She was the sixth child, born into a family already crowded into one room with never enough food to go around. But when Marilena Piva was just a toddler, things became even worse. Her mother bore two more children – twins.
And so it was that with a distraught but loving mother overwhelmed by life and a charismatic father who drank too much and worked too little, little Marilena became the straw that broke the camel’s back.
“I was there running around, running all over as little ones do, and one day my mother said, ‘Let’s take a bike ride.’ I was thrilled. It had never been just my mother and me,” she recalled.
But as they reached the center of Vincenza, their northern Italian town, her mother instructed her to knock on the door of a large building. It was a convent-run orphanage. A nun appeared, and Marilena’s mother assured the blond, green-eyed 4-year-old she would return for her.
“I waited in the courtyard all day until the sun went down, and then I knew she wasn’t coming back,” recalled Marilena, now 61 and living in North Canton.
For the next 11 years, Marilena never saw her family. The convent’s walls denied her access to the outside world.
“I never walked down the street, never bought an ice cream cone, never went to a party,” recalled Piva. “It was like a concentration camp. There was so much abuse. We were not allowed to talk, and that, I think, is how I learned to be ‘inward,’ to look inside myself.”
That ability to be “inward” would serve her well when she came to the United States, the young, non-English-speaking bride of a serviceman.
But first there would be more trauma in Italy. At age 15, her pleas convinced an aunt to rescue her from the sequestered life, and Marilena recalls feeling giddy with the freedom of a bird released from its cage. But the blossoming young teen was ill-prepared — too institutionally naive — to protect herself in the real world. Before she reached 16, she became pregnant, delivering a son she placed for adoption.
By 1967, Marilena was using rudimentary English as a telephone operator at a nearby U.S. Army base. It was there she met her first husband, who brought her to North Canton.
The couple had a son and a daughter, Marco and Sharon O’Brien, now grown. A painfully homesick Marilena learned English first by watching TV’s “Sesame Street” with her young children.
“It was like transplanting a tree nearly grown in another environment,” she said.
Though the marriage floundered, she and her ex- husband remained on good terms. Marilena, a single mother now with children to raise in a new country, worked several jobs. She also began thinking about yoga, a practice she first saw on television.
“But there were no classes, or just a few. When I took one, I knew that it was exactly right for me. It was about knowing yourself, getting in touch with yourself, and I had learned that as a child,” she recalled.
Delving deeper into yoga, she became determined to study it intensely, with an eye toward becoming a certified instructor.
Fourteen years ago, she met Martin Mick’l Bertman, a university professor, artist and philosopher. Six years later, they married. He and Marilena began traveling to Italy annually. There, though her parents are deceased, she joyfully reunited with her siblings.
And in 2007, the son she had surrendered at 15 found her. Over the years, she had tried to find him, but sealed Italian adoption records thwarted her efforts. She visits him now during every trip abroad.
Reach Diana Rossetti at (330) 580-8322 or e-mail:diana.rossetti@cantonrep.com
