Mother's Day

Hey guys, it's Tom Guarriello. You know, today instead of telling you what a beautiful day it was in Connecticut, I thought I'd show you what a beautiful day it is in Connecticut. It's spectacular here today, and I wanted to talk today about mothers. Tomorrow, here in the US anyway, it's Mother's Day, and I got a message from Savvy Symbiont who's somebody who I've followed and who's been a subscriber of my videos for a long time. And he said, hey, it's Mother's Day, why don't you tell us about your mother? I thought, that's a good idea, I'll tell you about my mother. I have to— I can't tell you all about my mother because if I told you all about my mother, we'd be here for a long time. Because my mother was a very, very interesting woman. I say was because My mother's been dead now for, um, 5 and a half years. She died in March of 2001. She was not quite 89 at the time. Died of lung cancer. And she died of lung cancer predominantly because my mother was a smoker all of her life. And smoking was part of my mother's persona. My mother was a, a pretty dramatic person. She was born in Sicily and came to America when she was a year and a half old. And that story in itself is like the first act of an opera. Because my mother was the second daughter in her family. Her older sister was about 4 years older than she, and when my mother's parents left this little town, Buccheri, a little town in southeastern Sicily, they could only afford to take one of their children with them. Actually, they really didn't want to take either of their children with them. They decided that what they would do is to leave their daughters with the nuns. This was a big deal back in Sicily then, and I have to stop this now because there's the phone. So I'm sorry, where was I? So my grandparents went to the nuns and said, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna go to America. You know, this was Let's see, this would have been 1914. We're gonna go to America and we're going to make our fortune, you know, the New World, and but we're not gonna be able to take these two little girls with us, so let's, let us leave them with you. The nun said, we'll take the big one, we won't take the little one. She's too young, 18 months, we don't want her. So that's what they did. They left my aunt with the nuns and brought my mother over to America. They landed in New York and moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts, which was the place where a lot of Sicilians from their village and from the general area came to. This was what immigrants did then, huh? They moved into places where, uh, people had gone before them, scouted out the area, got jobs, told them there was work, and, um, they moved to Lawrence. Well, let me just say that my mother never met her sister until 43 years later, and that central fact made a huge difference in my mother's life. The fact that she had been brought here to America and that her sister had been left there was a source of tremendous emotional turmoil for my mother. She communicated with her sister throughout their lives. Eventually they went, they came here, well, you know, there are a lot of stories, but eventually her sister came here to visit only after Her mother died. Only after my grandmother died would my aunt come from Sicily to visit. These are Sicilians after all, you know, they do have these tremendous deep beliefs and know how to hold a grudge. They're excellent at holding grudges. So that fact made a huge difference in my mother's life and my mother Her family lived in Lawrence, Massachusetts until she was about 14, at which time the work in Lawrence in the shoe factory— they were making shoes back then in this huge shoe factory which is still there in Lawrence but is now a mall or something— and moved to New York. And they moved to New York, the Lower East Side of New York. It would have then been 1920 '28 or so— 1926, I'm sorry. And my mother, who was then in the 8th grade, was unable to get into school right away when they moved from Massachusetts to New York. And so she was going to have to miss a year, have to essentially be put back a year in school the next year. When school began. Very much in keeping with my mother's temperament, she said, "There's no way I'm going to be put back in school. I'm going to quit rather than be put back in school." So this is what my mother did. She quit school in the 8th grade and she went to work as a seamstress. And she worked as a seamstress— my mother worked as a seamstress all of her life. She was an extremely hard-working woman who went to work because she wanted her family to have more than my father's income was going to enable us to have. I'm the youngest of 3 children. My brother is 17 years older than me. My sister is 14 years older than me. And then, surprise, up pops the baby. And so when my brother and sister were growing up, my mother wanted better for them than my father's salary could provide, and so she went to work. This was not a common thing, particularly among— well, it just was not a common thing. Women did not work outside the home, but my mother also loved to work. She loved the freedom that working gave her. She loved the, that sense of independence and what, you know, she was a very important person in the factory in which she worked and that meant a lot to her. So her work meant a great deal. I came along, my parents were older, My mother was 36 when I was born, and having older parents was interesting for me because I was of a different world than my parents' generation and my siblings' generation. And my mother encouraged a great deal of independence in me. Partially because she worked. I was a— before there was such a thing as latchkey kids, I was a latchkey kid. I would, from the time I was in second grade, first, second grade, I would get up by myself, get up in the morning. My mother was— my father was already gone. My father worked long, long hours. He was a hardworking person, good, good man, hardworking man. He was already gone by the time I'd get up and get going in the morning, and my mother would make sure I was up and ready to go to school, and that would be it. She'd be gone, and I'd have to get myself to school. We had a little house in the Bronx, and I walked to school and would lock up and leave in the morning and come home after school and had my own key and got in, and there was nobody home. From the time I got home for a couple of hours after I got home. So independence was something that was built into our family structure, and my mother certainly encouraged it because my mother was not a— her form of nurturance was a very, a very old-world form of nurturance. Ah, go ahead, do it. Go do it yourself. Go ahead. Yeah, you want to do that? Yeah, go ahead, do it. This kind of, this kind of mothering was also unusual. You know, a lot of my friends had mothers who were sort of, you know, a little more in that kind of Leave It to Beaver Donna Reed kind of world. My mother was not the Leave It to Beaver Donna Reed mold. She was much more, you know, she smoked, like I said earlier, she smoked, she smoked Camels with a filter, with a cigarette holder, kind of like Franklin Roosevelt. If you've ever seen Franklin D. Roosevelt's cigarette holder, my mother had one of those. She was a rather flamboyant person with that cigarette holder, and she was a, she was opinionated and intelligent. Although she didn't have an education, she was very well read and always, always had an idea, always had a point of view about things. Encouraged education for me a great deal. Neither my brother nor my sister went to college. My brother didn't graduate from high school. He quit high school, went to work, and then joined the Army and went to fight in Korea. My sister did graduate from high school and like all good Italian girls at the time, went to work and soon got married. So here I was coming along, I was the smart little kid and I was the one who was very much— it was assumed that I was going to go to college from the very beginning and my mother was very, very supportive of that. Of course, there are thousands and thousands of stories that I could tell about my mother, but the thing that I wanted to be sure that I got into this video is that my mother was one of these people who spent her whole life regretting things. She spent her whole life regretting that her sister did not— that she did not have her sister. She spent her whole life regretting a very broken relationship with her mother. She spent her whole life regretting not getting an education, and that regret, which really followed her, stayed with her till the day she died, was one of the lessons that my mother taught me, which is don't, don't regret. Don't regret the things that that you can't do anything about. Do things about the things you can do things about. But if you spend your whole life regretting things you can't do anything about, you're gonna torture yourself. And I watched my mother torture herself with those regrets forever. So not much, not much more than that to say in this kind of a video. Josie, my mother's name was Josie. Josie, I miss you. You were a crazy old lady. We would tell her that she was a crazy old lady all of her life, and she laughed and had a great sense of humor about that. But she was in fact a crazy old lady, that's for sure. So happy Mother's Day to all the mothers out there. You know, it's something we all have, a mother. And somebody once said, "Yes, we all have one mother. Thank goodness that's all we can survive." is just one. We've made the relationship between mothers and children extraordinarily complicated in our society. If you look back at what mothers are like in nature, um, mothers have their young, get them ready to live, and then out they go. Us, it's a little different. So happy Mother's Day and, uh, take care. Bye-bye.