The Naked Truth: The Real Story Behind the Real Housewife of New Jersey--In Her Own Words Read Free

relates to some kind of special insight I have into the past. But I prefer to believe that it directly relates to my experiences as an unborn child in my mother’s womb.
    Another important part of my heritage that I think I picked up prior to my birth is Italian food. I can be in another room, smell an Italian dish cooking in the kitchen, and know precisely what is being prepared. Is this a coincidence? My answer is no. I believe that all of my knowledge of and appreciation for Italian food can be traced back to my Sicilian roots and the place where I was conceived. I was never formally taught how to cook Italian food. Yet today I know how to prepare sophisticated dishes without using any written recipes and instinctively know how to season the foods correctly as well.
    The cliché is that Italians like to cook, eat, and reproduce. It’s not surprising that those are among my favorite pastimes. (My mood and the company I am with determines where each item falls on my list.) I crave Italian food all the time. I imagine that I love to eat the things my birth mother ate when she was pregnant. Today, my daughters crave the same Italian foods that I ate when I was pregnant. I believe the child in her womb takes on his or her mother’s tastes.
    This may sound a little off-the-wall, but I think I absorbed my religious beliefs as well while in my mother’s womb. I amclose to my priest, Father Michael Lombardo of Our Lady of Consolation in Wayne, New Jersey, and consider my relationship with him special. I see Father Michael once a week. I have gone to church consistently throughout my life. My one stipulation to my parents as I grew up was that I had to be raised Catholic, even though I was living in a Protestant home. Luckily, I had friends who were Catholic, so I would go to mass with them and their families. I think my own children knew they were Catholic as soon as they were born. I blessed my belly all the time when I was pregnant.
    When your family is a mystery that you wish to unravel and you desire answers to what might have been, you connect with your inner soul and senses more than other people usually do. You want to know where you came from. You want to find out how and why you think and feel the way you do. The questions of that journey don’t stop there. It often takes years of denial before you have the strength to face certain problems, so you can’t expect to resolve them overnight. At forty-seven years of age, I am still continuing to piece together my past and remain committed to my voyage of self-discovery. To learn is to live.

    As a child, I spent every day of my life wondering if my birth mother would eventually contact me. Was she investigating
my
whereabouts and trying to seek me out? One thing’s for certain:I was constantly thinking about
her.
Was she thinking about me? Only she could answer that for sure, but as a mother, I know the deep emotional and spiritual connection that evolves from carrying a child. I can’t imagine what it would be like to never be in contact with one of my daughters, so I doubt my mother just gave me up and forgot about me completely. But again, I may never know.
    After my birth, I’m not sure exactly what happened to my mother next, except that she went back to Italy with my aunt. Over the years, friends have offered their assistance to help investigate her whereabouts for me. From what I have been told, my birth mother eventually settled right here in America. Further inquiries revealed that she eventually got married and that I’m now the oldest of six children. I know that if I chose to meet my mother and her new family, there would be extremely complicated issues and risks. For one thing, I’d be coming forward completely from left field as the oldest of all her children. Do I really want to alter my siblings’ image of their mother by revealing that she gave birth to an illegitimate child? After forty-seven years have gone by, how does a sister announce to a