Change the News

As the family saga goes it was all about a small pox vaccination. My mother thought the resultant scars were ugly so appealed to the family doctor to put mine on the underside of my arm. I was a lot less than a year old at the time Mother was scheduled to be flying with me on a military plane to join Dad in Rome.

Eager to get away from all the relatives she planned well ahead for the vaccination so it I got sick it would not delay her departure. Two weeks later I had not shown any sign the vaccination hat taken. The site looked like an insect bite and Mother carried a certificate from the doctor that I had indeed been given all shots necessary for international travel.

Sometime mid Atlantic I became seriously ill. And by the time we touched down in Rome, at the civil and not military airport I was running a fever of 104 and covered with welts, and very dehydrated. I had what custom officials believed was a full blown case of Small Pox. Which was confirmed by not having the standard vaccination scar on the outside of my upper arm. Mother, who spoke German and French, didn't speak Italian and they didn't read English. I was whisked off by ambulance to an Italian hospital and put into quarantine. Even Mother not allowed.

Dad was on flight at the time. Mom tried to communicate with her seven years of French. Her German didn't work at all. I rapidly became an international incident because the Italians were sure the US had shirked their responsibilities and allowed an non-vaccinated infant to fly into their country on a USA military plane.

To make an already too long story shorter I survived. Not smallpox as feared but cowpox which is what they give you to keep you from getting its "adult" cousin. I was quarantined away with only Italian speaking medical personnel for two weeks. Upon being declared safe I evidently refused to recognize my mother, and very loudly protested being handed over to her. Which led to the assumption that she was not my mother. Hospital personnel were already suspicious because of the German. My father, a Major at the time, assured all officials in both governments that I was his if not hers.  I was not as easily convinced.

I had been abruptly weened and refused to accept substitutes. And absolutely would not submit to being held by my mother, who in my eyes, had abandoned me. Dad hired an Italian maid and she trained me to drink from a glass. I spoke Italian before English.

So the current news cycle of children as young as four months being separated from their parents really brings up a lot of anxiety. PTSD from infancy. Abandonment issues. Mother and I never became good friends. And she always preferred my brother, born when I was 2 1/2 years old. He was in her words, less willful and independent than her stubborn and headstrong daughter who only spoke English to Pa Pa.

I know what lies ahead for them. As a psychologist explained to me, emotional scars before the age of two are with you forever. You just have to learn to accept and cope.