Nobody loves you like your mother.

Sad, but true. I have the benefit/curse of having a full blooded Sicilian mother. She is one tough cookie. No one and I mean no one messed with me or my brother. If there was a problem with Eddie or me, she took care of it. It wasn’t until I got to college that I really had to tell her to back off and let me take care of things for myself.

Don’t get me wrong, it is not that we were spoiled brats whose mother blindly defended us. Not even close. For those of you who know my mother, or know someone else’s Italian mom, there is no stepping over the line. We did not break rules. It never even occurred to me to stay out past curfew, talk back, and other normal arguments that teen’s have. It just was not an option. Period.

The other side of this coin is the intense, panic like love Sicilian mothers have for their children. If I looked even remotely sick, made one little complaint about how I felt, my mother whisked me into the doctor. Good thing he was Italian too, other wise he would have thought my mom was a complete wack job. I had the thickest file at my pediatrician’s office, and the only person who came any where close to me was my brother. This was not a coincidence. Growing up in this environment, I have become a total hypochondriac. (Meegan is very sweet when it comes to this; she calls me dramatic).

Living with her, I had grown accustomed to being treated a certain way when I feel sick. Pampered, spoiled and coddled, to be exact.

Unfortunately, my husband does not respond this way. When he is sick, he just wants to be left alone, and thinks that everyone else feels the same. WRONG!!!!! I want attention! I want to know that when he hears me dying in our bathroom, that he doesn’t just roll over and pull the covers over his head to muffle the reverberations of my agony. Unfortunately, he knows I am a hypochondriac, and treats me as such. Let me tell you this: at 6:28 AM, Sunday morning, I could have called my mother and she would have driven over to take care of me. When I call for my dear sweet husband, all he does is yell back “WHAT?”

I promised myself, while lying on the bathroom floor trying to figure out exactly when that extraterrestrial from the movie Alien impregnated me, that if and when I did recover, I was going to have to kick my husband square in the balls.

Sadly, while I laid there dying, I realized that even thought she drives me up a fucking wall, nobody loves you like your mother.

Te amo, mamma!