Word: sonly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Mila Valdez, 40, lives near the central bus station in Tel Aviv. It is thousands of miles from where she was born, in the Philippines. She and her 7-year-old son live a cramped existence in three small rooms plus kitchen and bathroom - plus eight other people. But she is fighting for the right to stay in Israel...
Valdez is among 200,000 foreign workers from East Asia, Africa and Latin America who have found their way to Israel. About half of them are illegal, as Valdez is now. She went to Israel legally but her visa lapsed at about the time she gave birth to her son Jerry. Her apartment is among the Eritrean cafés, Sudanese restaurants and Filipino bars in the streets around the old central bus station - underneath a police advertisement inviting residents to inform on their neighbors' visa status. "I am working as a house cleaner because I'm now illegal," Valdez...
...apple pie feature prominently. The Italian version? Soccer, spaghetti and, yes, la mamma. But in recent years, the folkloric image of the doting Italian mother has been joined in the national consciousness by something a tad less idyllic: the mammone, or mama's boy, the hyper-coddled son (daughters are statistically less susceptible) who grows up so attached to his home, and to his mamma in particular, that he never really becomes independent or a self-sufficient...
...Still, the worst that these Italian mothers can usually be accused of is doting too much and not forcing their sons to grow up and do their own laundry. Now, however, in an extreme case that has made headlines across the nation, a court has been asked to consider whether a mother's love for her son - and that of his grandparents too - was so intense, it could be considered a form of child abuse...
...Considering the eternal debate in Italy over the country's supposedly overly sheltered mammone, the case has garnered widespread publicity. But the boy's plight doesn't exactly fit in with the national stereotype of an overprotective mother and her son - it's far messier than that. The parents divorced soon after the boy's birth and the father claimed that he wasn't permitted to see his son for nine years. Concerned about the child's welfare, he finally contacted social services and prosecutors opened an investigation into the mother and grandparents. (Read "What Women Want...