Been Reading - Old World Daughter, New World Mother

Old World Daughter, New World Mother by Maria Laurino

Sacrificio, sacrifice, spilled from the lips of Italian-American women of my mother's generation like sugar poured into espresso as they resigned themselves to sweeten life's bitterness, usually at the expense of their own desires. From the point of view of a daughter whose mother stepped back, allowing me to step forward, I had no use for this servile female role. Inherent in any act of sacrifice is both beauty and destruction - the surrender of self to aid another - but I could see only loss in the equation, and questioned how anyone could spend a lifetime caught in this interlaced pas de deux. It wasn't until I became a mother that I better recognized how sacrifice, and its essential component compassion, are integral parts of life because no one is ever fully independent unless living in a fictive neverland of the never young, never sick, never old.