By Dina Di Maio

Before Carmela Soprano there was Carmela Cafaro. Before Carmela Cafaro there was Carmela Abbato. And the list goes on.

Thanks to HBO, one of Italy’s most beloved female names has become a household word and a poster on a subway, making it almost as recognizable in the mountains of Tennessee as it is on 18^th Avenue in Brooklyn.

But before Tony’s blond wife bore the name, my great-grandmother and mother did. The name has a religious significance, a Roman Catholic origin, Italian for "Carmel," or the Lady of Mount Carmel. It’s popular in the Neapolitan area of Italy. My great-grandmother brought the name with her from the Naples village of Casoria to America in the early 1900s. She, too, was a wife like Carmela Soprano. But she worked in her husband’s butcher shop. She had six kids, one who died as a child from sickness. She and her husband built a family with many grandchildren and great-grandchildren and a business that is still family-owned today and owned three homes by the time she died in the 1950s. Her granddaughter, my mother, Carmela Cafaro, brought the name to a new generation. My mother, the rebel, rejected the various nicknames for Carmela: Millie, Car, Carm, Mela, for the full ethnic name: Carmela. In her life, she had not met many Carmelas and certainly could not find her name on key chains or bike plates in gift shops.

Carmela went to teachers college way back when but was forced to leave because she couldn’t pay tuition. She worked as a factory girl and married in 1973. Through the years, she raised two children. She took a risk and opened a business that failed, and along with it, lost family and friends who turned their backs on her. In her 40s, she found herself and returned to college. In 1993, she became an RN. She works at a mental hospital and has for years, putting my sister and me through college and grad school. My mother is known where she works for her smile, her kindness, and most of all, her respect for all, from doctor to patient to health care tech. She cooks grits on Saturday mornings for her co-workers to build camaraderie and brighten up what is a difficult, often depressing atmosphere. She speaks up for her patients’ rights. She’s been hit, spit at and verbally abused by many of these patients, some criminally insane. Yet she doesn't treat them as "mental patients," but as people, with dignity and respect, and in turn, has gained their respect.  Day in, day out, she shines in this difficult field with a smile and a laugh.

If Carmela Soprano can last a day doing what my mother does, then she would be worthy of wearing the name. But until then, when I think of Carmela, I don’t think of a blond woman who lives a fake life married to a mobster. I think of Langston Hughes’s poem "Mother to Son" because Carmela ain’t seen no crystal stair. In my life, through all, I’ve seen Carmela still goin’, still climbin’ and from her, I learned strength to do the same myself. I’ve been part of Carmela’s life for the past 27 years but have only understood it in the past few.

My hope in writing this is to give people a different image of Carmela. Before Carmela Soprano, the name Carmela was a celebration of special women. Carmelas were women who fought for their families, who fought for what was right, who were good women worthy of the name.

To me, Carmela is a woman from old black and white photos who wears her hair in a bun. She’s a chubby and old woman who prays and cooks. My mother visits her on her lunch break from school as a child and talks to her in a now forgotten Neapolitan dialect. Carmela is a woman with salt and pepper hair, a woman with imperfections yet the courage to laugh at those imperfections and trudge through the mud of life, rising above its murky depths and striving for cleaner, clearer waters with a shining spirit that touches all who truly know what Carmela means.