The myth of the perfect mother
I grew up believing my great-grandmother was an orphan. The truth, uncovered in an Italian archive, changed how I understand maternal love and what it means to be a “good” mother.
My mother always told me her Nonna Lina was an orphan. This was where our maternal line began, with a parentless girl from Bologna whose first name, Natalina, meant “Christmas”. I had assumed, since my mother knew nothing more of her grandmother’s origins, that the girl’s parents must have died before she had the chance to know them.
I never imagined there had been a mother, still living, unknown to Natalina. A father, too. Then I found my great-grandmother’s birth record. The document was among a pile of family papers belonging to Natalina’s last surviving daughter. Nobody else in the family wanted them and, since I have an interest in this sort of thing, I saved them from the rubbish heap.
The birth record was yellowed, two pages long, and the bottom right-hand corner was missing. At first, I was tickled to read her birthdate: 23 December, the day before Christmas Eve. It explained her pretty name. The record also informed me where she was born: in a house on 12 Mother Shadow, a street named for the abbot, Via Abate, in a town I had never heard of called San Giovanni in Persiceto, somewhere in the fecund plains outside Bologna.
I read down to the end of the first page until one of the last lines pulled me up. Those jarring words: che non consente di essere nominata, “who does not consent to be named”. They were her mother’s words, and I hadn’t been expecting them.
