The Baby.

They called me the baby. My parents were middle-aged when they had me. Let’s just say I was a surprise. I always felt my parents sheltered me, yet I was in the middle of it all. I was the one who sat quietly with my Keane-sized blue eyes, watching. I was just a little scrawny thing in the back seat, taking it all in.

It wasn’t until I became a mother and began raising my two children that I even questioned my childhood.

I never wondered why we were picking out Christmas decorations from the back of a truck, or why we moved in the middle of the night. I thought every kid knew what a sawbuck was and kept track of the point spread on every ball game. Even when I came home from school to find that the FBI (at least I think it was the FBI) destroyed my room, ripped my canopy bed in half and tore apart every toy and board game I owned, I never questioned who the bad guys were; it certainly wasn’t us. Because through all the Italian swear words, we were loved. Our home was filled with love and laughter, and the rest, well, somehow it didn’t really matter. We had all we could ever ask for.

I remember having a lot of money as a child, and sometimes no money at all. I literally had stacks of twenties in my little girl purse, or was with my dad parking the car several blocks from home so the repo-man wouldn’t find it. I spent my summers at the race track and sat in the car while dad “took care of a few things,” but somehow even all of this seemed, well, normal.

There were celebrities coming to dinner, lots of people with funny nicknames, and incredible food. I really thought I was the luckiest kid in town.

My mother and father were all about the show. They loved to entertain. It came natural to them. They were much more impressed with the story of the fast buck than any sort of traditional path of life. This could be what led my sister and I to the music business that managed to intertwine the people and places of our parents.

Strangely, this continued my delusion that everyone must have stories like ours. Stories of musicians, mobsters, celebrities, and maybe even a serial killer. But as I would have dinner parties with new friends, or hang with mothers on playdates, I’d tell a story or two. Possibly what I thought was an anecdote to our conversation was more of a shock and awe at what truly would be just the tiniest part of a story. This was a huge awakening for me. My life, our lives were… different.