I’m with Crazy: A Love Story (Ep7 – Part 1) Living & Loving Crazy
“…It’s a whole different world….” My brother Rosario is definitely right. I listen back to some of these stories and think WOW what we were going thru and hiding from the world…? And then I think WOW what must you listeners be thinking? LOL
While there’s much more to this podcast – so much more than I thought I’d break it up into two episodes – I’m pausing this first part to comment on a few things, the biggest of which is PERSPECTIVE. As much as I have always known that each person’s perspective is unique to them, I guess that for some reason, I didn’t think that applied so much to my brother and our upbringing and dealing with the mental illness in our family. From my brother’s memories, his focus in on the madness being in great part due to our Sicilian culture and to the disciplinarian upbringing. I do agree that that influenced the cray-cray of our lives. I also was surprised at how much he really wasn’t present in the house. It makes sense now with his age and his wanting to always be out, and me with my age – not yet driving and being stuck inside.
I think Ross summed it up best: our mom was super intelligent, ahead of her time maybe, ran a business and a household without any kind of personal freedom or outlet, she was so very talented and a protective mother, and, yet, she did have a mental illness that at that time wasn’t understood. She was, indeed, Don Quixote fighting windmills.
In part two of this conversation with my brother (I’ll post it later), you’ll hear about how much worse it can get when mental illness takes root in your family tree and our little sister is diagnosed as a schizophrenic and committed. Thanks for joining us for this episode, and I hope you’ll listen in on the second half for the rest of the story.
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Transcript:
Hi, and welcome to Madness To Magic, and my podcast, I’m with Crazy: A Love Story. I’m your host, Paolina Milana, author of “The S Word”.
This show is for those of us who find ourselves surrounded by madness and wanting to find the magic within. We’re going to come together here as caregivers to those who have been diagnosed with a mental illness. Maybe it’s someone in the family we’ve been born into. Maybe it’s someone we love. Maybe it’s someone we work with. Maybe, even, it’s ourselves. Whether we’ve been thrust into this caregiver role or taken it on by choice, this podcast is where we’re going to share our stories and learn to realize the magic in all the madness we may have been experiencing. I promise you, it can be done. So let’s get to it.
Paolina Milana:
Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Madness To Magic. Today, it’s pretty special because I actually have my brother with me, my first guest on Madness To Magic. Hello, Rosario. You want to say hello?
Rosario:
Hello, and hang on, it’s going to be a bumpy road.
Paolina Milana:
For some reason, it’s sort of like one of those things where, I don’t know if you ever saw the Mary Tyler Moore Show, yes we’re dating ourselves. There was an episode about Chuckles the Clown, where they’re at the funeral and they just can’t stop laughing. That happens with the two of us. There may be long periods of just laughter, so just go with it. Today, as you know Madness To Magic, this whole podcast, is not just about mental illness.
Paolina Milana:
It’s really about navigating mental illness for those who are relatives, family members, loved ones, colleagues, anyone who really kind of is a caregiver of someone who has mental illness. There is very little out there I think for people who are in those positions, either by choice or not. This podcast is intended to kind of give a voice, good, bad and ugly to anyone who has been through it. My brother and I obviously have been through it, both with our mother and our younger sister.
Paolina Milana:
I thought that since my brother’s visiting me here from Chicago, we’re out here in LA, that I would ask him just a couple questions, have him give his insight, his perspective, because everyone’s obviously is different. Without further ado, I thought we’d just kind of start with you maybe talking a little bit about your first memories, really of the whole family. When maybe we were quote/unquote “normal,” and then maybe the first thing you remember where it was like, “Whoa, maybe something’s wrong here.” You cool with that?
Rosario:
Yeah, I thought we were talking about recipes.
Paolina Milana:
We can do that later.
Rosario:
Okay. No, in terms of growing up, I think the difference was I was a lot more independent. I did things the way I wanted to do them, even though I got in trouble for it. It never seemed to bother me to do things, if I thought something, I wanted to do it, I would. Again, I’m sure Paolina expressed that our parents were very old school, so there were consequences to pay. In terms of dealing with the everyday oddities, I would say our father was fairly normal, obviously just working a typical job trying to make ends meet as meagerly as he could at that time with four kids.
Rosario:
Then our mother was a stay-at-home mom. I think that had a lot to do with it, though, that upbringing from old school Italian family values, if we use that word. To a new world where she assimilated to the point where she did have a business of her own, but still taking care of four kids and doing everything that had to do require. A pretty disciplinarian mentality from both our parents, actually. I mean I don’t know how different it is from the time period, but I think the Italian influence, again as I mentioned that old school mentality, that had a lot to do with how we were brought up as kids.
Paolina Milana:
Yeah. You were the second born. There was older sister, but you were the only boy.
Rosario:
Yes.
Paolina Milana:
That had to also kind of play into it, don’t you think?
Rosario:
Yeah, I did. Again, you hear the stories, you probably talk more to our older sister Kathy than I do in terms of that. Well, in fact growing up, I mean I don’t know how you guys felt for me. I personally just didn’t see a preference other than the fact that, like I said, I used to do things, and still get in trouble for them. I just did them anyway. Maybe I got a little more leeway because of being the only male, but I also wasn’t as, how should I say, confrontational I think as our older sister was. Probably more so maybe because she was the first born, and as they say first borns always get a little more-
Paolina Milana:
The test kid, so to speak.
Rosario:
Yeah, exactly.
Paolina Milana:
Yeah. You’ve brought up a couple times stuff that you did anyway, right? What are some examples? What do you mean by that?
Rosario:
Well, getting older, basically being the first one to want to get a car, let’s say for example at the age of 16. Well, again, getting a real job, it wasn’t a real job if you want, but at McDonald’s to start making some money. I actually started working there at 15. Getting a car, I wanted my own car obviously. So I was looking for just a junker. I just was going to pay cash for it, big deal. You have to fix it up a little bit.
Rosario:
The only stipulation that our dad had was the only way I was going to get permission to get a car is if I bought it with my older sister. Taking my dad to check out a car, he wasn’t too happy. I mean, being a big fan of the Rockford Files, I saw a beautiful Firebird, same color, needed work obviously. But my dad refused to allow it, even though it was my money, now that I think about it. Then made us buy a brand new car, at the time a Sunbird.
Rosario:
I think at the time it was like $4,500 for a brand new car. That was an expense that I didn’t want. Although I got to have a car, the only way I could get a car was if it was a shared car. Then after a very short period of time, again I think we were paying maybe $125 a month or something like that, my older sister couldn’t afford it anymore. She was more concentrated on school, so she had to pull out, which then left me with a financial expense that I did not want. It cut into my partying time.
Paolina Milana:
What year was that, do you remember?
Rosario:
Well, I was 16 years old, so what was that, 1980, did I graduate in 1980. Yeah, so it would be, was it ’78? Or did I go to high school in ’80? I can’t even remember anymore. 1962, yeah so it was in 1978.
Paolina Milana:
Yeah. All right, but the whole kind of car thing, I mean granted having to-
Rosario:
I would stay out, come home in the morning, 7:00 in the morning while Dad was getting ready to go to work. You guys I think had to stay, you couldn’t go out after 6:00 in the evening. No, it was like 11:00 or something.
Paolina Milana:
Yeah. Those are all-
Rosario:
But that was getting older, too. That’s why I wanted to move out. I always wanted to be on my own. I don’t know if you guys did, but for me it was always just, I just wanted to do what I wanted to do.
Paolina Milana:
Yeah. Let me ask you this. Just because this whole podcast is about kind of navigating mental illness, and you did mention the oddities at home.
Rosario:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Paolina Milana:
How old were you when you remember the first time witnessing or realizing that Mom, it was not a physical thing, that there was something else going on?
Rosario:
Interesting. Well, we had our uncle living with us. Really I think when he died, I think she, we heard later that she had mentioned that she was sort of tired of having him around. That might have played a role in her thinking that her thinking of having him leave caused his death, because that’s how old Italians think. Everything’s a curse. That might have been the first thing. Just little by little in terms of hearing voices or hearing sounds. I mean she was, in a way her madness was ahead of the curve. She thought about computers controlling minds way before it actually happened. She was the Elon Musk of madness.
Paolina Milana:
Well, do you remember… Well, let’s do this. Let’s do a City Slickers, Bruno Kirby, what was your best day, what was your worst day, related to Mom and the mental illness?
Rosario:
Well, I guess, I’m telling you, you know I was really out most of the time. Whether it was school, or sports-
Paolina Milana:
On purpose?
Rosario:
No, just because that’s what I wanted to do. I would come home from school, go to football practice, go riding. Remember I got in trouble for riding my bike at, I don’t know how old, 10 years old? Riding it all the way across town, and then to Touhy Avenue where we were, then telling Mom. Unfortunately, she told Dad, and then I got disciplined for that. I don’t really remember a lot of what she did at that time. I mean-
Paolina Milana:
You mean when-
Rosario:
See, I wasn’t home. For example, when I came home one day, obviously from work, maybe 16, 17, and Dad’s face was all scratched up. I wasn’t there.
Paolina Milana:
Yeah, you were there.
Rosario:
No, I wasn’t there, because I drove up, and as I pull into the driveway I see his face. I said, “What happened?” He was like, Mom scratched him all up. There was some kind of argument obviously, but I wasn’t there.
Paolina Milana:
But I thought that was the day when, you remember when we were around the dinner table. I don’t remember what you did, but Dad like hit you in the head. Mom smashed her wine glass, like hit it on the table and said, “Don’t hit him on the head.” I just remember my glasses went all like red, because of the wine. I thought that was when they got into the huge argument and she scratched him.
Rosario:
I wasn’t home, no. No, that was from, when you guys-
Paolina Milana:
You do remember that? When you-
Rosario:
No, I remember him, again, because he was such old school, even if you said to… I think I’d said to him something to the effect of, I asked a question, he didn’t hear it, and I said, “Oh, forget about it.” So he rapped me on the head with like the end of just a knife. She got upset, but that wasn’t, I wasn’t there-
Paolina Milana:
That wasn’t the scratch?
Rosario:
No, what you guys, I think you were or Kathy were there. You guys told me that dad made some reference like, “I’m going to strangle you,” or something to that. Then she just said, “Go ahead and do it,” and just jumped in his face.
Paolina Milana:
Yeah.
Rosario:
But I wasn’t there. See, that’s the thing. I wasn’t there for a lot of that stuff. You were there I think when he was cleaning out his rifles and stuff.
Paolina Milana:
Right, and then shot-
Rosario:
Yeah. But I wasn’t there for that. I’m telling you, the one thing probably I would say-
Paolina Milana:
Just for people listening, so our dad would go hunting, and one day he was cleaning his rifles in the kitchen. Mom didn’t want him to. He was like, “Oh, it’s no big deal. There’s no-“
Rosario:
“It’s not loaded.”
Paolina Milana:
Not loaded. Then he pointed it very close to her.
Rosario:
But at the coffee thing.
Paolina Milana:
Right, and it went off and smashed the coffee maker. Anyway, so-
Rosario:
I’m telling you, I’m thinking-
Paolina Milana:
You don’t remember-
Rosario:
I’m thinking as a little kid, I mean, I’m trying to think in my mind what in the world, remember she tried to open a window but broke her-
Paolina Milana:
That I don’t remember. That was even before-
Rosario:
That was on Chase Street. That was just accidentally-
Paolina Milana:
So you don’t remember like at the funeral for Uncle Joe, and her trying to get into the casket? You don’t remember-
Rosario:
Yeah, but that again is that old mentality.
Paolina Milana:
The Sicilian.
Rosario:
Like I said before, she cast some blame on herself.
Paolina Milana:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), sure.
Rosario:
That’s why I think that started this process that she had in her mind. Again-
Paolina Milana:
Well, don’t you remember when, didn’t she like when you were sleeping once-
Rosario:
Yeah, but that was older when she would walk around the house. That’s not my first, see that’s the thing. I’m trying to remember the first thing-
Paolina Milana:
Oh, you don’t remember the first thing.
Rosario:
I just don’t.
Paolina Milana:
That you were like, okay, this is weird.
Rosario:
Yeah, I mean obviously they used to argue, like everybody argues.
Paolina Milana:
Well, wasn’t the first time the definitive, “Mr. Milana, there’s something wrong with your wife that’s not physical,” was Mayo.
Rosario:
Well, remember he had the cops, when he had the officer guy come by to tell her that they’re taking care of the computers.
Paolina Milana:
Well, when we took her in, yeah.
Rosario:
Or whatever it was. Yeah, but that was-
Paolina Milana:
I mean, when we tricked her, so to speak.
Rosario:
Yeah, but that, and that was a lot older when we-
Paolina Milana:
How old were you?
Rosario:
Goodness. We all were driving.
Paolina Milana:
I can’t even remember.
Rosario:
I think. I don’t know if you were.
Paolina Milana:
I don’t even remember.
Rosario:
Yeah, that’s the thing.
Paolina Milana:
Let me ask you this, because the one thing you do remember, or should maybe, is when she was in that hospital.
Rosario:
Yeah.
Paolina Milana:
Then she escaped.
Rosario:
Yeah, and that was when you and I-
Paolina Milana:
What do you remember of that?
Rosario:
… went up, they only let two people up at a time. We went up there, and she had asked you to go down for some reason, downstairs.
Paolina Milana:
Let’s just set the scene, to make sure-
Rosario:
Billings Hospital in Chicago.
Paolina Milana:
We in essence, she needed to be committed. Why was she so far gone? Do you remember?
Rosario:
Well, obviously there was no understanding of what it was. Everybody, all the doctors thought that it was nerve issues, something to that effect. I mean, she went to a hospital and they did an operation where they separated a nerve and an artery. They said that was the issue for it. At that point, there was really nobody that understood what I think is now, face pain I think they call it, right?
Paolina Milana:
Yeah.
Rosario:
Yeah. The face pain is one thing, then you add the mental illness to it. At that time, it was all, oh, it’s got to be this physical thing not a mental thing, so let’s give some medication. I think she had stopped taking her medication.
Paolina Milana:
What was she, do you remember what she was doing that then caused us to trick her into being committed, so to speak?
Rosario:
Well, I think it was a lot of the computer voices. She constantly kept saying there were the computer voices. She slept with a knife under her mattress. But I think it was more the ranting of these voices, she can’t make them stop. Her face, the spiders, this face pain. Again, has this sensation I guess of spiders crawling on your skin. I’ve been reading about this more recently, and I guess it affects quite a few individuals. At that time, nobody at all had heard of it. The only doctor that really they saw in my opinion that was a capable psychiatrist, I think his name was Dr. Bernstein out of Hospital, and he was the first one that said that there’s a bipolar issue here, and started that medication. But that was well down the line.
Paolina Milana:
Bipolar? I thought-
Rosario:
Or paranoid schizophrenic, bipolar.
Paolina Milana:
Schizophrenic, yeah, paranoid schizophrenia. Well, they’re different. Okay, so we have her in the hospital, we’re going to go visit. We’re the first two who go up, and what do you remember of that whole-
Rosario:
She was in her room, and we went up there. Not long after she said, “You can go down and have someone else come up,” or something, to you. You left. Then she asked me to take her suitcase, and said, “Just take this. Just take this.” I said, “No, I’m not going to do that.” Basically, she dropped to her knees and grabbed my legs and says, crying, “Please, please, please, take this. She’s got to get out. She’s got to get out.” I just took the suitcase and walked downstairs. To her credit, I don’t know how, maybe-
Paolina Milana:
I don’t know how either.
Rosario:
Yeah, I mean-
Paolina Milana:
You don’t know how? You have no idea?
Rosario:
I have no idea. I have no idea.
Paolina Milana:
How she escaped.
Rosario:
She got out, and then my dad and I, everyone else was there, because I think our uncle was there.
Paolina Milana:
No.
Rosario:
Uncle Sam was there. Yeah, they called Uncle Sam to watch you guys.
Paolina Milana:
Oh, really?
Rosario:
Yeah.
Paolina Milana:
I don’t remember.
Rosario:
Dad and I went, drove all the way back home, and in the best Chucky impersonation, she was sitting on the couch inside the house, just staring.
Paolina Milana:
Now, I remember that too, walking in, and she was sitting-
Rosario:
Yeah, but that’s where she was when we left her.
Paolina Milana:
… at the corner of the couch. Oh.
Rosario:
We walked in first, and she said, to that kind of effect, “If you ever do that to me again, I’ll kill you,” to Dad. So we just walked out, went back to the hospital, picked everybody up, and came back home. She was still sitting on the couch there.
Paolina Milana:
You remember that whole night, she just screamed and screamed on that couch.
Rosario:
Yeah. Yeah.
Paolina Milana:
Yeah. Well, how did you, because you were going to school, you were working, how did that impact you sleep-wise?
Rosario:
Interesting. Remember, at that time, I was so active, jogging six miles a night, I would just sleep like the dead, so nothing really… And I was never there, so I never really, other than these kinds of instances, I was never around. I don’t think you were driving even at that time, because I was the only one that had the car. I don’t even think Kathy had the car after she gave up the Sunbird. I don’t know how she got around either. I really just saw that or through Dad’s words, telling me, oh this happened, or with the scratching part. When she wanted to function, she was very functional.
Paolina Milana:
Yeah, she was very, very-
Rosario:
Whether it was the sewing, the dressmaking, the cooking or whatever she did, she was on top of her game. But at some point, the medication just goes.
Paolina Milana:
Uh-huh (affirmative). Tell me this. It sort of sounds as if not getting involved, or checking out, or staying focused on your own stuff is the way that you did cope, whether it was intentional or not, during the early years of Mom’s stuff. Is that fair to say?
Rosario:
It is, but again, I think it’s something you have to just focus on your stuff. I know that maybe it’s not easy to say it and do it, because I’m sure there are a lot of people that it affects even more so than… For example, when I used to go running and you came with me on the bike that one time, didn’t you get in trouble the next day?
Paolina Milana:
Oh yeah, because she thought that I was doing weird things. Well, she thought that we were doing weird things.
Rosario: Yeah. Well, plus because you were riding on that bike, and it was for six miles.
Paolina Milana: Well, right.
Rosario: It took a toll on you.
Paolina Milana: Yeah, sure, in my vajayjay.
Rosario: She, yeah.
Paolina Milana: Yeah, no, totally.
Rosario: Your cooter bone got busted.
Paolina Milana: She interpreted, well she always thought that I was messing around with you, messing around with Dad.
Rosario: Uncle Joe.
Paolina Milana: Like there was something weird going on there.
Rosario: That’s something that could be from their childhood.
Paolina Milana: Right, exactly.
Rosario: Because I think that’s a freak show in itself.
Paolina Milana: Yeah, yeah.
Rosario: But we don’t know enough about it.
Paolina Milana: No, we don’t.
Rosario: But there’s some serious problems there.
Paolina Milana: Right, right, right. All right, so when you-
Rosario: Come to Italy.
Paolina Milana: This is an advertisement, Sicily, not Italy.
Rosario: Yes, Sicily, Sicily.
Paolina Milana: Old world Sicily.
Rosario: Palermo.
Paolina Milana:
All right, well, when we kind of look at roles with siblings in a family, in the earlier years there’s always, not even just our family, but I think in any family there’s always one kid who maybe for whatever reason, either takes on more responsibility or is given more responsibility. While in the beginning, I would have to say that I had taken on that role, there came a point after even Vinnie was diagnosed with schizophrenia, where you moved into the house and you had both Mom and Vinnie that you were caring for. You had gone, this is my memory, you had gone from a pretty kind of laid back focused person to someone who kind of lost your shit for a while.
Rosario:
Well, again, I was trying to run my own business. And you had, I think that’s when you decided, enough, and you had to take on what you needed to do for yourself. It was tough more probably because of our youngest sister, Vinnie, because she wasn’t, as we always talk about, she was functional borderline, but had those issues. She wanted to do things that everybody else was doing, but had a very hard time doing them. It was very difficult to tell her, you’re either doing it wrong… I mean all of us are stubborn. My god.
Paolina Milana: What?
Rosario:
Just ask Paolina’s husband. We all have that same issue. We’re able to cope with it, but if you’re trying to do something and you can’t do it the way it should be done, then you get frustrated, and then you get angry. That was our youngest sister. She was the harder one to handle. Our mother basically, at that point, as much as she even as a mother wants to help and all this kind of stuff, she had had her fill. That’s when you… You had already gotten Vinnie an apartment and gotten all that stuff. The problem was having to travel, and you did that more than I did. Travel from there to there, to go pick her up, to go do this. It was sort of like you were doing a limousine service, you were doing all kinds of things. Yeah, that fell-
Paolina Milana: Financial.
Rosario: Financial planning. Pizza, or whatever. That just took up too much time.
Paolina Milana:
Yeah, but I also remember, I mean didn’t you go to the… Well, let’s backtrack to the very beginning. Given that your memory with Mom, I mean I know it happens because you’re so old.
Rosario: Well, yeah-
Paolina Milana: Your mind is the first to go.
Rosario:
The only thing with Mom was, and again, it was older. We have moved to, here, that’s the thing. With Mom, for me it was, when we were living at this one house-
Paolina Milana: Which house?
Rosario: On Chase.
Paolina Milana: Chase, in Skokie.
Rosario: In Skokie.
Paolina Milana: Yeah.
Rosario:
Our dad was at the brink of retirement. The problem was, if he retired, what was going to happen? There still were house payments, et cetera, et cetera. So I had convinced our father to sell the house, because they had bought it so long ago and it was pretty much paid off, that they could take that money, buy another house, and have enough money to live on with our parents’ Social Security, et cetera, et cetera. That’s when I said, “Okay, I’m going to look around.” I looked around a few spots, and I picked out three houses. Then took them on a Sunday trip, and found the house in Algonquin. They liked it, and that was the one that we chose. That was on Thanksgiving that we moved.
Paolina Milana:
Okay, so hold on a second. It’s funny, because kids can be raised in the same family, parents think they’re doing the same thing, and the kids come out all different. Likewise, you can be in the same family, have experienced the same stuff, and your experience or your memory of it is completely different. What I remember is Mom, so we were in the, it was the Kedvale house, not the Chase house.
Rosario: Kedvale, Kedvale. My mistake, you’re right.
Paolina Milana:
When we were in the Kedvale house, I remember Mom was so far gone that she told Dad, either we get out of this house, because it’s bugged, it has all cameras around it, or I’m going to torch it.
Rosario:
Well, yeah, but she always said that. I mean, even remember her excuse for leaving Chase was because the basement flooded, which didn’t happen that often, but she was worried that we were going to get sick. But it was more that every place we were at, she thought, yeah, there were computers controlling her.
Paolina Milana: Or taking pictures of her, yeah.
Rosario: Yeah. But that was, I mean he got married at 43.
Paolina Milana: What are you trying to say?
Rosario: At that point, he was going to retire.
Paolina Milana:
Oh right, no, no. I understand. Yeah. Then we moved to this new house. I was away at college. When I called to be like, “Oh, is somebody going to come get me,” you guys were like, “Well, let us give you the new address to the house.” All right.
Rosario:
Because I had moved, I had gone away to college before. Then when I came home and I saw he wants to retire, because he wanted to retire. In terms of the money end, it just wasn’t going to allow him to do it. This was the best solution.
Paolina Milana:
Tell me this. How did Mom’s illness, or actually, you know what, did you tell anybody? Like when Mom-
Rosario: No.
Paolina Milana: You never told anybody?
Rosario: No.
Paolina Milana: Why?
Rosario:
Again, to me it’s, I’m not one that goes out and tells everything, and has a podcast, and goes about… I’m more personal, and keep everything inside. Not emotionally, but everyone’s got problems. You don’t go out there and say, “Yeah, this is what’s going on here or there.” If someone asks, I probably would have said something, but no one asked.
Paolina Milana: Well, because we kept it all a secret.
Rosario: Who knew?
Paolina Milana: Exactly.
Rosario:
Well, but in the neighborhood, who knew? I mean we got in trouble, remember we’re from a family where as kids we decide to do something very nice for our parents’ 25th anniversary. We go and we pay for a dinner at a nice restaurant.
Paolina Milana: Di Leo’s.
Rosario:
Di Leo’s. At a nice restaurant. We all get dressed, we all drive there. When we get to the restaurant, we let them out of the car and we tell them, this night is for them. We got into so much trouble for doing that when they came back. I don’t even know if they ate.
Paolina Milana: We left them there.
Rosario: We left them there, yeah.
Paolina Milana: That was it, yeah, by themselves.
Rosario:
Then we came back and picked them up. They were just so angry. Here we’re thinking, okay, we just did something nice. That’s the kind of, again, old school mentality. We do everything as a family, or we don’t do it at all. That was it, basically.
Paolina Milana:
Was it that you kind of never really knew normal things that should have been normal could be not normal? Like you never knew what was going to happen, what was going to get you in trouble, what was going to be okay, so you just kept it-
Rosario: I didn’t care. I didn’t care. Trust me, I got in a lot of trouble, to within an inch of my life.
Paolina Milana: Yeah, I know.
Rosario: At some points.
Paolina Milana: Yeah.
Rosario:
Yeah, so I got in a lot of trouble, but who was it, you told me that at one point after obviously we were much older, Dad had said to you that, I don’t know that he told Mom, “I don’t know if our son is stupid, or if he thinks I’m stupid. Because every time I discipline him, it doesn’t make a difference. He just continues on,” or whatever he said. I can’t remember.
Paolina Milana: When we’re talking discipline, we’re not talking, in our day it wasn’t go-
Rosario: Time out.
Paolina Milana: Go to time out, go sit in the corner.
Rosario:
It was time in, the bell rang, and you… You know, you ever watch National Geographic as the gazelles are running around trying to escape the lions? Yes. That was our disciplinary sessions.
Paolina Milana:
That’s true. Okay. Even with the girlfriends you had, you never told-
Rosario: No.
Paolina Milana: Because they had to come over and see something was odd-
Rosario:
The biggest thing that I found out, whenever I brought girlfriends or even buddies, and it wasn’t that often. Remember, we weren’t even allowed to have people over.
Paolina Milana: Right, true.
Rosario:
The times that I did, everyone would say to me, “I don’t know if I could survive in your house.” I’d say, “What are you talking about?” “All the yelling.” I said, “That’s not yelling. That’s how we talk.”
Paolina Milana: Well, that’s a Sicilian thing.
Rosario: That’s it, yeah. That’s how we talk.
Paolina Milana: Right, right.
Rosario: Everybody would say that to me, but no one… We are supposed to turn our phones off.
Paolina Milana: Yeah, we are supposed to turn our phones off. Yeah, sorry about that.
Rosario:
No, that’s the thing. That’s how we grew up. If you got out of line, you got corporal punishment times 10.
Paolina Milana: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Rosario:
For me, and again, I know you got it one time really intense. I probably had maybe, I remember five, six times, I think Kathy maybe a couple, and Vinnie never.
Paolina Milana: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Rosario:
But no, it seemed like to me it was, okay… I knew. When I did something wrong, all right, here’s the consequences. Fine. That’s the difference between us, that I can tell you. I know you guys ran. Okay? I knew if I ran, it would be worse. So I would always come, take what I got coming to me, and that was it. I mean that I do tell people actually is on our older sister when, I can’t remember what she had done, but I was actually doing homework once. That’s the only reason I remember it. I was at the kitchen table doing homework.
Rosario:
I hear a ruckus downstairs, and I see our older sister running up the stairs to try to get to her bedroom, sanctuary, and our dad chasing her from behind. I always tell this joke that, again, you used to watch Wild Kingdom. As the lion would be chasing the gazelle, just clipped her heel as she made it to the top of the stairs. She just quite didn’t make it to her bedroom. You know, that was basically, you did something wrong, and we’re not talking about abusive to the point of where we were hung by our heels. But yeah, it was very old school corporal punishment.
Paolina Milana: Mm-hmm (affirmative), true.
Rosario: Paolina got it for not wanting to have her hair washed, because she was afraid of water.
Paolina Milana: That’s true.
Rosario: Or soap, I can’t remember.
Paolina Milana: Water, yeah, nearly killed me. Ironically, it was Mom who actually saved me.
Rosario:
That’s the same thing with me. As a little kid, I stole Hot Wheels cars. She had to step in, because that’s probably… That was the beating I’ve taken of my life. I can’t remember, I don’t know, what eight, nine years old maybe, something like that. That’s what I’m saying. She was very protective as a mother. She was very talented of an individual, but she did have mental illness. That, again, causes all kinds of problems.
Paolina Milana: That nobody really understood.
Rosario:
That no one understood. Now, it’s a whole different situation. They understand it much more. There are remedies for it that can either curtail it or eliminate it. At that time, you’re fighting a battle, you’re Don Quixote fighting wind meals, windmills, excuse me.
Paolina Milana: The mind’s the first to go, and then the speech.
Rosario: That’s it. The stroke is happening.
Paolina Milana:
It’s interesting, because oh gosh, you had said something earlier that I wanted to touch on about, oh, that you didn’t tell anybody because you were a more personal kind of person. Yet you were talking about today it’s very different, because people know about it. There’s more talking about it. There’s not so much that stigma in your kind of opinion. Then that’s a good thing to actually share experiences, let people know. One of the things too that I’m realizing more and more is you are right. Mom was stuck at home. She was a stay-at-home mom. She didn’t really know the language.
Rosario: She couldn’t drive.
Paolina Milana: She didn’t drive.
Rosario: She couldn’t go anywhere.
Paolina Milana: Right, had four kids.
Rosario: She was on lockdown 24/7.
Paolina Milana: Right, and she was basically the cook, cleaner-
Rosario: Everything.
Paolina Milana: Everything. We treated her, to be honest, kind of like a maid.
Rosario: Help.
Paolina Milana: Yeah, like the hired help, right. No wonder she kind of went nuts, I mean not that that’s-
Rosario:
If you’re not stimulated to do something, and again, here’s a woman who had unbelievable talent as a dressmaker, a seamstress. She had that ability, and she had a business. She ran a business. It’s just that, again, you have to fit that in. Think about it. You’ve got four kids, you’ve got a husband, and you’ve got to fit the house, the whole thing. In the meantime, oh, make a wedding dress, or make whatever it was she was making. And using equipment that was like from the days of using mules. We talked about that the other day, how the sewing machines back then-
Paolina Milana: They were pedaled.
Rosario: You had to pedal it to get it to do anything.
Paolina Milana: Right, yeah.
Rosario: I mean, it’s a whole different world.
Paolina Milana:
It is a different world. My brother is definitely right. I listen back to some of these stories, and I think, wow, what were we going through and hiding from the world. Then I think, wow, what must people think reading this, or you listeners think hearing this. While there’s much more to this podcast, so much more that I thought I’d break it up into two episodes. I’m pausing this first part here to comment on a few things, the biggest of which is perspective.
Paolina Milana:
As much as I’ve always known that each person’s perspective is unique to them, I guess for some reason I didn’t think that applied so much to my brother, and our upbringing and dealing with the mental illness in our family. From my brother’s memories, however, his focus seems to be on the madness being in great part due to our Sicilian culture and to the disciplinarian upbringing. I will say I do agree a lot that that influenced the cray cray of our lives, but in my opinion it’s separate and aside from the actual mental illness.
Paolina Milana:
I also was surprised at how much he really wasn’t present in the house. That kind of blew me away. I just kind of thought he was always there. I didn’t realize how much he wasn’t. It makes sense to me now, given his age, him wanting to be out. Him being allowed to be out, as a boy. Me, with my age, not yet driving and being stuck inside, as [Italian 00:38:51], the little mother. Also, my memory when my mom escaped from the hospital included us all in the car searching for her, and my dad getting lost. That was a profound moment for me. You can read about it in my book, The S Word.
Paolina Milana:
It was my first real meltdown, so to speak. My father was my human GPS, and for him to lose his way meant a lot to me. What I didn’t know, and what Ross shed some light on while we were talking is that our dad and Ross had already found our mom. As he said, they found her in her best Chucky impression at home. They then returned to get the rest of us. While we were driving, and my dad did get lost, it kind of explains even more now why he did get lost. He had already seen what was waiting for us at home. I imagine that’s what his mind was on, versus the route that he knew like the back of his hand to get us there.
Paolina Milana:
I wonder what he must have been thinking. Was he driving us back home and delivering us to our collective demise? You know, I mean was there a fear there? Did he just not know what to do? He wasn’t paying attention? I don’t know. Anyway, I do think my brother Ross summed it up best. Our mom was super intelligent. She was ahead of her time. She ran a business and a household without knowing the language, without any kind of real personal freedom or outlet. She was very talented. She was a protective mom.
Paolina Milana:
Yet, she had this mental illness, this thing that at that time wasn’t understood at all. As Ross says, she was indeed Don Quixote fighting windmills. In part two of this conversation with my brother, you’ll hear more on our mom. Then you’ll also hear how much more worse, can we say, it gets when mental illness takes root in your family tree. You’ll hear more about our little sister being diagnosed as a schizophrenic, and us having to commit her, and things that happened there. Anyway, thanks for joining us for this episode, and I hope you’ll listen in on the second half for the rest of the story.
Paolina Milana:
Thanks so much for listening to Madness To Magic, and my podcast, I’m With Crazy: A Love Story. I believe we’re all here for a purpose, and I know that this is part of mine. Please share this with anyone you think might benefit, or might even have a story of their own to share. You also can visit me at madnesstomagic.com, or check out more of my stories including info on my book, The S Word, at paolinamilanawrites.com.
Paolina Milana:
I hope to hear from you, and to join forces with what I consider a unique caregiver tribe, as we all learn to embrace all of ourselves, to have compassion for others, and to come into our full power by the grace that is both madness and magic. Until we meet again, I’ll leave you with one of my favorite mantras. “Be bold, and mighty forces shall come to your aid.” Thank you.