My Mother's Hands

ANNA MONARDO is coming to terms with her parents' traditional arranged marriage and their struggles to settle in the US and provide a good life for her family. In this brave account, she exposes the problems that many new immigrants face, and honors the roles her parents played in giving her a life free from the shackles of war-torn Europe.

- ANNA MONARDO

There is a writing exercise I often had my students do in class: Write about your mother’s hands. This ten-minute prompt almost always yielded a fruitful rough draft full of details that were emotionally resonant. Yet, as often as I sat with students for this exercise, I avoided doing it myself. I didn’t want to put down on paper the truth of how I saw my mother’s hands: puffy, hesitant, unsure what to do. Instead, I’d spend the ten minutes writing about my father’s hands: intelligent, capable, chiseled knuckles, and the beautiful rising moons at the base of his fingernails. He was a surgeon, his hand movements confident, which gave me a feeling of safety. In contrast, I often had a feeling that my mother needed help—now!— and that I was the one who was supposed to provide it. There were times in my life when my mother and I spoke daily; still, I did what I could to keep some distance from her.

That’s pretty much where I was, emotionally, fifteen years ago when I began to write After Italy: A Family Memoir of Arranged Marriage. In random spurts, I’d been working on this family memoir for years, but in 2008, I committed to the project. Recently, I found this entry in a journal from that time: Writing this family memoir is the scariest story of my life.