Bishop Kearney High School. All girls. All plaid skirts. All Catholic guilt, stacked high like the communion wafers they forced down our throats. It was 1983, and I was about to graduate. Eighteen, full of opinions, already plotting my escape from the gold-plated cage I’d been raised in. But for my mother? The only thing that mattered—the only thing—was getting me married.
Preferably to an Italian lawyer. Definitely not Irish. Definitely not Jewish. Definitely not, under any circumstances, a woman.
“You can be anything,” she once told me, with wooden spoon in hand – stirring Sunday gravy (never “sauce”) with the intensity of a woman who meant it. “Just don’t be a lesbian.”
I swear to God. She didn’t care if I was a drug addict. A kleptomaniac. Hell, I could’ve been skimming cash from my uncle’s pastry story, D’Amico’s in Brooklyn,or driving a trunk full of untaxed cigarettes over the Verrazzano—she wouldn’t have blinked.But the idea of me coming home with a girlfriend? That was her nightmare.
I used to wonder if she understood who her brothers were—what kind of men they really were. Funzi, of course, was the king. Frank Tieri to the world, “Uncle Funzi” behind closed doors. But there were others. The uncles and “family friends” who showed up with pinkie rings and quiet whispers. Guys who ran clubs or “owned vending machine companies,” who gave me my pick of gold watches and leather jackets from boxes in trunks and smelled like cigars, cologne, and something darker. Everyone knew who they were. Nobody ever said who they were.
But God forbid I liked girls.
I once asked to sleep over a girlfriend’s house in high school. Neither of us had boyfriends. We were just best friends.
“You’re not a lesbian, right?”
“Ma, we’re just having a slumber party.”
“Yeah, but why do you need to sleep over…”
She said it like she’d uncovered a plot to blow up the Vatican. I was doing exactly what the nuns wanted us to do—study, behave, not get pregnant.
Marriage was her gospel. Not love. Not happiness. Marriage. A nice Italian boy. A lawyer. Someone who could take care of me and could “help” the family and wouldn’t ask why certain people disappeared from our Christmas card list.
She didn’t want a daughter. She wanted a bride-in-training. A respectable, quiet girl who would wear the right dress, marry the right man, and keep her mouth shut about everything else. She wanted payback for all the envelopes she had given out over years of being a wedding guest.
But I wasn’t wired that way.
I had questions. I had rage. I had dreams that didn’t involve standing next to some guy at a communion party. And honestly? At that point in my life, I was more obsessed with getting out than getting married.
But there was no room for nuance in our house. You were good or you were garbage. You were married or you were una disgrazia.
My mother loved me—don’t get me wrong. In her own twisted, Aquanet-fueled way, she loved me hard. But it came with strings. Strings that looped around your neck, not your heart.
And at seventeen, on the edge of so-called adulthood, with the mob all around me and a diploma in my hand, I had to make a choice:
Do I play the game? Marry the lawyer? Smile at the wedding and keep my secrets and aspirations locked tight?
Or do I burn it all down and become my own kind of woman—one who might break my mother’s heart but could finally breathe?
Spoiler alert: I’m still here. Still standing. Still full of questions.
And no, Ma—I’m not a lesbian.
I went to college, then graduate school, got my MBA in finance—clutching a cappuccino and side eyeing every frat boy along the way. Then I ended up working for the most buttoned-up, regulation-dodging, bonus-hungry mafiosa of them all: Wall Street.
So congrats, Mommy. I didn’t marry a woman. I just married a male dominated career with a criminal record.
