When Maria Calatori came from Italy and settled with her family in Mulberry Bend she was known for the steel that ran through her veins, and her beauty. She was slight, with golden skin and bright blue eyes. Her hair was spun like gold. She looked so different from her weak sick siblings with their watery brown eyes and limp hair.
She was what held the struggling family together, her grit and determination as well as her strong faith in the church.
She worked hard, refusing the typical jobs offered to poor Italian women and taking a job as a ladies maid for a rich woman who had come from her town and made her money.
She came home and brought a good pay in, she was able to pay for good Jewish doctors to bring life into her sibling's sick, dead eyes. She learned to read, she learned to write.
And then she met John Conlon. He had dark brown hair, green eyes and a laughing mouth. It was the most typical story in the world. The two fell in love, Maria left her job to marry John in a church wedding that neither family approved of.
They moved to Brooklyn because it was cheaper, and less restricting for a couple like them. John got a job working on the docks and he even enjoyed it, he liked the backbreaking work and the male companionship of men who all agreed with him. To him, it wasn't like he was in a work force, no, he was with other Irish men who felt that men didn't cry, and that men knew best.
He was surrounded by those who told him that he couldn't lean on anyone.
Sean was born with his mother's skin, but his eyes, when he opened them were so clear that it startled the midwife, she whispered a prayer. Because the baby had seen through her. Had seen that she was planning on over charging the young mother whose labor had been almost unnecessarily easy. She shook her head, the baby couldn't know that. But at the same time, she didn't over charge.
Sean's mother was strong during his childhood, she created a home for the little boy and his father. She forged friendships with the irish neighbors and was glad to have woman next door who had adopted their niece, a few months younger then Sean and a permanent playmate.
John was gone for most of the days, and in the nights all he did was collapse next to his pretty young wife, turning farther and more into a dock worker and less as an individual. He couldn't turn to his wife, and tell her of his fear, of how much he wanted her. Because he didn't feel that was what he could do. But he loved her.
And she loved him, they loved each other deeply and passionately, but now they couldn't show it.
And Sean knew it, he had his father's mouth. At least it appeared that he did. His mouth was normally set into a line of concentration as he looked at his parents, confused but not asking.
His mother, being from an incredibly emotional family saw no problem with his tears, she encouraged them over small things. Like when he fell and hurt his knee. Her reasoning was that he would need to be strong over the big things, and it hurt to fall. No reason not to cry.
So he did, until his father beat him for it.
Sean didn't know it, but that night was the first that his father spent with a mistress.
Two years passed, and his father was gone. Presumably working.
Then the news came.
His mother hung herself two days after the sobbing woman, more of a girl delivered the news that the man they both slept with was dead, murdered.
Sean knew his mother had been strong. She raised him to be. But she left him with only an uncle who didn't feel a connection to what he thought of as a Mutt.
So he forgot all that.
His mother may have been strong, but she left him so weak he couldn't allow her to be so.
Author's notes: Change of pace, and kind of me putting down what I think of as cannon for Spot's past. THis is Spot's past as far as all my stories from now on. (And the Saga) I wanted to show his mother, and I wanted to get the point across that that was where he got his inner strength, but hw won't admit it.