A friend wrote to me after last week’s blog:

“Wow, this really hit home. My husband has been dealing with a difficult family situation for years, and he finally made the decision to get up off those nails. He realized that the pain of staying had become greater than the fear of getting up. I know he is going to be in a better place with himself and his son.”

Her message stayed with me because it reminded me of my son, who suffered a 14-year heroin addiction. In an effort to understand addiction better, several years ago I interviewed 42 recovering addicts and alcoholics from around the world and asked, “What brought you to recovery?”

The majority answered without hesitation: “When the consequences of my actions became too painful to live with.” Only then – when the pain point of using became so intense – did the people I interviewed decide it was time to get off the nail.

Today, my son is 19 years sober, and our family lives in deep gratitude. But my son had to reach that decision himself, in his own time, when the pain of staying the same outweighed the fear of change.

As parents and spouses, we want to protect those we love from making mistakes, but sometimes we can’t. We can support, love, and guide – we can stay close, but each person has to decide when he or she is ready.

My hardest lesson.

I heard this story from a Buddhist practitioner:

“A man notices a dog sitting on a porch, whining in pain.
He asks, ‘What’s wrong with you? Why are you whining?’
The dog answers, ‘I’m sitting on a nail … and if I get up, it will hurt too much.’” 

So the dog continues to sit because he feels safer choosing the pain he knows over the pain he fears might come with change.

I remember this story well because I was like that dog. I was in pain, but I was afraid to move. I was afraid to get up.

We all have nails – some big, some small. Nails that hurt us, poke at us, and keep us in a state of quiet unrest. Some are career nails: work that drains us. Some are relationship nails – we don’t leave for fear of being alone. Others are health nails, friendship nails, family nails.

For me, at age fifty-four, four major “nails” collided in my life: I was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a bilateral mastectomy; my father died; my firstborn son was addicted to heroin; and I left the school community where I had served as Head of School for seventeen years.

With all of these nails, I felt adrift – aching, beaten down, and lost.
But it was because of this pain – not in spite of it – that I finally found the courage to change my life.

That moment became the beginning of It Takes a Lifetime to Learn How to Live.

The truth is simple, and not always easy to accept: At some point, the pain of staying becomes greater than the fear of getting up.

…and we all have the possibility of getting up. The question is when.

In Italy, Easter is known as “the feast of feasts” and is more important than Christmas. Easter marks the resurrection of Christ – the heart of the Christian story. Christmas celebrates Christ’s birth, but Easter is the reason that birth matters.

You can feel it in the days of Holy Week that lead up to it. Churches fill, bells echo through the streets, and towns come alive with processions and reenactments of the crucifixion. From Holy Thursday through Easter Sunday, there’s a sense of anticipation. Everything softens on Pasquetta, the Monday after Easter, when people picnic in the fresh air and enjoy the warmth of a burgeoning spring.

But more than anything, Easter is about gathering. Families and friends arrive, and the day unfolds slowly around the table. There’s time for conversation, laughter, and the quiet comfort of being together.

And then there’s food. Lamb roasting, spring vegetables, slices of Colomba di Pasqua – a soft, dove-shaped cake symbolizing peace and renewal – are passed around at the end of the meal. Children delight in breaking open large chocolate eggs to discover the surprises hidden inside.

In Florence, the celebration returns to a tradition dating back to the late 1400s: the Scoppio del Carro, or Explosion of the Cart. A team of white oxen pulls a towering, 30-foot cart through the streets, stopping in front of the Duomo. During Mass, the priest lights a mechanical dove that shoots from the church’s high altar to ignite the cart in a burst of fireworks. It’s loud, sudden, and dazzling—a symbol of faith, renewal, and hope for the year ahead.

Buona Pasqua! I hope your Easter was filled with joy and a sense of renewal. And if it wasn’t, I wish you peace with the onset and beauty of spring.

Now that our parents have passed, my older brother, JF, is the official holder of memories. Not only that, but he’s the first-born son and grandson. In the Italian tradition, it doesn’t get much more important than that.

He recently wrote, “I’ll be seeing Nana soon…I am 78 and in poor health…and that will be a treat for me. Loved that woman!”

I adore my brother, so I wanted to share something he wrote last week in response to my blog entry:

“When I feel blocked or boxed in, in the grand tradition of Italians everywhere, I complain. Just let it out. And figure tomorrow will be better. And if it isn’t, then the next day. Take your wins when you can, because the losses will find you.

But getting back to Italians…my people…I would never want to be of any other nationality of origin…my sainted Nana (that’s what I called her…my sister uses the more proper Nonna in her book) never had a good day. When I would see her I would always ask, ‘How you feelin’ today, Nana?’ And the answer would always be (read it with a nice Italian accent), ‘Oh, no good, no good. Me no feel good.’ Meanwhile this old Italian lady, who grew up HARD, and never felt good, could outwork me 15 days a week and 55 days a month.

I suppose if you say you feel great you’re inviting the Evil Eye, and Nana was the designated neighborhood remover of the Evil Eye. But what a woman! She was the best.

I remember the first time I ever cried out of sadness—not pain, but sadness. I was maybe five years old, lying in bed, ready to fall asleep, when for some reason I pictured Nana dying. It made me cry like hell.”

Reading that, I realized something: Sometimes, if you’re lucky, someone loves you so much it hurts. The kind of love that fills you up and keeps you safe, even years later.

He loved that woman.

She was Nonna

My granddaughter in front of my grandmother’s home in Rotondella

A friend wrote to me after reading last week’s post: “When I was twenty, I first visited my grandparents’ village of Saint Ippolito outside Cosenza in Calabria. I was fortunate to go from house to house meeting families throughout the town. Since then, I’ve returned a half dozen times, trying to understand my heritage and how it continues to shape our lives.

That first journey helped me understand the significance of place and the incredible reservoir of knowledge and history that has made my life so much richer.

I wish I could transmit my enthusiasm and deep gratitude. I encourage anyone who wants to discover their roots to go. Take the deep dive—it’s so worth it. For me, nothing compares to the warmth and personal connection of time in my ancestral village.”

My reflection: When I read his words, I felt his enthusiasm and gratitude because I felt the same thing when I discovered Rotondella.

Today’s thought: In 2024, more than eight million Americans traveled to Italy. But for those who want to understand their past, the deepest connections happen in the small towns and villages where their families once lived. Stories heard around the dinner table begin to take on new life.

For Americans whose families came from Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Poland, or countless other places, the same opportunity exists: to walk the streets their ancestors once walked and to see the landscapes that shaped their lives.

Millions of Americans travel abroad every year. But a journey to the town or village your family once called home can become something more than tourism.

It can become a return – a return to a place, a story, and perhaps even a deeper understanding of yourself and your family.

Where might your own ancestral road lead if you chose to follow it?

Read the review HERE

I was honored to see my memoir, It Takes a Lifetime to Learn How to Live: An Italian-American Story of Coming Home, recently reviewed in the March issue of The Florentine, an English-language publication based in Florence, Italy.

The author, Alexandra Lawrence, asks the question that sits at the heart of the book: Can the land of our ancestors heal us?

In 2000, when my life was collapsing, I set off alone to Italy to find my grandparents’ ancestral village of Rotondella. There I found the open arms of family, but I also uncovered the lingering shadows of the malocchio, omertà, rigid Catholicism, abject poverty, arranged marriage, patriarchal control, and the Mafia.

Slowly, I began to understand how these forces shaped not only my grandmother’s life, but also my mother’s – and my own. By honoring the courage of the women who came before me, I found the grace to make peace with my mother. And in that understanding, I found peace within myself.

I began writing this story in the summer of 2000. When my mother heard about the project, she was not happy.

“You can write about your grandmother, Missy,” she said. “But you can’t write about me. No one needs to know about my life—not even you.”

Since she was the critical link between my grandmother and me, I set the writing aside.
Twelve years later – just five days before she died – she showed incredible courage and vulnerability. My feisty mom, despite all the fraught and difficult moments we had lived through, said,

“My life would make a good book, wouldn’t it?”
“But you told me I wasn’t allowed to write about you,” I countered.
She paused, then said simply:
“After I die, write.”

And with her permission, I did.

So, to answer Alexandra’s question, returning to the land of my ancestors did help to heal me. And for that, I’ll be eternally grateful.

With my Nonna, long before I knew about love stories

Romantic love may be the love we notice first and the love we talk about first, but it’s not always the love that shapes us or touches us most deeply. For me, It Takes a Lifetime to Learn How to Live: An Italian-American Story of Coming Home is a love story.

It is the love story of a child and her nonna in the kitchen, where love simmered slowly in pots of tomato sauce, filling the house with a sense of peace. It is the love story of a mother and daughter learning, over time, to understand one another, to accept each other, and to find peace together. Not perfectly, but enough. Most of all, it is a love story about coming home – not just to a place, but to self.

The truest love stories might not be about romance at all. They might be about learning how to open your heart to others, to your past, and sometimes to your own imperfect self.

Maybe a love story is simply the story of coming home.

And maybe it takes a lifetime to understand that love was there all along.

My younger son once said to me, “You don’t have to tell us what you think. We already know.”

Curious (and slightly defensive), I turned to my older son. “Is that true?”

His response was clear. “Yes. After all these years, we already know what you think and how you’ll respond. Now we learn how to live by watching the way you live.”

That moment changed me.

I suddenly felt the full weight of my actions. My sons weren’t moved by my lectures, reminders, or sage advice. They were learning from my reactions. My actions. My tone. My patience. My choices. By watching the way I lived – and I’m sure the same was true of their father – they were absorbing what to do… and what not to do.

I remember thinking, when I was young, that I would never say the things my mother said to me. I would never lose my temper the way she did. I would do better. That was a deliberate choice. But I wasn’t always successful. There were moments when I heard her words come out of my mouth before I could stop them, and instantly I wanted to grab them back. I wanted to pull them out of the air and swallow them whole. Too late.

Over time, I learned something even more important: how to apologize. I learned to say, “I was wrong. I’m sorry.” I learned to admit when my frustration spilled over. That, too, was something worth modeling.

The tapes of our youth play in our minds. We can’t erase them. The voices, the reactions, the patterns are imprinted in our brains. But we can become aware of them. We can pause. We can choose differently. We can lower our voices. We can soften our responses. We can try again. Every generation carries forward both wounds and wisdom.

Our children are always watching. And whether we intend to or not, by our actions and reactions, we are teaching them how to live.

The opening lines of IT TAKES A LIFETIME read:

Comfortable as a priest before the altar, Carmela stands at her stove.

Her right arm moves in familiar circles as she stirs rich red sugo with

a wooden spoon—the spoon that never hits me. While she cooks, she

moves her lips slowly in prayer. The scent of her heavenly tomato-

and-garlic sauce quiets me, fills me with peace.

Food was Nonna’s love language.

When I ran to her house with the heavy heart of a child, she didn’t ask questions. She cooked. Linguini with ricotta. Crispelle dusted in sugar. Spaghetti topped with mudika. Falahoni and fresh baked bread. “Mangia, mangia,” she would say, urging me to eat, to take in comfort the best way she knew how to give it.

Her kitchen was her sanctuary. The stove, her altar. The scent of tomato and garlic quieted my fears long before I could name them. I didn’t know then that she was wrapping me in love.

In my own kitchen, I am not the cook she was, but when the aroma of chicken and peppers fill the air, my sons know they are home before they even open the door. Chicken pastina soup simmers on the stove when they are ill. Meatballs, bracciole, stuffed shells, orecchiette remind them of who they are and where they come from.

I understand now what Nonna was teaching me without words: sometimes love is not spoken. Sometimes it is stirred slowly in a pot and served at the table.

Food is more than nourishment. It is memory. It is heritage. It is love made visible.