Marina On Air

She was just two and a half years old when I had to make the first hard choice of our lives: left her behind, under the care of my mother, in order to go for a job with good perspectives, which was 3.500km away from my home town. And so I did. Every day I used to call home and talk to my little daughter, asked how she was doing at the kindergarten, and every day I said: "mom is working, and I will soon come to pick you up to live here with me". But this "soon" was not exactly a true statement, it could take around one year until I got a house from the company and could bring her to live with me. Ten months later I received the house, but I could only fly home on my vacations, so I still had to wait two months to pick her up to me. This one year apart was way too hard, and I counted anxiously the days and hours to bring her to our new home. In order to make an easier transition, I brought my mother to stay with us for some time and help her to adapt to h...

It was a Sunday in March 2001. As usual, she came into my room early, because she woke up according to her biological clock and wanted to play. I wanted to sleep longer and used to kick her out of my bedroom. So many times I did this, so many times she came back shortly afterward with my breakfast, arranged in her own way, on a tray. But that morning she did not return. And I did not even miss her, because I slept again. When I got up, I saw her prostrated on the sofa, burning with fever. There was a slight reddish swelling behind her ear, and I immediately took her to the hospital. They gave her medicine to lower the fever and said it seemed to be mumps, but the strange thing was that she was already immunized against it. How could it be? We went home and stayed quiet for the rest of the day. On Monday morning she was feeling better, then I took her to school and went to work. But at lunchtime when I picked her up at school, she was feverish again, the edema behind her ear ha...

*Mom does not work I worked as a nanny for an Italian family in Munich. Papà was an engineer and had a very good job. Mama was an event promoter and self-employed, she had her own company and worked from home, organizing and promoting events in her town in Italy. Every morning she was pretty busy with conference calls, budgets, emails, and planning, but when the day of the events came, she had to be there in Italy, to conduct them personally. They had a son, the little Pietro. He was not yet two years old and used to fly to Italy with Mama when she needed to be there for work – his grandma was always happy to have him around. But this one time it happened that Pietro had to stay in Munich. I came in the afternoon to take care of him until Papà arrived from work. Mama told him she had to go to work, Papà was coming soon and that I would be there to play with him meanwhile.  When he noticed that Mama was really leaving, he started to cry, clung around her neck and shouted “Mama...