My father was a jazz piano player. He and my mother met in a jazz piano bar. I was under a year old when he left us.

From a young age, my mother was my heroine. She could do anything. She was the first woman to own a car in Florence in the early 40’s. She smuggled cigarettes between Switzerland and Italy and played professional poker at a time that only men frequented bars.

For these reasons, she was the subject of whispers. A black sheep.

We moved to a small town not far from Milan, where I was left in the care of a veritable stranger so my mother could travel. I like to believe that my mother didn’t know at the time that this woman was a prostitute.

In any case, I was raised in the streets, in a slum.

I wanted only to live with my mother. Between visits, I missed her terribly.

When she would visit, she would take me to a tavern or café. And I felt taken care of, proud to be with my mom.

As a very young child, I would sit quietly on a barstool for hours on end, waiting for her to empty her last glass andplay her last hand.

My mother talked to me as an adult and told me things I would now only tell a girlfriend. The messages were mixed.

She would cry and say

Life is so hard, I want to die. At my age, you’re lucky enough to live through a single day.Don’t ever look back in life, look forward. If you want to achieve anything you have to work for it.

The whole world is your oyster, Topolino (little mouse), no matter, no matter what. Your life will be different. You’re going to go somewhere. You’re going to do bright, beautiful things. Now, tell me, what do you want to be when you grow up?

I was complicit in my mother’s addictions, even if I didn’t know it at the time. I was her accomplice in tattered shoes as I ran down the boulevard to the farmacia for bottles of pills that she took, some days by the handful. Pills that made her ill to her stomach. Pills that made her pull at her hair and take tweezers to her eyebrows. Pills that kept her up at all hours, or gone for days at a time.

Topolino, Topolino, she would say, my little mouse. Tomorrow, I’ll be better. I promise, my Lauretta. I promise.

Years of tomorrows came, went, disappeared in the rearview mirror.

By association, I too became a black sheep. The stigma never went away.

When my mother lost herself completely to alcohol and drugs, I lost myself too. I stopped believing in a bright future for us.

One might say I became obsessed with needing to prove my worth and to defy the fear of being judged and labeled the way my mother had been.

To prove to the world how much better I was than everyone else, I excelled in school, never getting less than an A grade.

Seeking that morsel of recognition I so badly craved since a young age, I would work 14 hours a day to assure that everything was perfect, study hours on end for an exam, rehearse the same presentation hundreds of times.

I became top sales performer for Apple Computer Company, selling business solutions to Fortune 100 companies. My closing rate was an unheard of 100%.

But the voices that told me I wasn’t good enough became the voice I was using to speak to myself. The constant pressure of having to be first in everything and having to show the world how good I was took its toll.

I was drained, exhausted.

I married four times in search of the love and protection of a father figure. But, like my mother, when things got tough and a situation too thorny, I would exit the scene rather than be the one left abandoned.

I went back to school in my 40s and 50s and obtained a BA in Women Studies, a Master in Psychology and a Certification in Coaching, with the intention of utilizing my life andbusiness experience to help other women reach the pinnacle of their potential.

This is my mission today: To help women recognize their own brilliance and ability to succeed. To grow their careers from an empowered place, not a place that’s draining and exhausting, having to prove anything and never fulfilling the promise.

Endnote:
Lauretta Zucchetti has written extensively about her life. Her memoir is in the hands of a New York agent and will be published within the year. Compressing her lyrical prose to under 500 words was a challenge to say the least!