How Creative Resilience Saved Me
I’ve spent half my life running from my past, and the second half running towards it
After the Funeral
Hours after my estranged mother’s funeral, my brother and I would stay up until 4 a.m. chatting in the deserted, low-lit hotel lounge right outside the city limits of Northeast Philadelphia, sitting on a nondescript, L-shaped sofa while we each clutched a decorative throw pillow over our chests like super plush body armor.
I hadn’t seen my brother in well over a decade. There was no falling out per se, no fight — not at all. I love my brother; I love all my siblings. I chalk our awkwardness up to our dysfunctional childhood: second-generation Italian on our mother’s side, growing up in a 1950s row house in Northeast Philly that was prone to chronic leaks, where we spent our summers perusing the old, urban ruins of Byberry Mental Hospital — our neighborhood’s golden rite of passage, taking off on our trusty bikes like the cast of E.T., or Stranger Things.
The Wonder Years
Our parents fought constantly. Sometimes our home got scary with the constant fighting and verbal threats, especially for my older siblings. I’d coin my growing up period, being the youngest of seven — “The Cold War,” although I do remember witnessing a few bad fights when I was little.
By the time I got to middle school, my parents would mellow out, but there was a chronic, distinct chill in the air. In fact, from the time I was four until around the age of ten, I would sleep in a sleeping bag on the floor right next to my mother’s bedside like a loyal Labrador. Hell, my own two dogs, a lab-beagle mix and a standard poodle — both rescues, sleep on my California king bed under a soft blanket — no hard floor for them.
Years later, one of my brothers told me that the real reason I started in my parents’ bedroom, on the floor at four, was because my mother wanted to give my sister her own bedroom as she was almost twelve years older than me, already a teenager by then, and sharing a tiny room with a literal baby sister was probably cramping her style. But four turned into six and six turned into nine — you get the pattern. It was never my choice, and later I would get ridiculed for it as if it had been.
At forty, my therapist would inform me that sleeping on my mother’s floor all those years was a form of abuse, what particular brand — I don’t know for sure, maybe enmeshment? As a result, my father would treat me like a perpetually annoying cockblock, which may have been my mother’s point all along.
It didn’t help when our parents left Roman Catholicism sometime after my Christening in the mid-seventies for the pre-Moral Majority era brand of Evangelical Christianity — creating a chasm between extended family and neighbors within our close, Catholic community. At the time, we were the only Italian, Born-again Christians / Baptists I knew of in our neighborhood. Our world went from Us to Them seemingly overnight.
We were semi-ostracized by our large, extended Italian family for a time, maybe even a few years. When everyone reconciled their religious differences, we’d come back together again for Sunday pasta dinner at our grandmother’s house. But even at the formative age of six, I was able to glean the undercurrent of animosity. The constant tension was palpable.
Yet, we’d continue to return for Sunday dinners, holidays, birthday parties, and life’s big celebrations until I left for college in the mid-nineties, and completely lost touch. My childhood and teen years now feel like one big, vaporous mirage as if familial estrangement was always in my deck of cards, even with a huge family like ours.
In 2008, one of my poems was published in a now-defunct New York literary review about the “Us versus Them” aspect of childhood. Here’s an excerpt:
We learned young
religion was thicker
than blood,
blood thicker
than San Pellegrino…….The stigma soon stung
in Northeast Philadelphia,
where I grew up playing Barbie’s
with Irish, Catholic school girls;
attending their Holy Communions
in bland, Baptist dresses,
envying the way
their white dresses twirled —
AND OH HOW THEY’D TWIRL,
those prepubescent,
little brides of Christ.I was never truly trusted
by their mothers.
When I asked one of my brothers back in 2012 how he lived with all the elephants in the room, he’d respond in a rather matter-of-fact tone as if the answer was universally obvious to everyone but me: “I carry peanuts in my pockets.”
I would later write a poem entitled “Elephants,” included in my second book Coupling, inspired by his response. Here’s an excerpt:
To get along
in certain circles
sometimes meant
living with elephants.The smart ones
carried peanuts
inside their pockets.I was not one
of the smart ones.
When you grow up in a kind of closed family system, odd behavior becomes the norm. I learned early on not to ask any questions, and not to seek truth that could reveal hidden family secrets. So when I watched my mother feverishly chop all her hair off over the bathroom sink — resembling the super cropped hairstyle of Mia Farrow’s pregnant, bewildered character from Rosemary’s Baby, who’d then proceed to take my friend and I to Woolworth’s so she could try on wig after wig — never once resonated to me as odd, or slightly strange. It was just my Mom, and I loved and adored her like an exiled Ave Maria, with all my heart. In some ways, she was a sympathetic character.
I learned at an early age to disassociate, something I still struggle with even today, affecting my closest and dearest relationships. I had a whole inner life — a rich imagination that I also see in my two beautiful daughters as well — my safe space that I still tap into today. When I’m in the zone, that singular focus, I can lose huge blocks of time as if the concept of time bears no meaning at all.
Hope
As a teenager, I began sketching fashion designs in my bedroom for hours, dreaming of a successful career in high fashion, far away from my family; far away from Bucks County. I would daydream about living in a cool, warehouse loft apartment with a freight elevator just like that crazy, blonde bitch with the close-set eyes from Fatal Attraction, a place downtown in the middle of big city nightlife. I knew it was a tall order, but back then I had a hope that hung heavier than the moon.
In 1992, I came up with a shoe idea while sketching in my bedroom, the size of a large closet, that would later materialize into an actual LLC called Kiss My Feet via Sole Keepers in 1999, after I was introduced to a successful entrepreneur, who would hire the patent attorney in Washington, D.C., finance flights and hotel stays in New York when we flew there to meet with top V.P.’s of shoe companies, including Nine West, Skechers, Kenneth Cole, FUBU, Candies Shoes, and JC Penney in Plano, Texas. Nine West had our prototypes shipped to their White Plains office. Things were moving along at a steady pace.
The shoe idea came about because I didn’t like to carry a purse, which still stands true today, all these years later. In short, I like having my hands free. I like having options. I must note that the entrepreneur would lend his marketing expertise to the enterprise, creating new vertical markets and even cool utility features like the ingenious hinged door at the back heel/sole of the fitness shoe.
What if the soles of my shoes could carry my keys, which I was always losing — holding make-up like lipstick, even cash and subway cards? What if various products could be pre-sold and packaged within the soles of the shoes from the chunky boot, the platform sneaker, the athletic shoe, or trainer, the beach sandal, and the hiking boot, to name a few? This could create new revenue via diverse brand partnerships. We envisioned a Sole Keepers market within every demographic, especially the youth and teen markets. It was a real team effort.
The momentum began in 1998, after showing my then-boyfriend, now husband, a bunch of my old fashion designs from high school. My shoe idea caught his eye, and he was intrigued, and said it had promise.
We started the operation on our own, at first — just the two of us, even though we were twenty-three and twenty-four, respectively, and I should add — broke. Back then, I spent my lunch hour calling shoe companies in New York on my cell phone, even speaking to Steve Madden of the Steve Madden shoe brand, who was generous enough to take my call and give me the time of day. That’s when I realized I had a knack for cold calling, which is now considered an archaic skill in today’s fast-paced, digital world.
Cold calling taught me the power of the buzzword — the elevator pitch. The same theory of cold calling can be applied to the art of writing. I have a moment, maybe 30 seconds if I’m lucky, to engage my reader in my essay, short story, review — poem, and I better do it right. And the pitch better be good.
Finding Creative Resilience
Some people have told me that they were drawn to the “immediacy and energy” in my writing as if my life depended on it — the irony.
I would attribute cold calling, the shoe idea, hours and hours of sketching, and later my love of writing to my dysfunctional upbringing, that need to go deep within myself, something called creative resilience — the Phoenix rising from the ash, that chronic fire in the belly.
I would continue to stumble over opportunities haphazardly with no forethought like someone stumbling over a child’s left behind toy in the middle of the night — stubbing a toe in the process while on the way to the loo — a real comedy of errors.
The only constant in my life, besides the divine grace of God, was that safe space buried deep inside myself, where a love of writing and observation would soon take shape in my early twenties, moving away from fashion for good.
And yes, I would finally make it to New York, living there with my young family for almost a decade, at times wanting to pinch myself like the time I met Ethan Hawke in Brooklyn.
At the end of my poem “Elephants,” I pay tribute to the pain and the adversity and come to terms with my fear of silence.
At night, when every sound
is another sound
in the dark,
I think about those elephants;
their big and small gifts.
Hope as a Spark — Save It
For many of us, creative resilience has been the single catalyst to flip our own scripts. I could’ve gone down a path of spontaneous combustion — total self-destruction if it had not been for hope. Think of hope as a spark. Here’s one of my favorite aphorisms by poet Charles Bukowski in The Last Night of the Earth Poems.
“I knew that I was dying.
Something in me said,
Go ahead, die, sleep, become as them, accept.
Then something else in me said, no,
save the tiniest bit.
It needn’t be much, just a spark.
A spark can set a whole forest on fire.
Just a spark.
Save it.”
