The Sicilian Inheritance

by Jo Piazza

“A good marriage for you would have bankrupted us. We do not have an extra bay mule or gold coin to our name and times are only getting worse.” A girl’s dowry payments ruined families like ours, the ones who made only enough to get by. How many times had I heard the old sayings: “Blessed is the door out of which goes a dead daughter, and the older and uglier she is the greater the comfort” or “I have five children. One boy and four burdens.”

I bit my tongue to stop from replying that my having no marriage at all, that a life far away working as a teacher in a city would have cost them nothing. The wedding

With each of my pregnancies, I felt more and more hollowed out, like another piece of me was being carved away, taking me further from the person I had wanted to be, that girl who would go to school in a city by the sea. I had once wanted to read great books and write down all my thoughts. I wanted to debate big ideas and understand why our small island, so rich in so many ways, remained so poor in

:/

all the ways that mattered to the rest of the world. Since becoming a mother, I barely had time to remember all the things I once wanted, all the lives I hoped to lead, but sometimes the desire all flooded back and I felt a small death.

I wonder how many mothers feels like this :/ makes me sad