I often wonder when I am writing a post here how I am perceived.

I’m a single mother, a teenage mother, now grown and into my thirties with a near teenage daughter, and I have finally found a man who loves me no holds barred. On top of this he loves my daughter and realises that we come as a package, that he will marry me and become her father, and his acceptance of this is so very humbling to me and I wonder at how long it has taken me to find him, to be found by him.

My daughter lies sleeping next to me in our bed. Whenever he is away she leaves her room and comes to bed with me, a kind of mutual love reassurance that we have always shared with each other. Indeed, when I am away (not that often) she climbs into my bed to reassure him that all is well and our home is the best place for love to live.

It has taken so many years of search, and I have had to kiss many frogs before I found my prince. God has been kind, after my sinful past in which I did not live the Christian life my parents raised me and my brother to live, I rebelled and I did myself a lot of harm, self-harm.

As a teenager I always felt on the outside of the group of people I wanted to be my tribe. We had left Sicily when I was eight so I guess that was a factor in displacement that made me so very much the rebel. I didn’t care that my mother was not likely to approve, and although I was at a good school in Napoli, there was a guy, and a girl, who always knew where to go to be bad. The strict Jesuit education was reacted against and I was only a mid-teen when I lost my virginity to a guy older than me, who was supposedly the guy all the girls wanted to try sex with!

Yes, extremely risky with all the STI’s around! I didn’t say anything to my mother, despite my underwear being soaked in blood and semen. I threw them out so they wouldn’t learn anything after having a few hot showers once I got home.

I think I reacted better with my attitude to school, but my friends knew I was running with a rough group. My tomboyish attitude towards my own personal safety was really blasé, and it really was fortunate that the people my father’s special unit were pursuing in Napoli didn’t learn how much I was vulnerable (or perhaps they did, but my Papa’s actions had them on the ropes).

I ran around with several guys, and girls, riding behind them on their scooters while they tried doing their gangland style stuff that I didn’t really know was going on, I was just hanging out with the coolest gang in our part of the city. I was mostly with a guy named Umberto, who was known to us by a different nickname. He liked me to wear very short miniskirts and a little crop top in the summer, sneakers or flat sandals, astride his scooter close enough behind for him to touch me as we rode wherever we went.

I think about it all often nowadays and I think I must have seemed a real slut despite the fact these guys were so very possessive of us, and we could never speak to or be seen with any of their rivals. I am thinking about this because I know I changed my life, but only because of two factors. One of the guys (yes, I was servicing three of them in our group) got me pregnant, and my father informed us a few weeks after I was impregnated that we were going to be moving to Roma! I suddenly had to leave everything behind!