Marie Victoria Santacroce grew up in Elmont, New York, a shitty part of Long Island that I have often heard her brother, my Uncle Vinny, call “Smellmont.” She is the second oldest of three sisters and one brother. My mom says she always “stood out like a sore thumb,” even in her own family. She was born with a head of curly red hair that my grandmother claims was the color of fire, more orange than red, translucent blue eyes, and eyebrows and lashes so blond that it appeared she didn’t have them at all. This is remarkable because my mom is 100% Italian and everyone else in her family has dark hair and olive skin. She claims she is a product of the Nordic Vikings who invaded Sicily, the part of Italy where her father was born.
If you ask my mom about her childhood, she will usually talk about her big, Italian family, playing kickball in the street, and the dozens of cousins who would come over each summer to visit. What she doesn’t talk about as much, but I have learned has colored and shaped her whole life, is that she was poor.
There was nothing about my mom’s childhood that resembles my own where food, clothing and toys were always available and abundant. My grandfather came from a family of poor mountain farmers and emigrated to the United States in his early twenties. He made pizza for a living and spoke very little English. My grandmother, also Sicilian but born in the United States, was mostly a housewife who took care of her five children and then later worked as a secretary at Valley Stream North High School. When they got married and started their family, they rented out part of their two-floor home for a constant passive income. At times, this was all they lived on as my grandfather didn’t always have a job.
The Santacroce household was chaotic, tight, and loud. It was a constant symphony of noise and disruption—music playing on several radios, the dog barking, phone ringing, and always someone arguing over what show should play on the single black and white television. A new baby joined the family every two years until there were five kids. My mom shared a tiny bedroom (half the size of mine) with two other sisters, with three twin-beds tightly shoved against each other. All seven of them shared one pink-tiled bathroom with a slightly cracked mirror.
There are aspects of my mom’s childhood that I can tell pain her by the subtle twitching of her eye when talking about them. Every week in school she was called up to the front of class and given a roll of tickets that she used in the cafeteria to get a free lunch. The day before school closed for Thanksgiving, she would be handed a seven-pound turkey, which she brought on the bus to take home to her family. She was mortified and got many stares for having a raw turkey on her lap.
I’ve never had to worry about food. The thought of having to be given free food or not having enough food never really crossed my mind. My mom’s circumstances did not allow for this. Recently, I was bringing in groceries and she talked to me along the way about her childhood a bit more:
“I don’t think my siblings fully understood.”
“What part?”
“What was going on financially with my parents when we were younger.”
Everything they owned or was in the house had value to them. Now I notice she gets upset about things others may overlook because she didn’t have the luxury to overlook them—cold three day-old pasta being thrown out, pants with the tags still on that I have already outgrown and never used, or my brother claiming he needs a new Hydroflask when the one he has is perfectly fine and relatively new. Before I knew most of these things about her past, I assumed that she was attempting to teach us life lessons, which technically she is, but I didn’t realize it was rooted deeper than that. I can recall vividly the day my brother and I both simultaneously ordered lunch on DoorDash separately. “Mariano, why is there a man at the door with a bag of food when we just got a food delivery?”
“I guess Paul already ordered lunch, he never asks me anyways.”
“Do you realize food delivery costs money? Do you think I have unlimited cash to throw away? If you and your brother can’t learn how to communicate, then you two can never order again!”
Starting around the age of nine, my mom sought escapes from the chaos of her family. The first, she found one block away from her house at the Elmont Public Library. The space was small, quaint, and had the same librarians sitting in the same wooden chairs for twenty years. She spent all her free time there and dove headfirst into everything from cookbooks, to teen magazines, to short stories and plays. This is where she developed her life-long love for reading and learning. Her other escape was sports. Although my mom stands at a non-intimidating height of 5’3”, she excelled at sports. She pretty much played everything—basketball, softball, soccer, and even touch football. Her love for soccer further developed throughout high school, and eventually was passed down to me and my brother.
My mother claims she decided to be an attorney when she was thirteen years old. I always thought this was such a boring profession to admire. It requires long hours working in an office, travel, and at times, very little sleep. I never understood why anyone would ever aspire to constantly work like that. From what I gathered, she was extremely level headed and had big future plans. According to her siblings, she was always conducting some sort of law and order investigation—she would interrogate her siblings to find out who was lying about eating the last cookie or which sister wore her new shirt without permission. Although my mom may have had some natural abilities that helped with choosing her profession, I now understand that it was in part a choice she made based on her childhood. “I liked to read and write, and I was good at it, probably from all the time I spent in the library. I also was always trying to argue a point with my mom or figure out who was lying to me about taking my sneakers, but when I heard that lawyers made a lot of money, that was it.” I noticed her face droop as if she were about to engage in deep reflection. “I didn’t want to have to worry about how I would pay bills or feed my family like my parents did. I never wanted to live with that fear again.” This was the first time I realized the gravity of what being a lawyer meant to her.
In order to get a different perspective on my mom, I secretly spoke with one of my mother’s sisters, Aunt Paula. I wanted to know what my mother was really like beyond all the talk about school and sports that I hear every Christmas. Aunt Paula had plenty to say about how my mother responded to their parents’ expectations: “Our dad always told us: study and do well. They never really kept a tight leash on us about school or hovered over us to see if we did homework. I wasn’t as obedient as Marie; I think maybe I was less concerned and she just took it more seriously. Marie was always like this. She got super fixated on what she needed and reached for the stars.”
That said, any of my aunts would tell you that when she got mad, she got really mad; I can attest to this, since as her child I see it happen every now and then. When I was ten and still forced to go to church with her on Sundays, we would go to Dunkin’ Donuts after every Mass as my reward. Religion was really important for her growing up, so she wanted to bestow it upon her children, too. I was an extremely impatient child, and even more so during Mass since I did not want to be there. One weekend I fought with my brother after church—likely because I didn’t get a donut. My brother and I pestered and annoyed each other the entire forty-five-minute car ride. Finally, as soon as we got out of our blue Jeep, my brother shoved me onto the grass, and we began tearing each other’s shirts and pulling relentlessly on the other’s hair.
“Stop it you two, I’ve had enough! All you did was fight the entire day so far, I’ve had enough of this bullshit— cut it out now!” Nevertheless, we continued to ignore my mom, refusing to yield as the fight got more intense, hoping to rip each other’s faces off. My mother finally lost it; she took off one of her church-appropriate black high heels and threw it in our general direction. She landed a clean hit on the back of my skull; I don’t think she expected to actually hit me. I took it like a champ, but she felt really bad. From then on I realized that if you pushed all my mother’s buttons, you were at risk of getting the heel-to-the-head experience.
To be quite frank, I sometimes have a hard time coming to terms with the fact that my mother was a real person before she was my mom; her past is a completely different world in my eyes. My fantasy of my parents truly started when I was in elementary school and believed they were superhuman taekwondo ninjas that went out at night and fought bad guys. They were invincible, and they had nothing else going on. My mother also was around much more often than my dad was (he worked longer or farther away from home at times), so the idea of my mom’s only occupation being “take care of Mariano” was all that raced through my mind at that age.
I guess I didn’t really take her too seriously until I started seeing her overwork herself at home during quarantine. My mom has been working from home since the beginning of COVID. She is no longer working as a lawyer, and instead is in charge of cyber security at Mastercard. I don’t know exactly what the job entails, but it doesn’t take a genius to realize that she puts almost as many hours into her new job as her prior job as a stressed lawyer.
The other day I saw her passed out asleep on the couch in a sitting position with a magazine in hand. Out of respect, instead of laughing at the idea of my mother sleeping like that, I tried my best to keep quiet and not wake her up. As I have gotten older, she’s become more than just mom. I used to neglect Marie because I had the privilege to, but we’re both getting older now, and it’s time that I start treating her more like an individual rather than just mom. I filled a few gaps about my mother’s past, but I’ve now started a different journey because of these discoveries. I can’t say I fully understand Marie just yet. As a newly proclaimed adult, I begin a lifelong phase of attempting to uncover the mysteries this small, driven, red-headed woman Marie has left to unfold.