My mother and father met while they were attending Brooklyn College. They used to go to Junior’s in Downtown Brooklyn for lunch. My father met my mother’s father, my grandfather, and my grandfather loved him.
My father got a high-level position at Irving Trust on Wall Street. Eventually, my parents were married in 1961. My sister was born in 1962, and I was born 357 days later, in 1963.
At the time, we were all living at 30 Montrose Avenue, Apartment 11R, Brooklyn, New York. Our telephone number was 782-6937. This was long before New York City had multiple area codes. At the time, the entire city was in the 212 area code.
My very first memory is of my father.
I couldn’t have been more than four years old. I was lying peacefully in his arms while he sat watching a football game on television. He was wearing a plain white T-shirt. On the coffee table sat a pack of Marlboro Reds and a can of Schaefer Beer.
The game went to commercial, and suddenly the television filled with cowboys riding across the open range. They lit their cigarettes, and the announcer spoke about the Marlboro Man. From that day on, I always associated that commercial with my father.
Oddly enough, I even remember the smell of his armpits. It’s funny how the human mind works. Out of all the things we forget over a lifetime, certain smells and tiny details remain crystal clear. Nearly sixty years later, I can still remember that moment as if it happened yesterday.
My next memory couldn’t have been more different.
I must have been about five years old. I remember my mother standing inside our apartment, screaming and crying. Someone—I’m almost certain it was my father—was outside pounding on the front door, trying to get in.
I didn’t understand what was happening. I only knew that my mother was terrified, and because she was crying, I started crying too.
Then I heard my father’s voice through the door. I didn’t understand the meaning of the words, but I knew they were the words of an angry man.
“Damn it! Damn it!”
The moment my mother heard me crying, she picked me up, rushed me into my bedroom, opened the closet door, threw me inside, and slammed the door shut.
I remember sitting in complete darkness, terrified and confused. I had no idea what was happening outside that closet door. I couldn’t see anything. All I could hear was my mother crying, my father yelling, and the pounding on the front door.
That was the day my parents separated.
I still don’t know exactly why.
About twenty years later, I discovered that some memories never disappear. They simply wait for something to unlock them.
I was watching the movie Halloween with some friends. There is a scene where Jamie Lee Curtis’s character hides inside a closet while trying to escape the killer. The moment she stepped into that closet, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I felt a wave of fear that I couldn’t explain.
Then it hit me.
I was right back in my childhood bedroom.
I remembered being five years old, crying in the darkness after my mother threw me into the closet and slammed the door shut. Until that moment, I don’t think I had ever connected that childhood memory to the feeling I experienced while watching the movie. It was as if that scene unlocked something that had been buried in my mind for years.
My mother always said that my father left the family.
As I grew older, I began to see it differently. My mother thrived on drama and had a way of provoking arguments and creating conflict wherever she went. She was the grand manipulator. Looking back, I think my father simply reached a point where he couldn’t take it anymore and walked away.
One thing always stood out to me. My mother had almost no mechanical ability whatsoever and couldn’t fix things around the house. Yet whenever she wanted someone out of her life, she somehow knew exactly how to change the door locks. She did it repeatedly throughout our lives.
Looking back, I believe that when she no longer found my father appealing, she changed the locks on him too.
Sometime before that final fight, my father had made a major change in his life. He left his prestigious position at Irving Trust on Wall Street to buy a Chicken Delight fast-food restaurant.
It was only much later in life that I began putting these events together. I have often wondered whether my mother saw my father’s move from Irving Trust to owning a Chicken Delight as a major step down in status and whether it changed the way she viewed him.
But there is another possibility I’ve thought about over the years.
Maybe my relationship with my father had something to do with it.
My earliest memory is of lying peacefully in my father’s arms while he watched a football game. Maybe, even at that young age, I was beginning to associate myself more with my father than with my mother. Maybe she saw how attached I was to him and became jealous of that relationship.
I’ve seen versions of this happen in other families over the years. The father walks through the door, the children light up and run toward him, and instead of the mother simply being happy that her children love their father, sometimes there seems to be a little jealousy underneath it.
Was that happening in my family?
I don’t know.
I was five years old. I couldn’t possibly have understood what was happening between my parents.
Maybe it was my father’s change in social status. Maybe it was my relationship with him. Maybe it was something completely different that I will never know.
But looking back, I can’t help wondering whether one, or both, played some part in the fight that ultimately ended their marriage.
The days after my father left were confusing. My mother had never worked while we were living in Brooklyn. She stayed home and took care of my sister and me while my father supported the family.
So when my father was suddenly gone, the family’s only income was gone with him.
My sister and I were too young to understand what had happened. We only knew that our father was gone, there was less food in the house, and my mother suddenly seemed overwhelmed.
I remember telling my mother that I was hungry. My sister was hungry too. My mother didn’t seem to know what to do.
My sister and I knew the television commercials for Chicken Delight and remembered the jingle, “Don’t cook tonight, call Chicken Delight.” We were too young to really understand my father’s connection to Chicken Delight or that he had bought one of the franchises.
Trying to be helpful, I said, “Mom, don’t cook tonight, call Chicken Delight.”
Then my sister and I started jumping up and down, singing the jingle:
“Don’t cook tonight, call Chicken Delight.”
She didn’t say a word.
Even as a little boy, I could sense that something had changed.
With my father gone and no money coming in, we were all going hungry.
A short time later, my grandmother came to our apartment carrying groceries. My mother cried out, “Look, kids, we have food! Look, there’s butter. Go eat.”
There are two other memories from this period in Brooklyn that have stayed with me.
When I was five years old and attending P.S. 250, I remember seeing a news report one morning about a rapist. My mother immediately turned toward me, slapped me across the face, and said, “If you ever rape anybody, I will disown you.”
I was five years old. I didn’t even know what the words “rape” or “disown” meant. I was startled and didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.
I also remember my mother beating me when I was five years old. I don’t remember exactly why it happened or how it started. One time, she beat me with a broomstick so severely that it broke across my back.
Years later, my sister confirmed that she remembered watching my mother break that broomstick over my back.
Over the years, I told many women about my mother breaking a broomstick over my back when I was five years old. Almost every one of them responded the same way. They said that I must have done something really bad to deserve a beating like that.
My response was always the same:
“What could a five-year-old possibly do that would justify beating him with a broomstick until it broke over his back?”
They had no answer.
Not long after my grandmother brought us food, we moved into my grandparents’ apartment at 421 10th Avenue, Apartment 4N, in Manhattan.
Their telephone number was BR9-8999, which translated to Bryant 9-8999, or 279-8999. This was still the era when telephone exchanges had names instead of just numbers. Just like my parents, my grandparents made sure we memorized their address and telephone number.
Nearly sixty years later, I can still recite them from memory.
When we first moved into my grandparents’ apartment at 421 10th Avenue, Apartment 4N, I remember sleeping in the living room. Every night they opened the Castro convertible sofa bed. I was so small that I could sleep right on the sofa seat cushions with a blanket pulled over me.
At that age, I didn’t think anything of it.
It was simply where I slept.
My mother found a job selling gloves at Macy’s Herald Square. It was the first job I remember her having.
Then something happened that changed our living situation.
The man who lived directly across the hall from my grandparents, in Apartment 4S, passed away. My mother and my grandfather negotiated for the lease. After the apartment was cleaned out, my mother, my sister, and I moved into 4S, while my grandparents remained directly across the hall in 4N.
For a while, it was almost as if we all lived together. My grandparents were only a few steps away.
My sister and I attended P.S. 33 on 28th Street in Manhattan. Every morning, my grandmother walked us to school while my mother went to work at Macy’s. At the end of the school day, either my grandmother or my grandfather picked us up, and we went back to their apartment.
My grandfather had been a chef in the Army, and there was always something good to eat. Every afternoon, he made sure that my sister and I had a good, hearty meal before my mother came home from work.
You would think my mother would have been grateful.
She wasn’t.
One day, my mother came home and found out that my sister and I had already eaten. She had stopped at a nearby store and brought home food for dinner, but instead of being happy that we had been fed, she became enraged.
She stormed across the hall into my grandparents’ apartment and started yelling and screaming at the top of her lungs. I don’t remember exactly what was said, but I remember what happened next.
She came back into our apartment and said to my sister and me, “If I ask you whose food you like better, you tell me it’s mine.”
A few moments later, my grandfather walked in.
“What’s all the racket?” he asked. “What’s going on around here? Why is everybody yelling?”
My mother unloaded on him.
“I want to eat dinner with my kids like a family, and you’re not allowing that to happen.”
My grandfather looked at her and, in the calm way he always spoke, said, “Oh, come on now. Cut it out.”
Then my mother turned to my sister and me.
“Whose food do you like better, mine or your grandfather’s?”
My sister and I pointed to my mother.
We did as we were told.
What my grandfather didn’t know was that only a few moments earlier, my mother had already told us exactly what answer to give him. She had taken two little kids aside, instructed us to lie to our grandfather, and then used that lie against him.
The strange thing was that my mother never cooked. She bought food and brought it home. Yet she wanted us to tell my grandfather, who had been a chef in the Army and who had been feeding us every afternoon, that we liked her food better.
Looking back, I don’t think this was really about food at all.
She had manipulated her own children into helping her humiliate her father.
And we did it because we were children and our mother had told us what to say.
My grandfather quietly turned around and walked out.
My mother slammed the door behind him.
I sometimes wonder what went through his mind as he walked back across that hallway. He had raised my mother, paid for her wedding, taken us in when her marriage fell apart, given us a place to live, and made sure her children were fed. And now his own grandchildren had just stood there and told him that we preferred food our mother didn’t even cook.
He had no way of knowing that we had been told what to say.
Looking back now, I wonder whether I was seeing something my father had already experienced.
At the time, of course, I couldn’t possibly have understood it that way.
After we had been living across the hall from my grandparents for several months, my grandfather announced that he was retiring from his job and that my grandparents would eventually be returning to Cyprus, the country where he was born.
I remember my grandfather packing everything he owned. He even built a large wooden shipping trunk in his kitchen to send his tools, clothes, and personal belongings back to Cyprus.
As a little boy, I watched him build it, never realizing that I was watching the end of an important chapter in my life.
Not long afterward, my mother found another apartment closer to our school.
We moved to 508 West 29th Street, Apartment 6.
My bedroom window faced what is now known as the High Line. Back then, it was an active freight railroad. I remember hearing the trains creeping by at a very slow pace. The steel wheels screeched against the rails like rusty nails scratching across a chalkboard.
By then, my sister and I were old enough to walk home from school by ourselves. My mother usually came home later from work.
We were no longer living across the hall from my grandparents.
For the first time since my father had left, they weren’t just a few steps away.
After we moved to West 29th Street, one thing never seemed to change.
My mother changed the apartment locks, just as she had done before.
I also began noticing that my sister was becoming more and more violent, much like my mother. It seemed to me that she was learning from my mother’s behavior. She would pull my hair and beat me up, and I never knew what to do.
I didn’t fight back.
One time, my sister noticed that whenever I was hit on the nose, I would start sneezing. While my mother was away, my sister grabbed me by the hair from behind, dragged me to the floor, straddled my chest, and started bopping me on the nose over and over again just to make me sneeze.
It was one of many times when her behavior became just as violent as my mother’s.
If I complained to my mother that my sister had hit me, she would tell me, “Fight your own battles.”
But if I defended myself, I was the one who got punished.
One day, my sister became so enraged that she punched our television so hard that it knocked over and broke the fish tank sitting beside it.
By then, I was beginning to learn that there was no correct response. If I did nothing, I could get hurt. If I complained, I was told to handle it myself. If I fought back, I could be punished.
So I started learning other ways to survive.
My mother seemed to search for words she could use to humiliate us or hurt us emotionally. If she thought she had found something that bothered you, she would remember it and use it again.
I remember figuring this out when I was only seven or eight years old.
One time, my mother called me “retarded.” The word itself didn’t really hurt me, but I wanted the argument to end. I wanted to give her some kind of minor victory so she would stop.
So I started crying and pretended that what she had called me had really hurt.
It worked.
The problem was that now she thought she had discovered something she could use against me.
After that, whenever she wanted to hurt or humiliate me, she would call me “retarded.” And whenever she did, I would pretend to cry again.
I wasn’t crying because the word hurt me. I was giving her the reaction she wanted because I had learned that sometimes the easiest way to make her stop was to let her believe she had won.
Eventually, my reaction concerned her enough that she took me to a school psychiatrist to find out why I was so messed up.
But she didn’t get the answer she expected.
The psychiatrist told her that I was highly intelligent.
That pissed my mother off tremendously.
So she took me to another psychiatrist.
Again, she didn’t get the answer she was looking for.
Then there was another psychiatrist, and another. From what I remember, the conclusion kept coming back essentially the same. Instead of finding something seriously wrong with me, they kept telling her that I was highly intelligent.
My mother wasn’t satisfied.
She seemed determined to find someone who could explain why I was the mess she believed I was. But psychiatrist after psychiatrist wasn’t finding what she wanted them to find.
Looking back, what strikes me most is that I was only seven or eight years old and had already learned how to manage my mother’s anger. I had learned that sometimes I could end an attack by pretending she had successfully hurt me.
I gave her a victory so she would stop.
During this period, my mother also began having relationships with married men.
First there was a man named Frank Pike. He was married.
Later, my mother became involved with another married man named Julio Castellano, who had successfully left Cuba while his wife remained behind.
One year, Julio took us on a trip to Canada. At the time, I thought we were simply going on vacation.
It was only later that I understood the real reason for the trip. Julio wanted to mail clothing and other items to his family in Cuba because packages sent from Canada were less likely to be opened or confiscated than those mailed from the United States.
Eventually, we moved again, this time to the Robert Fulton Houses in Chelsea, at 418 West 17th Street, Apartment 19D.
The Wayans family lived in the same housing project, including Keenen Ivory, Shawn, Marlon, and Kim. Although I never spoke to them, my sister knew them.
One day, my mother told us a story about my grandmother’s childhood.
She said that her grandmother—my great-grandmother—once tied my grandmother and her younger brother to a tree and left them there overnight as punishment. Her husband had left her, and she believed it would be easier to earn a living without the two youngest children around—the ones who needed the most attention.
My mother told us that story to explain herself to us.
It was as though she was trying to justify beating me and my sister. Maybe, she suggested, Mother Nature was teaching her to be cruel to us because it was time for us to be on our own.
Around that time, my mother took a new job with the Otis Elevator Company. She worked in the parts department, purchasing elevator parts exclusively for the World Trade Center, which was still under construction at the time.
Their offices were located directly across the street from where we lived, in the building that today is part of Google’s headquarters in Manhattan. There was a heliport on the roof, and from my bedroom window, I would watch the helicopters take off and land.
Around this time, I took up building models.
I would spend hours putting them together, but it seemed that whenever I finished one, it would only be a matter of weeks before it was broken as some form of punishment.
I built a model car.
It was broken.
I built a model airplane.
It was broken.
I even built a model aircraft carrier.
That was broken too, this time by my sister.
I also loved drawing mazes. Somehow, I found a huge roll of white paper about three feet wide. To a kid of about seven, the roll seemed enormous. I would sit at the dining room table for hours, day after day, drawing elaborate mazes.
One time, I created a gigantic maze that stretched for about ten feet across that three-foot-wide paper.
I had spent hours working on it.
Then, as another form of punishment, it was thrown into the trash compactor.
For what?
Who knows?
Maybe I hadn’t washed the dishes correctly.
It wasn’t enough to punish me. The things I created could be punished too.
I remember one morning waking up in my bed without even hearing an alarm.
I was amazed by how quiet the apartment was.
Nobody was yelling. There was no noise. Nothing was happening.
It was the strangest way I had ever woken up in my life.
A few minutes later, while I was still lying in bed, I heard my mother’s alarm clock ringing in the other room. The radio was tuned to Rambling with Gambling with John Gambling.
My mother got up, went into the bathroom, returned to her bedroom, and then went back into the bathroom. I could see all of this happening because my bedroom door was open.
Then, completely out of the blue, my mother yelled my name and told me to wake up.
Without missing a beat, my sister, from the other side of the room, yelled, “Come on, it’s time for you to wake up. Mom’s been yelling for about half an hour now.”
I couldn’t believe it.
I had been awake the entire time.
I had watched my mother get out of bed only moments earlier, yet the two of them instantly created an entirely different version of what had happened.
All that time, I had believed I was such a sound sleeper that I could sleep through anything. I was beginning to realize that the tag-team duo of my mother and sister had been distorting my perception—even my perception of my own sleeping patterns.
As the years went by, my mother’s anger became even more intense.
I remember one time my mother called me over and made me stand in front of her. She told me to tuck in my lower lip because it looked too much like my father’s.
I tried, but it wasn’t good enough for her.
She smacked me and told me to do it again.
Each time I failed to do it the way she wanted, she smacked me again until I finally got it right.
Other times, she beat me simply because she said I was acting like my father.
Another time, she kept hitting me in the face because, according to her, I wasn’t showing enough emotion. Each time I failed to show the emotion she wanted, she hit me again.
I was about eight years old.
There was a boy in the neighborhood whom my mother, my sister, and I all knew. At some point, he came out as gay.
When my mother heard about it, she giggled and wasted no time telling me that maybe I should be gay too, just like the boy down the street.
That wasn’t the last time she said it.
If I didn’t have a girlfriend, she would make fun of me and tell me that maybe I should be gay. Later, when I was a teenager and had problems with girlfriends, she would say things like, “You wouldn’t have these problems if you were gay.”
It became a recurring thing with her. Whenever something went wrong in my personal life, or whenever I didn’t have a girlfriend, she found another opportunity to suggest that I should be gay, usually while giggling about it.
Eventually, I stopped telling her about my personal life.
I simply didn’t want to give her anything else to use against me.
The punishment wasn’t limited to words.
My sister and I were often ordered to bend over the arm of the couch while my mother whipped us with a thick leather belt.
She would beat my sister, then tell me to take her place. Then my sister would take my place, and then I would take hers again.
We went back and forth like this until my mother finally grew tired of beating us.
One day, she took a brown suede belt with decorative metal rings attached to it and beat us with that.
The metal rings left little circular welts all over our bodies.
It was embarrassing to go to school, especially gym class, because the welts from the beatings were completely obvious.
The reasons for the beatings were often small.
A pair of missing scissors.
Not washing clothes the way she wanted.
Failing to do a chore correctly.
Whatever the reason, the punishment was often far greater than the mistake.
One time, after a particularly brutal beating of me and my sister, my mother called us back to interrogate us about why we had made her beat us so many times.
She asked us questions like, “You know this is the way I want it, right?”
We had to answer yes.
Then she said, “If you know how I want it and you don’t do it that way, then you’re asking for a beating.”
Again, we had to answer yes.
We were only about seven or eight, maybe eight or nine years old.
She pounded us with that twisted logic until she made us agree that we were somehow asking to be beaten.
In effect, she was making us agree that we were the masochists in order to hide her own sadistic ways.
Then she sent us off to our room, calling us “the bitch” and “the bastard,” and both my sister and I were called “masochists.”
My mother never cooked. Not once do I remember her preparing a meal.
My sister and I were expected to cook, clean, and take care of many of the household chores. We prepared her meals, set the table, and tried to stay out of trouble.
The worst thing was when my mother wanted a glass of water.
She could have been lying on the sofa with the kitchen only twenty feet away, but she wouldn’t get up to get it herself. Instead, she would yell for me or my sister to bring her a glass of water so she could take a single sip.
It didn’t matter if we were asleep or involved in doing something else.
When my mother wanted that glass of water, she wanted it when and where she wanted it, and she would never get up to get it herself.
I guess, to her, my sister and I were her little servants.
Anytime my mother wanted something, she called on us to do whatever she demanded.
She was the queen.
She was the mother.
In her mind, we were never allowed to disobey her. She constantly reminded us that we were to obey her, and only her.
My mother had several friends she spent time with on weekends. One of them was a woman named Estelle.
One day, I overheard my mother telling Estelle a story about when she was a little girl.
She said she hated going to the Greek Orthodox Church with her father. During the service, everyone held candles. My mother discovered that if she stared into the flame long enough, she would eventually faint.
She laughed as she described what happened next.
The older women in the church would rush over, carry her downstairs to the basement, fan her, and bring her a glass of water.
“It made me feel like Cleopatra,” she said.
I never forgot hearing her tell that story.
As I grew older, I began wondering if that feeling ever left her.
Looking back on my childhood, it often seemed that my sister and I existed to wait on her hand and foot. We cooked, we cleaned, and we brought her whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted it.
From my perspective, she still wanted to be Cleopatra.
Sometimes I wonder if this was how she treated my father before he finally left.
My mother discovered the feminist movement and started taking my sister and me to feminist meetings and outings. We saw Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm, and Gloria Steinem speak.
At one of these meetings, a curly-haired woman, probably in her late forties, was talking to my mother. She looked over at me and asked my mother to introduce her to the young boy standing there.
My mother introduced me as her son.
Almost immediately, the woman said something to the effect of, “You know you better treat women right. Women are your equals. You don’t own them.”
My mother slapped me on the head and said, “You hear what she said? Be nice to women.”
Another time, we went to an outing for a group called Parents Without Partners. We met in Battery Park.
My mother was talking to a woman with short hair and glasses who was wearing jeans. To me, she looked very masculine.
She asked my mother who I was, and my mother said, “That’s my son.”
The woman came down to my height, reached out, grabbed me by the crotch, held on tightly, and shook it.
She said something like, “This is not a weapon. Do you understand me?”
My mother laughed and said something to the effect of, “Yeah, I’m going to teach him right.”
As I got older, my world began to expand beyond our apartment.
My sister and I now attended I.S. 70 on West 17th Street in Manhattan. I loved meeting new friends and having new experiences.
For some reason, some of the boys picked on me, but my friend Dennis always stuck up for me. Nobody messed with me when Dennis was around.
Even to this day, in 2026, Dennis and I are still friends.
When school was out for the summer and my mother had to work, I would go over to Dennis’s house. We would watch wrestling, watch cartoons, or just play around with his brothers.
If we made too much noise, his mother would come in and yell at us. If we got out of line, she would take off her chancleta, the Puerto Rican word for a slipper or sandal, and give us a playful smack with it for being disrespectful.
Dennis and I would laugh at her attempts to punish us.
It was nothing like the beatings I was getting at home.
Then she would go back into the kitchen and cook us rice and beans and plátanos.
Being around Dennis’s family showed me something I hadn’t really understood before.
Adults could get angry with children without terrorizing them.
Dennis and I, along with some of our other friends, explored the abandoned piers in Chelsea. We walked along the High Line while it was still operational. We did a lot of fun stuff together.
It was fun being with Dennis and his family.
Dennis knew about the beatings I was getting at home. He told his mother what was happening and even asked her if she could adopt me.
Then the day came.
It was time for our beatings.
I don’t remember what it was for. Maybe we had left my mother’s laundry in the washing machine over the weekend.
Who knows?
It was my sister’s turn to go over the arm of the couch.
My mother started beating her.
My sister was crying and screaming.
Then it was my turn.
I walked over to the couch and bent over the arm.
My mother began beating me.
But this time, something was different.
I didn’t cry.
When it was over, I stood up and looked at my mother defiantly.
I motioned toward her, almost as if to say, “Now what?”
I saw fear in my mother’s face.
That was the last of those beatings.
In the days that followed, my mother sent telegrams to her mother and father in Cyprus, asking if I could come and stay with them.
Once she received confirmation that they would take care of me, she looked me in the eye one day and said, “I don’t like the way your sister and I are dominating you. You need to go and live with your grandparents. They will straighten you out for sure.”
I didn’t even know what the word “dominating” meant.
But even as a kid, I remember thinking: If she didn’t like the way she was treating me, why didn’t she just stop?
Or at least change?
Instead, I was the one who was leaving.
I was scared about what was going to happen to me. I was leaving everything I knew behind and going to live with my grandparents in Cyprus.
I didn’t even speak one word of Greek.
I said goodbye to Dennis, but before I left, I bet him ten dollars that he couldn’t get with a girl named Yvette, whom I had been pining for at school.
He later wrote to me in Cyprus saying that Yvette was now his girlfriend and that I owed him ten bucks.
He eventually married her.
I arrived in Cyprus, and my grandparents were there at the airport, hugging me, kissing me, and welcoming me.
They brought me to their home in Agios Theodoros, Larnaca, Cyprus, a small town with a population of about 800 people at the time.
Their property was nothing like anything I had known in New York.
In the yard was a structure that was about 400 years old, with newer structures built around the perimeter of the property. There was a hay storage area, a barn for the mules during the winter, a chicken house, a grain shed, and a tool shed. The bathroom was on the other side of the property. There was one pig out front, along with chickens, rabbits, and other animals.
I had gone from New York City to a place that seemed like another world.
On my first day there, my grandfather cooked a great meal and invited everybody over to say hello and welcome me.
The next day, my grandparents looked at the clothes I had brought with me and basically said, no, we have to buy you new clothes.
We went into town and bought clothes, shoes, sneakers, and a couple of school uniforms because I was going to school there.
I attended the American Academy in Larnaca, the closest English-speaking school to where my grandparents lived at the time. The school was filled with English-speaking kids whose parents came from countries all over the world. Some of their parents were in Cyprus on work contracts. Others had retired there.
Every school day, I rode a rickety old 1943 Bedford bus about 20 miles to school and another 20 miles back home.
My grandmother made me change my school uniform every single day. I would wear one uniform while she washed the other so it would be ready for me to wear again.
When my grandfather came home, he would cook a great meal, we would eat, and eventually we would go to sleep.
It was a simple routine, but for me it was completely different from the life I had left behind.
On weekends, especially during the summer, I went into the fields with my grandfather and helped with the farming.
There was no tractor.
We worked with two mules.
My grandfather used to take me places with him, and we went to church every Sunday. I didn’t understand what the priest was saying, but that didn’t really matter to me.
I felt proud just being there with my grandfather.
I felt proud walking beside him and being part of his life.
Every time my grandfather introduced me to someone, he introduced me as a man, not as a little boy. He would tell people that he was going to give me the best he could, that he was going to give me everything I needed, second to none.
I had never been treated that way before.
He made me feel like I mattered and that he expected something from me.
That was very different from being told that there was something wrong with me.
My grandfather had a very large 18-karat gold ring with a gold coin mounted on it. During my stay in Cyprus, I bought a similar ring with a gold coin on it, only smaller. I also bought a separate gold coin the same size as the one on my grandfather’s ring.
At the time, they were simply things that meant something to me.
Years later, they would become part of another story.
In all the time I lived with my grandparents, my grandfather slapped me three times.
Looking back at it now, I pretty much deserved it.
These were not the beatings my mother used to give me. He didn’t beat me over and over again, leave welts on my body, destroy my possessions, or make me agree that I had somehow asked for it.
These were three slaps over the entire time I lived with him, meant to get me back in line.
I had come there with very little direction, and my grandfather was trying to give me some.
There was another difference.
I respected him.
My grandparents spoke English, but almost everybody else around me spoke Greek, so I had very few friends in the beginning.
I still loved the place.
There was no television. There was no stereo. There were very few of the things I had been used to in America. There was one radio, and at night we would listen to the news.
It was a completely different life.
And somehow, despite having less, I felt like I had more.
By the time I was 14, the country had changed considerably since the Turkish invasion of 1974, and Cyprus was building up its military.
The Cypriot army came to my school and required every male student with a Greek last name to register at 14. It didn’t matter what country we came from. That was what we were told.
I don’t know why we had to register at that age. It wasn’t a matter of choosing whether to enlist. We were told we had to enlist.
Those were the rules.
My grandfather and I decided that it would be better for me to return to America than to end up in the Cypriot army.
I had been sent to Cyprus because my mother said my grandparents would “straighten me out.”
Instead, Cyprus had become home.
Now I had to leave it.
Before I left Cyprus to return to America, my grandfather gave me a handmade 18-karat gold cross with a ruby in the center, along with a nice chain so I could wear it around my neck.
It was one of the last things he gave me before I left.
We packed my bags, and in the summer of 1978, I returned to America and moved back in with my mother.
I was going back to the same family I had left behind.
But I was no longer the same kid who had left.
When I arrived at the airport in New York, I couldn’t find my mother.
I went over to the information booth at JFK International Airport looking for help.
Unbeknownst to all of us, we were standing only a short distance from one another. My sister was standing there with my mother, and then suddenly she yelled, “There he is,” and pointed in my direction.
I actually turned around to see who she was pointing at.
Then they recognized me, and I recognized them.
I had changed that much.
I was taller, darker, and much more muscular than when I had left.
We went back to my mother’s apartment. I moved into the larger of the two bedrooms, which I had to share with my sister.
Almost immediately, I remember thinking:
This is going to be hell.
I went into the bathroom, sat down on the toilet, put my head in my hands, and thought, I made the biggest mistake.
I could smell the stench of the cat box sitting next to me. I watched a roach or two running up the wall. From outside the bathroom, I could already hear my mother and sister arguing.
This was bad.
That apartment smelled worse to me than the place I had just left in Cyprus with the pigs, goats, sheep, and chickens.
Right then, my plan became very simple.
Get out of the apartment as early as possible.
Come home as late as possible.
Go to sleep.
Wake up, take a shower, and get out again.
I wanted to finish school, and I wanted to get out.
Two things had changed while I was away that I could see almost immediately.
My mother’s job had changed. When I left, she had been working in the parts department of an elevator company. Now she was working as a mechanic’s helper. Her job was basically to hand tools to the mechanic and clean up after them.
She also had a new boyfriend, Rocco Rugnetta, although everybody called him Rocky.
Rocky worked with my mother at the World Trade Center for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. He was an inspector.
Rocky was married.
Then, the next morning, my mother told me something I hadn’t expected.
We were going to see my father.
For the first time in years, he was about to be back in my life.
I was only 14 years old, and I didn’t know how I felt about seeing the man I had spent years being beaten for looking like and acting like.
My mother would later claim that she never taught her children to hate our father.
But I had spent years hearing about him and being punished because I supposedly looked like him or acted like him.
We went to his apartment.
He saw me and immediately hugged me.
He hugged me hard.
My arms stayed at my sides.
I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel.
I was in shock.
He was hugging me and whispering into my ear:
“I missed you. I missed you. I missed you.”
I just stood there.
Not a single emotion.
I remember exactly what was going through my mind.
Who is this man hugging me?
Why is he hugging me?
Why am I here?
My sister was already working for my father. He owned a carpet cleaning company that was fairly successful. I used to say that we were the carpet cleaning company to the stars.
My father’s clients over the years were a who’s who of celebrities and famous people. His client list included Truman Capote, Peter Sellers and his daughter Victoria Sellers, Barbara Walters, opera singer Maria Callas, Happy Rockefeller, Gene Simmons, and a host of others whose names I can’t even remember anymore.
I started working for my father because I wanted to make some money, but I really didn’t want much to do with him.
When I went out cleaning carpets, I stayed with the other workers and tried to stay away from my father as much as possible.
I didn’t want any connection with him.
I went to work, did the job, got paid, and that was about it.
After I had settled back into my mother’s apartment, she noticed the cross my grandfather had given me.
Before she even asked whether she could wear it, it was already around her neck.
She told me she was going to wear it for a couple of weeks.
Within a couple of weeks, she told me she had lost it.
The handmade 18-karat gold cross with the ruby in the center that my grandfather had given me before I left Cyprus was gone.
I had brought something home that connected me to my grandfather, and almost immediately, it disappeared.
During the school year, I worked mainly on weekends.
I attended Louis D. Brandeis High School when it was on 66th Street and Amsterdam Avenue.
My sister claimed that she was going to the same school.
I had a pretty outgoing personality, and within a few weeks, I knew everybody.
I never saw her.
Finally, I went to my mother and told her that my sister wasn’t going to school.
My mother looked at my sister.
“Are you going to school?”
My sister looked right back at her.
“Of course I am.”
That was all my mother needed to hear.
She slapped me in the head.
Gently this time.
By then, I was bigger, and she couldn’t beat up on me the way she once had.
She told me not to lie.
My mother never looked at a single report card in all our years in school. How was she supposed to know what was going on in school?
Later, when my mother wasn’t around, my sister gave it to me and called me a rat.
Once again, I learned exactly how things worked in that apartment.
My father shared an office with another company.
One Saturday, he asked me to come to work with him and the boys really early because we had a big job. We got to the office around seven in the morning.
My father opened the office, and we loaded the trucks in record time, maybe five or ten minutes. Then the office was locked up and we left.
When I got back to the office later, my sister was there waiting for me.
She immediately started yelling at me, accusing me of doing something to another guy’s shirt.
She blamed me immediately, even though other people had been in and out of the office.
I was in shock.
She kept yelling at me and then started hitting me.
This time, I hit her back.
I punched her right in the face and gave her a fat lip.
When my father came back to the office and saw what had happened, he talked to me. He told me that I shouldn’t hit my sister and that I wasn’t supposed to hit a woman.
When we got back to the apartment, my mother started yelling at me.
“You don’t hit your sister. You never hit your sister.”
Then my sister told everybody in the neighborhood what I had done.
Suddenly, I was the woman beater.
People in the neighborhood hated me.
I started sneaking out of the apartment and taking different routes so I wouldn’t have to run into anybody. I avoided the people in the neighborhood as much as I could.
What nobody in the neighborhood heard was everything that had happened before I hit her.
They heard that I punched my sister.
They didn’t hear that she had been hitting me.
And I didn’t tell them.
Several months went by, maybe even a year.
One day I came home, but instead of using my key, I rang the downstairs intercom. The intercom rang through the landline phone in the apartment.
My mother answered.
Then I heard her scream.
And then nothing.
Luckily, somebody was coming out of the building and I got inside.
I ran up 19 flights of stairs.
When I opened the apartment door, I saw my mother and sister lying on their sides on the floor.
My mother had both hands wrapped around my sister’s hair. While still holding on to her hair, she was using her upper arm—the part between her shoulder and elbow—to try to block my sister’s punches to her face.
Mirrors were broken.
Things were scattered all over the floor.
The telephone had been ripped out of the wall.
I just stood there.
Something inside me went numb.
I didn’t know what to do.
So I stepped over my mother and my sister and walked straight into my room.
A short time later, my sister got up and ran out of the apartment.
My mother was crying and extremely emotional. Eventually, she sat back down on the couch and called me over.
I don’t remember exactly what she said, but I remember one thing she kept repeating.
“Your sister is confused. Your sister is confused.”
Later, it was announced that my sister was going to live with one of her friends. My mother spoke with the friend’s parents, and they all agreed that she could stay there.
Looking back at it now, I came to believe that my sister had started that fight deliberately. I believe she wanted sympathy and wanted a reason to get out of our apartment and move in with her friend.
And there was another reason.
She thought her friend’s oldest brother was very cute.
I can’t know for certain what was going through my sister’s mind when that fight started. That was simply what I came to believe afterward.
What I did know was that my sister was gone.
For the first time, I had the larger bedroom to myself.
I decided to fix it up.
I scrubbed the floors, cleaned the windows, and painted the room. I even put several coats of a floor shiner called Mop & Glo on the floor.
It was the only nice-looking room in the apartment.
Within a few months, after I had done all that work, my mother decided she needed the bigger room for her bedroom.
My question was, why didn’t she take the bigger bedroom while I was away in Cyprus?
She only wanted it after I had scrubbed it, painted it, cleaned the windows, and made it the nicest room in the apartment.
Then she gave me the smaller, grimy room, the one she had never cleaned in all the years she had lived there.
So my mother and I switched rooms.
She took the larger bedroom.
I moved into the smaller one.
Once again, something I had put my time and effort into no longer belonged to me in the same way.
By then, I was beginning to understand something.
Getting bigger had stopped some of the beatings.
It had not stopped the control.
My mother had her routine down to a science.
The minute she got home from work, she took off her uniform, put on a nearly see-through nightgown, and lay down on the couch to watch television.
Every day, she washed her uniform. We didn’t have a dryer, so when the washing machine finished, she called me to take her clothes out and hang them up.
Once again, I was supposed to service her.
Get her a glass of water when all she wanted was a teaspoon-sized sip.
Change the channel on the television.
Take her uniform out of the washing machine.
Hang up her clothes.
Take out the garbage.
Taking out the garbage was always one of my jobs.
My mother always seemed to want me to be a garbage man, while she wanted her daughter, my sister, to be a doctor.
Even after I graduated from high school, she told me to get a copy of a newspaper called The Chief, which listed government jobs, and look for a job as a sanitation worker.
So taking out the garbage had another meaning to me.
To her, that was what she saw me as.
A garbage man.
Then one day, my mother started an argument with me.
About what, I have no idea.
She stood in the doorway of my room yelling and screaming at me.
I didn’t know how to react to her. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t even understand what was going on.
When she yelled, I stopped hearing her.
To this day, when somebody starts yelling at me, I don’t hear a damn thing they’re saying.
All I understand is that it is time to get away.
I tried to leave my room.
She blocked me.
I tried again.
She blocked me again.
Finally, I squeezed between her and the doorway and got past her.
Then she started screaming at the top of her lungs.
“Rape! Rape! Rape!”
She went back to the sofa and called 911.
I was maybe 16 years old at the time.
I didn’t know how to deal with the police, but I thought that if I stayed in my room and remained completely calm, the police would see that I was calm and that my mother was the one who was out of control.
The police arrived.
There was a male officer and a female officer.
My mother told them that I had hit her.
For some reason, she had a bruise on her arm.
I know I didn’t hit her.
Looking back on it now, I believe my mother may have bruised herself while I was in my bedroom with the door closed waiting for the police to arrive. I can’t know exactly what happened while I was in that room, but I know what I did and did not do.
The female officer came over to me.
“Why do you do this to your mother? Why do you do this to your mother? What’s wrong with you? Do you hate women?”
I never understood the concept as to why, if you had a conflict with one woman, all of a sudden people started accusing you of hating every woman.
There was almost a giggle in her demeanor, like she was trying to provoke me or get some kind of reaction out of me.
I thought that was extremely strange.
I felt like she was trying to humiliate me.
I tried to explain what had happened, but she didn’t want to hear it.
The male officer told me it would probably be better if I left for a couple of days until things calmed down.
So I left.
I stayed at a friend’s house for a couple of days.
When I came back, my mother was at work.
But the locks had been changed.
Again.
My friends and I in high school had learned how to pick locks, and I carried lock-picking tools in what I used to call my grab-and-go bag. These days, people would probably call it an everyday carry bag, or EDC bag.
I got back into the apartment.
Once inside, I saw the old lock cylinder sitting on the coffee table. I put the old cylinder back in the door so my mother’s old key, which was still on her key ring, would work again.
I took the new cylinder she had installed and put a drop of Elmer’s glue into it, rendering it useless so she couldn’t simply put it back and lock me out again.
The locks had come full circle.
I had grown up believing that my father had simply walked away from us.
Now my mother was changing the locks on me.
After that, I talked less and less to my mother.
But my sister told everybody in the neighborhood that I had beaten up my mother.
Once again, I was the woman beater.
I was the evil one.
After all those years of my mother and sister punishing me, teasing me, provoking me, and beating on me, somehow I was the evil one.
I was the one everybody blamed.
I never publicly answered the version of events my mother and sister were spreading.
For many, many decades, whenever any of it was brought up again, I never said a damn thing.
Their version was the version people heard.
My mother and I had another fight, another argument, and I just couldn’t take it anymore.
It was the summer of 1980.
I left the apartment with nowhere to go.
For a few nights, I slept in Central Park, where the hippies used to hang out all night, either behind the bandshell or near Sheep Meadow.
Then one day, I was walking around New York City and happened to sit down on the steps of an apartment building, just contemplating what I was going to do next.
Then my father came walking by.
It was strange because he didn’t live anywhere near there.
It just happened that way.
He told me that my mother was worried about me.
Then he looked at me and said I looked like I needed a shower.
Yeah, I really did.
He brought me back to his new apartment, which was about the size of a two-car garage, at 180 East 88th Street, Apartment 6, and I started living there.
Even though we were living in such tight quarters, I still tried to stay away from him as much as possible.
I still didn’t want much to do with him.
What I didn’t see at the time was the irony of it all.
Why had my father left the same woman I had just found myself unable to live with?
At that age, I still wasn’t putting those pieces together.
After I moved in with my father, my mother found the smaller ring and the separate gold coin I had bought in Cyprus.
She sold them, telling me that she needed the money.
She also claimed that she had found out the coins were replicas, not real gold coins. As far as she was concerned, that made it okay for her to sell my possessions.
Even my sister chimed in, telling me it was okay for my mother to take them and sell them because they weren’t real.
They were still mine.
First the cross my grandfather had given me had disappeared.
Now the ring and coin I had brought home from Cyprus were gone too.
I started my senior year of high school while living with my father.
I was about to start college when my father married his third wife.
She moved in right away.
I liked her very much, but I knew I didn’t fit there anymore.
Eventually, I moved back into my mother’s apartment.
That wasn’t what I had planned.
I had spent years wanting to get out, and now I was right back where I had started.
I finished two years of college, double majoring in physics and electrical engineering.
I wanted so badly to finish my degree, but I didn’t have the money or the emotional strength to keep going.
My original plan had failed.
Around that time, my mother broke up with Rocky.
She later told him that if he bought her an ounce of gold, she would come back to him.
After my mother broke up with Rocky, she would sometimes talk about her work partner. His nickname was Whitey because his skin was so pale it was almost pink, and he had nearly albino features. My mother worked as his helper.
One day, I came home from school, opened the apartment door, and saw Whitey and my mother on the couch.
Whitey immediately got up, buckled his pants, and rushed out the door.
My mother was giggling.
She pushed past me, and I went into my bedroom and minded my own business.
That weekend, my mother had the guts to go to a company picnic or some kind of company gathering where Whitey and his wife, Margie, were both going to be.
Once again, I later heard my mother talking about the whole thing on the phone with her friend Estelle.
Then, for some reason, my mother was not working with Whitey anymore.
Eventually, there was a new boyfriend.
His name was Teddy.
Teddy was a Greek guy who worked in a diner. He drank, smoked, and gambled. I don’t know how my mother met him, but suddenly Teddy was her new boyfriend.
One day, I heard my mother talking on the phone with her friend Estelle. She was telling Estelle how sorry she felt for Teddy because his wife had kicked him out of the house, made false accusations against him, and didn’t want him anywhere near his son.
I remember thinking about the irony of it.
After everything I had heard growing up about my own father, my mother now felt sorry for a man who claimed that his wife had done essentially the same thing to him.
The circle of life.
My mother never seemed to see the irony.
Meanwhile, I was still living in her apartment, not knowing what I was going to do with my life.
After my grandfather passed away in Cyprus, my grandmother wanted to return to New York, where she had grown up and made her home. She had been born in Pennsylvania, but New York was home to her.
My mother took her in and opened a bank account so she could transfer her money from Cyprus.
When my grandmother returned to the United States, she gave me my grandfather’s ring—the large 18-karat gold ring with the gold coin mounted on it.
At some point after she gave it to me, that ring disappeared.
I don’t know what happened to it, and I never saw it again.
My suspicion is that my mother or my sister took it, but I don’t know for certain.
By then, I had no plan anymore because the plan I had made for myself had failed.
I started working for moving companies, hoping I could save enough money to eventually get my own apartment.
Then something happened.
Within a few weeks of my grandmother’s return, my mother wrote a check for $27,000 from that account and bought the tiny restaurant where Teddy worked.
She used my grandmother’s money to buy a restaurant for her boyfriend, but she didn’t have the money to help her son achieve his goals.
Since I was out of work at the time, she asked me to work for her.
For years afterward, I told a lot of my friends that I owned the restaurant.
That was a lie.
I never owned it.
But in a lot of ways, I might as well have.
I was the one paying the employees, keeping the records, hiring and firing people, ordering the food, and ordering the equipment.
I was handling much of the day-to-day operation of the place.
My mother promised to pay me $100 a week.
At the time, I thought that was fair.
I had free rent. I didn’t have to pay for gas or electricity. I could eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the restaurant, so most of my food was covered too.
And for some reason, things at home became quieter.
My mother had Teddy living in the next bedroom, I was working for her, and she mostly left me alone.
I looked at the whole arrangement as an opportunity.
If I could keep my expenses almost nonexistent and save whatever money I made, maybe I could eventually afford to go back to college for another year.
That became my new plan.
Around this same period, maybe a year or two earlier, my sister had gotten an apartment in Brooklyn with her friend.
At one point, my sister and her roommate decided to go on a wild adventure. They hitchhiked from New York City to San Bernardino, California, to attend the US Festival, which had been heavily advertised on MTV.
One evening, I came home and immediately noticed a different look on my mother’s face.
I asked her what was wrong.
“Nothing.”
Just then, the telephone rang.
I answered it.
It was my sister.
She and her roommate had run out of money and had no way of getting back to New York. They had been out in the California sun so long that they were badly sun poisoned and their skin was peeling.
Then I found out that they had already called my mother.
My mother had answered the telephone and hung up on them.
She wasn’t going to spend the money to bring her own daughter home.
I told my sister, “I’ll take care of it.”
I didn’t have a credit card back then, and it was already around nine or ten o’clock at night. The only way I knew how to get them airline tickets that late was to go directly to the airport and pay cash.
So I took a cab from Manhattan all the way to JFK Airport.
I went to the airline ticket counter, paid cash for two one-way tickets, and arranged for my sister and her roommate to get the tickets in California.
Then I took another cab all the way back to Manhattan.
The next day, I went to the airport and picked them both up when they arrived. I got them a cab back to their apartment, and before I left, I slipped my sister a thousand dollars to help her get back on her feet.
There was another reason I did all of this.
I wanted my sister to know, and I wanted my mother to know, that I was on their side.
I wasn’t the enemy.
Then my sister became pregnant.
Almost immediately, she started staying back at my mother’s apartment.
Neither my mother nor my sister would explain to me what was going on.
While my sister was living with me and my mother, the two of them were relentless in finding problems with me.
If I came home and the door closed a little too hard, they accused me of slamming it.
They nitpicked every little thing I did, and each one of them always supported the other.
If they heard me take off my shoes, they immediately told me I had to wash my feet.
It was horrendous.
Eventually, I tried to say something.
I wanted to tell them, look, I was there when you needed me. When you were stranded in California, I spent my own money to get you home. I gave you money when you needed help.
I was there for you.
But I never even got the chance to finish the sentence.
The minute I started with, “I gave you money…”
They both pounced on me.
“What, you want it back?”
“You can’t get blood from a stone.”
They shut me down before I could explain what I was actually trying to say.
I didn’t want the money back.
That wasn’t the point.
The point was that when my sister needed me, I was there for her.
So why were they treating me like this?
Later, I found out that my sister was hiding the pregnancy from the man she had gotten pregnant by, a one-night stand with an alcoholic.
Soon afterward, my nephew was born.
One of the things my mother warned me about when I was a little kid was that if I ever left my family, she would disown me.
But here she was helping my sister hide her pregnancy from the man she had slept with.
She was helping hide his child from him.
I never understood the contradiction.
Eventually, my sister got an apartment in the projects, in the same neighborhood, only about two blocks away.
Over the years, she had three sons by three different men. There were marriages, divorces, and relationships in between, and eventually she was raising three boys.
My life was changing too.
By then, I was working on Wall Street using the computer knowledge I had developed, and I had my own apartment in Astoria, Queens.
After all those years of trying to get out, I finally had.
I tried to visit my nephews whenever I could.
As they got older, something started bothering me.
They began telling me how terrible their grandfather was.
Their grandfather was my father.
They told me that he had cheated on my mother and repeated stories about things that supposedly happened between my parents years before any of them were even born.
They weren’t there.
They didn’t know.
Everything they knew about their grandfather had come through my mother and my sister.
The same narrative I had grown up hearing was now being passed down to another generation.
Over time, the story even seemed to change.
My mother eventually claimed that my father had cheated on her and that she had contracted chlamydia because of him.
That claim always bothered me, and years later I spent a lot of time researching it.
The infection itself existed and was being studied in the 1960s, but chlamydia as a distinct sexually transmitted clinical entity did not emerge until the 1970s. That left me questioning how my mother could have been specifically diagnosed with sexually transmitted chlamydia around 1968, as she later claimed.
I can’t prove today what diagnosis she was actually given or what happened medically between my mother and father.
I wasn’t there.
But by then, I had learned to question stories about my father that I had once simply accepted.
What also struck me was the contradiction.
My mother accused my father of infidelity, yet she herself repeatedly became involved with married men.
She knowingly became the other woman in somebody else’s marriage.
Yet years later, she portrayed my father’s alleged infidelity as proof of what a terrible man he had been.
My nephews wanted nothing to do with their grandfather.
Not because of anything I knew of that they had personally experienced with him.
They had been told who he was before they ever had the opportunity to decide for themselves.
The narrative I grew up with had survived another generation.
Ever since I got my own apartment in 1986, I think I visited my mother maybe two or three times.
In 2008, I received a contract to do work at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
After working there for a few years, I met an older woman who lived near me. Sometimes we shared the train ride from New Jersey back into New York City.
We talked about different things, and eventually I mentioned that my mother had worked for Otis Elevator at the World Trade Center.
She looked surprised.
“Oh my God. I know your mother. I know her.”
Then she seemed to get a little embarrassed because she also knew that my mother had been involved with a married man named Rocky.
There were a few other people around my office who had known my mother too. Every once in a while, one of them would come over to meet me.
I was almost embarrassed every time.
Eventually, my mother moved to Arizona.
She died in 2015.
When my mother died, my sister called me while I was at work.
I went into my boss’s office and told him that my mother had died and that I needed to go to Arizona for a couple of weeks, where, coincidentally, my nephew was living at the time.
My boss seemed puzzled by my complete lack of emotion.
As I prepared to leave, I told some of my coworkers that my mother had died.
They seemed puzzled too.
There was no emotion.
I did not shed a single tear.
Nothing.
When I got to Arizona, I thanked my nephew and his wife for taking care of her during her final days.
But I still did not shed a tear.
And then there is the elephant in the room—the truth that had been sitting directly in front of me my entire life, and I still don’t understand why I couldn’t see it.
My mother was cruel to everyone closest to her.
She screamed at her own father after he rescued her, fed her children, and gave us a place to live.
She took her mother into her home, gained access to the money she had brought back from Cyprus, and within weeks used $27,000 of it to buy a restaurant for her boyfriend.
She beat her children with broomsticks, leather belts, and metal rings.
She destroyed the things we created.
She humiliated us.
She manipulated us.
She turned us against our father and then forced us to accept responsibility for the pain she inflicted.
Her cruelty was not an isolated act or an occasional loss of control.
It was a pattern that followed her through every relationship—with her father, her mother, her husbands, her boyfriends, her daughter, and me.
Yet for most of my life, I remained blind to her evil and sadistic ways.
I continued accusing my father of leaving the house without ever truly asking what had driven him out.
For most of my life, I knew that I wanted to get away from my mother.
What took me much longer to question was why I still blamed my father for leaving her.
I had watched her scream at the father who had taken us in and fed us. I had lived through the beatings, the humiliation, the destroyed belongings, the changed locks, and the constant manipulation.
She could hurt us and then demand that we agree we had made her do it.
Yet even after I had left her apartment with nowhere to go, I continued to hold my father’s departure against him.
I needed to escape, but somehow I had never allowed myself to consider that he might have felt the same need.
I still don’t know everything that happened between my parents.
I know what my mother told me.
I also know what it was like to live with her.
Those are not the same thing.
My mother accused my father of infidelity, yet she herself was the affair partner four separate times—the other woman in relationships in which men were unfaithful.
For years, I accepted her version of my father without truly questioning the contradictions I had witnessed with my own eyes.
That is the final irony of the whole story:
I blamed my father for walking away from the same cruelty that I eventually had to escape myself.