Wooden Spoons & Women Warriors

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi — the first female Speaker in American History, and the first Italian-American female to be the most politically powerful woman in the country — continues to give fits to Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and all other aging, shallow, soulless, white men. Regardless of the issue — from Obamacare (which was pushed through by Pelosi and should bear her name), to Impeachment, to pointing her finger at the ManChild in the Cabinet Room and scolding him for having gangster friends, like the punk Putin — these pathetic old patriarchs cannot fathom the inherent power of this woman warrior.

It’s pretty simple, actually. She is a grounded Italian woman who has zero tolerance for lies, meanness and bluster. My mother was just such a woman warrior. Brilliant, but without any formal education, my mother had an innate skill to get to the heart of the matter. If you crossed her, you did so at your own peril. Paralyzed in her right arm by Polio, my mother enforced her word wielding a wooden spoon in her “good” left hand, when she wasn’t using it to cook.

My middle brother, Vincent — the most misogynistic, racist and troublesome of her four children — was frequently the target of my mother’s wrath. She used the wooden spoon on him regularly to drive home her displeasure with his anti-social actions. Each blow she landed on him with the wooden spoon…