Carmela, a Mother’s Day Remembrance

Her name was Carmela, a lyrical name meaning “garden or orchard.” Carmela with one “l” she’d always say. My mother really disliked having her name misspelled. Understandable, especially considering that her vibrancy as an individual was so often dismissed throughout her life, because when you suffer from mental illness, that one fact is often the primary thing, sometimes the only thing, people remember about you. And she was so much more than the madness inside her mind that she could not escape.

My mother was also called Millie, a nickname given to her by her Sicilian mother. Born in Brooklyn, New York, she was in the middle mix of ten children and a first-generation Italian American. Her parents, Nicholas and Rosa, had immigrated to America from Palermo, Sicily. When she was a young girl, her parents moved from New York to New Jersey where her father opened a barber shop.

 Memories of my mother, Carmela, are like opaque washes of indigo on an unfinished canvas. That’s because I never knew my mother in the way one would normally know a mother. I never knew my mother when she wasn’t mentally ill. Since I am the first-born of six children, none of Carmela’s children really knew her as a mother in the loving way one ought to know a mother. I also cannot sugarcoat the fact that her mental illness made huge chunks of our childhood nearly unbearable. My mother had visions of angels and demons, and at any moment she could go into a fit of uncontrolled rage trying to knock the demons out of us. Because of her illness, my siblings and I spent time in an orphanage (which was no better) and foster care. But I don’t want to dwell on that, except to say what happened in my childhood made me a stronger individual and more compassionate toward others, having been exposed to children from varying cultures and difficult circumstances at an early age. No matter how hard it rains, the sun will shine again.

On this Mother’s Day, I’d like to focus on who Carmela was beyond the darkness of severe bipolar disorder. Although my mother had limited education (her Old World Italian parents did not believe in education for their daughters, only marriage), she had much talent. She was a budding writer, and after she died, I found part of a short story she had written when she was young. She read the dictionary to improve her vocabulary and enjoyed learning new words. Mom liked reciting quotes, especially the Abe Lincoln quote: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” I believe she felt that quote was applicable to her own life.

Carmela had a beautiful soprano singing voice. During World War II, before she married, she sang at local USO shows entertaining troops from the nearby Army base. Her jet black hair was styled in pretty waves; she sometimes wore a flower in her hair. When we were children, she sang along to the radio all the time. That is one of my best memories of my mother, when she was singing. At those moments, she seemed unencumbered and she sang with passion. Her favorite musical artists were The McGuire Sisters, Tony Bennett, and Frank Sinatra. Sinatra’s version of “My Way” was her favorite song.

I am not in the medical profession, but I believe that music therapy could have been a more effective treatment for her illness than all the electro-shock therapies (now referred to as electro-convulsive therapy), so heavily advocated by her doctors and which produced no beneficial results, not once. In fact, those therapies caused her to forget entire parts of her children’s childhood, the end result being that when her children were taken away, my mother cut-out pictures of children from magazines and framed them as if they were her own, as if creating a new family.

At a birthday party for Mom with my brother, George, and sister, Rose.

Toward the end of her life, my mother, Carmela, became nearly comatose after so many years of failed ECT therapies and medications. She was locked in her own world with images no one could envision and she barely smiled anymore. Yet, she was once a vibrant woman with the potential to be so much more than the darkness that stole her mind.

In my dreams since her death, Mom is young, happy, without any signs of mental illness; I am a young girl again playing with my siblings, and Mom is smiling and playing with us, something she never did. Yes, I am seeing her in my dreams the way I would have liked to have seen her in life. I am seeing the mother I never had. That is the magic of dreams; they are an alternate reality of hope. Hope and dreams are survival skills.  

Carmela passed away in 2002 and was buried alongside my dear father, who had preceded her in death by twenty-two years, 1980. Mom loved the colors rose and pink, so we chose a rose-tinted marble headstone for my parents’ grave and had their wedding photo permanently encased in an oval on the stone. She would have liked that. At the bottom of the stone I had inscribed the quote: “Hope sees what is not, but yet will be.”

It is my hope that Carmela’s spirit, my mother’s spirit, free from the physical constraints of madness, can now embrace a life full of joy in whatever way that life continues. I know she will be singing…singing with passion.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. Playing Sinatra for you...

©2013 JerseyLils2Cents, all text and photos.

A Small Christmas Miracle

There’s a musical nativity figurine I take out every December since 2002. It’s a nice ceramic piece that plays, Away in a Manger, and has beautifully painted figures of the Holy Family in the classic scene: Mary kneeling, hands folded in prayer, gazing adoringly at the Baby Jesus in the manger with Joseph standing watch over them, a staff in one hand and a lantern in the other. The bottom of this figurine has the date, Dec. 2001, and my mother’s name. And that’s the important part.

This particular figurine was not my first choice when I shopped for a musical nativity for my mom that Christmas. I had glanced at it quickly then passed it by, moving on to other stores. My mom loved nativity scenes and musical boxes, and I was looking for one that revolved while playing a tune, and one that was larger (this one is a bit over 6 inches tall) so my mom could more clearly see the details given her failing eyesight. After shopping for hours and not finding what I wanted, I chose this one because it was pretty and it played one of my mother’s favorite Christmas tunes, Away in a Manger. I wasn’t totally satisfied with it…the melody sounded rather tinny and the music didn’t play very long before needing rewinding…but with time running short, just a few days to Christmas, I bought it with the idea that it was fine for now and I’d get her a better one next Christmas.

Before wrapping the gift, I wrote the date and my mom’s name on the bottom with a magic marker because she was staying in a nursing home. When I arrived, she looked at me with the faraway, blank stare that had become her expression these days. She said my name, as she always did, and nothing more. Sometimes you could not engage her at all, as if she just wasn’t there. I handed her the gift, she opened it...and then she smiled! Yes, she smiled, and that was a big deal, she did not smile often anymore.

With her failing eyesight, I wasn’t even sure the figurine was big enough for her to see the wonderful detail in the figures. But no matter…she seemed to see it well enough to smile right away when it was unwrapped, and an even bigger smile that lit up her face when she heard, Away in a Manger. She loved music; she loved to sing. In her younger days before the illness that left her body alone but took her mind…and oh, did it take her mind to places where a dark unreality could turn a warm summer day into a harsh winter night…she sang at a local USO club for WWII soldiers. When my siblings and I were children, my mother sang to the radio every day. She had a lovely singing voice. Although I enjoy singing, I can honestly say I did not inherit her vocal talent, but one of my sisters did. Then the illness took my mother's body, too. 

"Away in a manger, No crib for his bed,

The little Lord Jesus, Lay down his sweet head."

Mom lay down her head for her eternal rest just a few months later. I didn’t know it at the time but December 2001 would be my mother’s last Christmas. Much sooner than I was expecting. Was it a Christmas miracle that she smiled for me that day? Certainly, a Christmas miracle is anything you want it to be. And so it is for me. Every Christmas since then, when I play the musical nativity, I smile and think of my mother on that Christmas day. The music I once thought sounded rather tinny, doesn’t sound tinny anymore. Now it just sounds like a wonderful memory.

Text and photo © 2010-2011 JerseyLil’s 2 Cents. All rights reserved.