Early Childhood
The future Mother Angelica was born Rita Antoinette Rizzo, on April 20, 1923, in Canton, Ohio, in a community of Italian immigrants, Southeast Canton, who worked in the mills in Canton. Of Italian American background, she was the only child of John and Mae Helen Rizzo (née Gianfrancesco). Her father, a tailor by trade rather than a millworker, was not interested in having children in the first place and abandoned the family when Rita was very young. Her parents divorced in 1929, and her mother maintained full custody of Rita, but struggled with chronic depression and poverty. Her maternal grandparents kept Rita at times.
Rita's childhood was marred by poverty and unhappiness as she grew up during the Great Depression. Looking back upon this time in her life, Angelica described herself and her mother as being "like a pair of refugees. We were poor, hungry, and barely surviving on odd jobs before Mother learned the dry cleaning business as an apprentice to a Jewish tailor in our area. Even then, we pinched pennies just to keep food on the table."
By the age of 16, Rita realized that her mother's dry-cleaning job was a dead end; so she began searching for work for her mother. Through Rita's efforts, her mother got a better job that provided some relief from their dire poverty.
By 1941, a stomach ailment from which Rita had suffered since 1939 required medical attention. By November of that year, x-rays revealed serious abnormalities in her stomach and intestines. The pain continued to worsen, with no alleviation. Doctors were unable to do anything to relieve her suffering or remedy the ailment.
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Famous quotes related to early childhood:
“Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase ‘early ripe, early rot!’”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)