January 14, 2009 was a crazy damn week.
I had just been publicly terminated from my very high profile and politically charged general counsel position, and my very recently ex husband and father to my then 8 year old son, died suddenly of a heart attack.
The stock market had been in free fall, shrinking my state pension funds, and the Florida real estate market crashed hard, reducing the market value of my generously over mortgaged home to several hundreds of thousands under the mortgage amount.
I woke up every morning with the clear and unambiguous conviction that I would find a new job(after all, just before all this , I had been at the top of my successful law career, with numerous accolades, awards, and appointments). Days turned into months and it would be a solid 5 years before I secured a stable job with good income.
During those five frightening years, I lost my house, lived off my savings, and found myself moving multiple times for possible jobs and start over plans. I had been diagnosed with MS in 2003, and flare ups due to stress and no health insurance for medication left me fatigued and struggling to keep my strength and my health intact. I was the sole
supporter for not only my son (left with no alimony, no child support, and no life insurance) l also supported my mother.
The long divorce and custody battle revealed that my ex had embezzled a huge line of credit against my house and created tax and other debt. As a result, I got all the liabilities. I was in shock. Yet, I had always been a survivor, I knew I could “fix it”. But this time, it seemed, I could not “fix” any of it. I spent the next several years sinking further and further into debt, and it seemed every recovery plan was a failure or led to a dead end. My life was imploding, yet, my mother had planned a trip to Italy for the summer of 2009, to discover our roots and to claim some property in Calabria that she was certain was left to her by her grandfather.
This was absolutely not the right time to go anywhere, but she had planned this for years, and I did not want to disappoint her. I made all the arrangements for the trip for the three of us, my son then 8 years old, my mom, 80, and me. We travelled to the interior of Calabria where my grandparents were born, and we sailed the coast in the violet blue waters between Reggio and Sicily. We met with architects, lawyers, and geometras to study the property. We were never able to complete or finalize the property conveyance. Yet, we discovered our true ‘”inheritance”. It was the discovery of our cousins, who we were able to meet and connect with. They remain to this day a cherished family in our lives.
It was there and then that I decided that my son and I would move to Italy one day.
April 17, 2021