God’s Reminders
I am going to take you on a journey of truth, absolution, and devotion; a journey which I hope will open your heart and spirit, and break down the wall Ignorance has mortared for far too long. God’s reminders of purity, forgiveness, and grace are the quintessence of my brother Vinny. Walk with me, as I take you through an unselfish, uncensored memoir.
~ LLB
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Prologue
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In the summer of 1992, none of us could have predicted the turbulent journey on which we were about to embark. Dreams of being a family reunited were again, unglued. After years of mending and molding, we were faced with one of the most difficult challenges a family could endure; a challenge that would open a gaping decade of non-communication with relatives, separatism with peers, and contention within our immediate family. Ultimately, what we regarded at first as a test in faith turned out to be His greatest gift: unconditional love. Yet, unconditional love is conditional on the heart; you are at once devoted and utterly helpless.
At the age of thirty, and with a strong devotion to begin anew, my mother decided it was time to give our family the gift of another child. It was Christmas Eve of 1991, and my mother came prepared with two fully-loaded barrels. My gift was a suitcase concealing a roundtrip ticket to Florida – to visit my estranged father in his new home state. My step-father’s was a dress box filled with diapers, rattles, and other assorted baby wear – signifying my mother’s readiness to commit to motherhood for the second time. This new child was to be the totem of our family. If the baby was a girl, she was to be named after her two sisters. If the baby was a boy, he was to be named after his father. The air on this particular Eve however, was particularly thick. In retrospect, we must have all been feeling like tumbleweeds on the vast plain of her gestures. We were reactively elated and proactively wary.
Our life up to that point had exhausted precipitous momentum. My mother ended her thirteen-year relationship with my father and married my step-father one year later. Added to this potent formula were the respective daughters of the newlyweds; each beguiling a chip on her shoulder larger than the wedding bill. While sibling hostility was simmering, dissidence between our parents was growing hot enough to sear the whole marriage. Civil differences of opinion became regurgitated debates, leaving lifestyle and parenting choices clinging to the walls. After months of discussing issues ad nauseam, we had finally reached a hiatus of recovery. We were finally adapting to one another’s differences; accepting and understanding each other’s pasts in order to clear the way for our future as a family.
Copyright(c) September 2006 Lindsey Borzelli. All rights reserved.
