My Beginning
What does it mean to have strong Political beliefs? My thoughts were scattered with strong opinions without being followed in reason. Debates squandered in random passing conversations taught me a process for education that was never really being addressed in what it meant to have Democrats living on the corner. We were Republicans I supposed and what did that mean? What did it mean to be friends with the girls on the corner? Was being a Democrat bad by the tones of my mother’s voice in judgment. Could I have fun with the neighbor children or did I have to remain separate? Was I surrounded by the voice of I can’t and judgments in all the labels I never understood. My husband is Catholic, Italian, and handicapped. The only concrete label was that he has a PhD, a rank he earned. This impressed my mother and brother. Handicap and Italian were not as welcomed.
Titles with a writer's love for people found me wondering? As I began facing education after filling the gaps in my primary school education. I found dancing, listening to music, and friends were what I was good at. Art also mattered; it was my only A grade. I was off to claim my post High School education with family in England. When I flunked 2 courses in my senior year, I was still off to England to get an Art degree. Their system didn't care what my education was. I had four years of High School. I was accepted to Kingston upon Hull’s Regional College of Arts and Crafts,in England. My grandiosity was about to take me that far from home where the systems of a foreign country didn’t affect me. I was about to find out about living with a structured University family. I became a foreigner because of their manners. I only knew England's music with dancing and the love of music would continue. I didn’t know I couldn’t thrive without an internal structure to support me.
My mother’s heartbreak didn’t matter to me. Mom stayed with my best friend Bonnie’s family for 2 weeks, crying, because I left. My spirit's fearless nature out weighed my mother’s needs. How she came up with the money for me to go to England I will never know. Her lack of education could perhaps have given her motivation to get money and give me her need to surpass her childhood desire to learn which was lodged in her poverty childhood home and the times that didn’t allow girls to be educated. Unless the girl was from a wealthy family.
Mom found a husband who was raised in Boston with a wealthy family.Her thoughts were to bring my Mom stability and charm. Then at the age of 45 my father died and with that her dreams. Dad and she had traveled the United States as he was a salesman as they enjoyed their start. Rochester NY was where they were to settle because I was to be the surprise of a child after losing two pregnancies. She couldn’t believe she was to have a child at 40 and my brother was 13 years older.
