I'm going to start at the beginning.

The absolute beginning.
It seems like that's the only way I might be able to piece everything together and figure out the missing parts.
Thirty one years ago I was born to two second generation immigrants living in one of the less than stellar but better than most parts of the city.
According to dates it was only twenty four years ago but it's complicated and I'm going to get to that.
My father was twenty one, mother was seventeen. She was sixteen when my sister Tamara was born and that was a quick six and a half months after the wedding, if you know what I mean.
Our house was very traditional, more formal than most, but nonetheless a loving home. I remember especially that there was always a special bond of closeness between us as sisters, one that happily grew to accept Val a few years after she was born when I was two.
Val's birth was hard on mother, and it took her a long time to get back on her feet.
Family came to help with the house and the baby. My paternal grandmother had my mother round to the church at least once a week to have the priests pray over her and anoint her.
That was the first time I remember fasting, as well. Everyone in the family had to because mother and the baby couldn't and they needed the blessings more than anyone. Father kept a calendar in the living room on a little peg and Theresa would always make sure to remind me what I could and couldn't eat. Later she told me that was what taught her to read.
Father was very strict about observing the fasts, if he caught you breaking it he would sit and explain why what you'd done was wrong on personal and spiritual levels. He didn't yell.
It would have been easier to endure if he'd yelled.
Instead all he did was talk to me in a quiet, patient voice until I was in tears.
Didn't I care about mother? Didn't I understand that she needed me?