In 1976 when I was ten years old and a fresh immigrant from Italy to Adelaide South Australia, my half brother Piernatale was born.
That is us pictured together in 1983 for my eighteenth birthday at my mother’s and stepfather’s housing commission home in Bonnyrigg New South Wales where we moved to in 1978.
My brother was born with an intellectual disability. The reason for it can be attributed to a number of things which are detailed in my autobiography Seventy Thousand Camels. What I want to convey in this post has nothing to do with the why’s and how’s of Pietro’s (as I prefer to call him nowadays) disability and or about how he is today. This post is about my relationship with him then and now. Trigger alert for anyone not wanting to experience some painful and ugly context.
Maternal narcissistic abuse, the common thread running throughout my autobiography, can lead the suffering progeny into committing some unspeakable acts against themselves and others. Emotional development is stunted as the victim attempts everything it thinks is correct for them in order to survive. In my case some of this skewered survival included tormenting my disabled half brother.
Pietro was as innocent as I in the Gemmellaro household. But as they say generational trauma affects every member of the family and shit runs downhill in a stormy landslide. In a tiered family dynamic the youngest victim within this landslide was Pietro.
My mother’s first and only love in life was opera. She devoted every ounce of herself to her craft and if she needed Pietro and his intrusive disability out of her way he was sent and locked into my bedroom. I of course tried proving myself in school through my assignments and homework and therefore spent every ounce of my energy attempting to produce 20 out of 20 work my teachers would be proud of.
Imagine then trying to concentrate while your disturbed half brother would bang his foot against your door incessantly whilst making weird and high pitched noises. My nerves were already raw from my mother’s acrimonious screams or her never ending operatic scales and aria practices.
I still hate too much noise around me today.
Eventually I’d have enough and torture my brother as he and my mother tortured me. I’d grab a shoe horn or my rubber thong and have him put his palm out and smash either or both as hard as I could across it. Sometimes I’d pinch him, other times I’d kick him. Fuck knows what other things I did to that poor soul. I know when I was about fourteen I pushed Pietro into the corner of a steel bed frame head first and he had a cut on his forehead that took forever to heal, and another time I deliberately forced his hand on a hotplate and burnt it. That scar never did heal and I had become his ghoul just as my mother was mine.
I hated my family, including Pietro.
Fast forward to around 2015 when I finally decided to drop the thoughtful daughter facade with my narcissist mother who was only getting more selfish with time, and began going low contact following a twelve page letter full of accusations against her. This and the fact I’d moved from Sydney to Adelaide in 2008 meant I wasn’t seeing her, my stepfather, or Pietro.
The last time I saw Pietro in fact was at my youngest cousin’s wedding some time in 2014 where the photo below was taken of Pietro and I.
Silver Sands early 2014
By 2022 I had not seen or spoken to Pietro in eight long years, only ever sending him cards with gift cards for his birthday and sometimes at Christmas time via my mother’s address in Mt Pritchard New South Wales. Then out of the blue a Sydney based NDIS co-ordinator called me to inform me Pietro had been removed from my mother due to neglect and welfare concerns and placed in a group home in Prestons NSW.
It is then that I finally got to hear Pietro’s voice in almost nine years when I called the house. His supported living carers had no idea Pietro even had a sister.
Pietro remembered me and immediately started his tried and true litany of random anecdotes.
“Cicci lives in Adelaide? Bimbo come see Cicci? Don’t swear at Gloria. Kristen in England? Don’t say bad words at the anonati. Don’t go in Ray’s room.”
For years I felt like shit about what I put my brother through as a wayward, lost, angry kid/teen. I thought I might have washed out some of that mea culpa guilt through self deprecation about Pietro’s mistreatment in Seventy Thousand Camels, but I hadn’t even touched the sides.
Pietro in care
There was only one thing to do. Go and visit him in Sydney. And so, I plan to this October 2023; the first time I see my poor brother in nine long lost years.
Look how much he’s aged. And during our last telephone conversation he tried telling me he is really sick with diabetes. His father died aged sixty three from diabetes.
I’m so sorry Pietro. I know life punished me with the birth of my own disabled son, and I deserve as much. Hopefully by caring for my child as no one cared about you, I’ve atoned somewhat for the ill I caused you.
See you soon 💔
