my ground
showing me the path I could not see.
You all know
that it's time to make new decisions in my life,
that perhaps it wasn't a lost battle
but rather a passage won.

   I grew up within a family nucleus where perfectionism seemed to be one of the fundamental pillars: from the time I was a little girl I found it hard to fit into that mold. I felt I had to meet expectations that always seemed to lie just a little beyond my reach. Humiliation and the lack of confidence gradually eroded my sense of self-assurance. No matter how hard I tried to live up to what was expected of me, the feeling of not being enough remained.

Perhaps one of the deepest battles of my story has been, precisely, learning to stop measuring myself against that yardstick and beginning to discover my own worth.

As for me, I confess that this praise made me feel privileged, although back then I couldn't understand what those words were planting in me. 

—What a good girl!
—So calm, always so easygoing!
—She always does as she's told and never complains.

Being docile and not causing any trouble seemed to earn me a special place in the eyes of the adults. Without realizing it, I was learning a dangerous equivalence: if I obeyed, they approved of me; if I pleased them, they loved me; if I wasn't noisy and restless, they accepted me more readily.So I would try a little harder to hold back a reply, to accept without arguing, to do what was expected of me. AndI began to train myself in the art of pleasing.

Over the years I came to understand that behind that docility there also dwelled a deep insecurity. If I didn't fully trust my own worth, I needed to find it in the gaze of others. Being impeccable became, little by little, a way of feeling deserving of affection.
But perfection always demands a little more. It's never enough.
And so, along with the need to please, there grew the fear of making mistakes, of disappointing, of failing to fulfill what others expected of me. Failure stopped being simply the possibility of making an error: it could mean losing the approval I so badly needed.

Over the years I came to understand that we live surrounded by contrasts. No one inhabits only the light, nor remains forever in the darkness. Within one and the same person, tenderness and rage can coexist, strength and fragility, patience and losing control. Perhaps we need to know the opposites in order to learn to recognize them.

At my young age I couldn't understand how someone peaceful could turn hostile, nor how the same person could go from tolerance to anger so quickly. 

There is an episode from my childhood that, although it happened when I must have been about two years old, remained in the family memory.
One day I was with my mom in the kitchen. She was making the meal and I was sitting on the counter. At one point she opened the oven door and, suddenly, an explosion produced such a loud bang that it threw us both to the floor.
My grandmother wasn't home. She had gone away for a few days with my sister and, when she came back, I was the one who told her what had happened.
As my mom remembers it, with my scant resources as a little girl I summed up that experience in one sentence:
—The kitchen went boom!
That was my truth. The simple, spontaneous way a little girl had of telling what she had seen and lived through.

Little by little I learned to distrust my own perception. If what I saw might not be true, if what I remembered could be denied, then how much could I trust myself?
Perhaps that was where another silent crack began to settle into my self-esteem: the need to check over and over again whether what I felt, thought, or remembered was worth enough to be listened to.

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II

We lived in my maternal grandmother's house, and she loved to tell about her experiences. Something it did her good to say was that she was a curious, intelligent little girl. She had an enormous need to learn, In those days, educational opportunities were not the same for everyone and, in her surroundings, formal learning was meant mainly for the boys. But my "nona" did not seem willing to accept that knowledge should be forbidden to her for being a woman.

Among her daily chores was looking after the pigs and the other animals. She had to make sure the troughs had enough water and to help work the horse-driven whim that drew water from the well. These were important responsibilities for a little girl, but not even the work managed to keep her from what truly drew her in: learning.
Whenever she found a small gap between her chores, she would take a little stick and trace letters in the dirt. 
And while she watched over the grazing animals, she found another way to exercise her mind. She would gather small stones and use them to practice adding and subtracting. That was how she took for herself the knowledge that no one seemed to have thought of offering her.
She learned in secret what her father taught the boys, defying the rules that determined what a girl could or could not do.
That perseverance ended up making her the first woman in her family to learn to read, write, and do basic arithmetic. The only one who went on writing letters in Piedmontese to her relatives in Italy.

Then she reached what used to be called "the age of deserving," an expression used to refer to the stage when a young woman began to fall in love. Her courtship became a marriage, and after some misfortunes in their attempts to become parents, a little girl managed to hold on to life: she was my mother.   

For her father, that little girl was a treasure; he looked upon her as something extraordinary, as the daughter who had finally managed to stay in his arms. He loved her deeply and made her feel special.

Family life went on under a single roof. My great-grandparents shared the house with their children and their children's respective families, forming one of those large households in which several generations learned to live together, work, and help one another.
Intimacy knew almost no boundaries. The spaces, the obligations, and a good part of the child-rearing were shared. They built a life closely tied to the countryside and to farming and livestock activities, which took up much of their days, though she always found some moment to share with the others.
Among the women, the daily tasks were divided in an organized way. My nona tirelessly took care of washing, ironing, and preparing the meals, while her sister-in-law looked after her own children and her nephews and nieces as well. In a house full of adults and children, each one knew what she had to do, and cooperation was indispensable.

They also shared those small everyday chores that today may seem hard to imagine.
One of them was bath time.
There were no showers, no hot water available at the mere turn of a tap. You had to begin long beforehand, heating large pots of water over the fire of the wood-burning stove. When it finally reached the right temperature, they would get the bath ready and help each other.
One of them would begin by filling a container with warm water and letting it fall slowly over the other's body, from head to foot, like a small domestic rain. Then they would switch roles.
One bathed the other.
I picture that simple scene, almost like a gesture of sisterhood born of necessity. What today we settle in a few minutes with modern comforts required back then time, preparation, and, very often, the help of other hands.
But it wasn't all work.
There were also afternoons when the family left its obligations behind and went off to the river. Those days seemed to have a different rhythm. The men ventured out in the canoe, roaming the waters in search of fish, while the women stayed on the bank with the children, enjoying the sun and the rest.
During those hours, life seemed simpler.

The river, the conversations, the children's laughter and the wait for those who would come back from fishing made up a scene of tranquility that my mother would keep among her happy memories.

She was the youngest of the cousins and grew up surrounded by them. They played together with the familiarity of true siblings, sharing adventures, secrets and mischief.

As the years went by, my grandfather and his brother decided to buy two adjoining plots of land. The purchase meant growth, work, and the chance for each family to build its own space. For the adults, it surely represented progress.
For my mother, on the other hand, it meant a separation.My mother missed the games and the company of her cousins, but there was one absence she felt especially: that of her aunt.

From her she had received care, protection and an affection that felt motherly. 

And so, little by little, she grew up.
She was an intelligent, curious girl who deeply enjoyed learning. Going to school was not an obligation for her.
When the time came to attend secondary school, she had to move to the city. During the week she stayed at the boarding school run by nuns and returned home on weekends.
Those years nurtured a dream: she wanted to be a teacher.
She studied enthusiastically and began to picture herself in front of a classroom, teaching others what gave her so much pleasure to learn. But that longing was abruptly cut short one Friday when the adults made the decision to take her out of the boarding school. There was no farewell to that life she had begun to build, nor any chance to finish what she had started. From one moment to the next she stopped being the student who dreamed of becoming a teacher and went back to the chores of the house and the farm. She began taking dressmaking and sewing lessons by correspondence.

Many years have passed and yet, when my mother remembers that Friday, nostalgia still overcomes her to the point of tears.

                                                          III