Sometimes I feel like Rose Castorini

Rose Castorini is a wonderful character in the film Moonstruck. Beautifully played by Olympia Dukakis (she won an Oscar for the role) Rose is the long-suffering wife of Cosmo (Vincent Gardenia), who is going through a mid-life crisis, and the mother of Loretta (Cher), a woman approaching her 40’s with a case of the dowdies and a practical idea about becoming a bride.

I’ve always loved the character of Rose because she is so real. Her first lines are uttered when she is awakened from a sound sleep by her husband, “Who’s dead?” she immediately asks.

Through much of Moonstruck Rose ponders the world and the state of the lives of her loved ones with a look of misery and perpetual dyspepsia. She closes her eyes and gives a tiny forward lurch, as though her life has been one long punch to the solar plexus, and then she emits the tiniest of weary groans. She is a mother with a slight martyr complex – although she has some reason to feel misused.

Today I feel a little like Rose Castorini. My cheerful Li’l Bro Thom asked me how I was doing and I managed the equivalent of the tiny-lurch-and-weary- groan, a little martyr in my own little sphere.

“What’s wrong,” he asked.

Oh, I didn’t want to burden him! But life can seem so overwhelming sometimes, can’t it? What with one kid suddenly needing emergency housing, the other running from ballgames to the opera house to Chinatown and losing his ATM card in the process, the husband stepping off one plane and on to another, the still-not-quite-done planning for a large family gathering two weeks from now, the tree falling down in the backyard, the bills – the trying-to-decide-if I can-afford to-continue-blogging or do I need to get a real job, and very soon…

It’s the party that is really running me down, though. I love my MIL very dearly, but you try to figure out a guest and seating list for an Italian family with cousins, aunts and uncles coming out of the woodwork, half of them not talking to the other half – this aunt hasn’t spoken to that one for 50 years, etc and “don’t sit cousin Donny near cousin Adriana, because he scared her forty years ago on New Year’s Eve when he made a joke about necrophilia and she still won’t sit in the same room with him – put her on the other side of the room, but not by Aunt Dora because they had a fight once about how to make chicken with mushrooms and wine! And try to locate the best hotel prices, the best wine -not too dry, honey, and not sweet, and not cheap like a chianti, but don’t go overboard on the price, and could you get me the off-white ribbons for the souvenir bottles? Not off-white like beige, and not too yellow, but a sort of cream color, NOT ecru, that has too much brown, but sort of a blushy cream, you know, like the color of cream, but not so white! And can you find some old Carlo Butti recordings for the DJ? He doesn’t know who Carol Butti is – imagine!”

“Basically,” I wrote back to my brother, “I’m trying to trust that everything works out, everything is for the best in the grand scheme of things. I just keep handing things off to Jesus and treating him like a Divine Runningback, “take it Jesus, haul it to the goalposts!” Which is either very bad theology or very good theology, depending on one’s mood and indulgence.

Dear heavens…I’m all but singing “Drop-kick me, Jesus, through the goalposts of life….” That’s simply not to be borne!

Yes, I’m giving the tiniest of weary groans…