As a homeless child, Regina escaped her abusive mother with trips to the beach. Now she owns a beautiful home just blocks from the Long Island shore. (Rene Cervantes)
Regina Calcaterra was a partner at a high-powered Manhattan law firm and is now a successful politician, working for Gov. Andrew Cuomo as an executive director investigating public corruption. She’s surrounded by New York’s powerful elite. But until a few years ago, few of them knew she grew up with a violently abusive mother who left her homeless on Long Island, practically raising her siblings as they were abandoned for months at a time. Now, she’s sharing her story with the world in her memoir, “Etched in Sand: A True Story of Five Siblings Who Survived an Unspeakable Childhood on Long Island,” released today. She tells The Post’s Kate Storey her tale:
I’m reclining on a couch on the brick patio of my home in North Fork, LI, gazing at the sparkling creek that runs behind it while my boyfriend cooks fresh tilapia on the grill. My cocker spaniels, Oscar and Maggie, are sitting at my feet.
Sometimes I have to pinch myself that I created this safe, warm, adorable environment for myself. I have security, love, friends, health and a powerful job fighting corruption for the state.
I still can’t believe that, as a child, I grew up homeless, living in a station wagon with my four siblings, just miles away.
My mother was a part-time barmaid and full-time alcoholic and drug addict who had five kids by five different dads — none of whom were in our lives.
Calling our mother “Mom” just didn’t fit, so I called her Cookie, the nickname her parents gave her when she was a kid.
Cookie was about 5-foot-5, with dyed red hair that was always pulled back. She never wore makeup and always smelled of stale alcohol. She was a heavy-set woman with a loud, grating cackle for a laugh.
She’d come and go out of our lives, abandoning us for months at a time.
My older sisters, Camille and Cherie, took care of me until they were old enough to move in with friends, and then I took care of the younger two, Rosie and Norman.
When we were all under 10, we lived above a factory in St. James, in a middle- to upper-class portion of Long Island. The sharp stench of the manicure nail glue manufactured there filled the space, but that was the least of our problems. There was rarely enough food and, when Cookie was around, there were regular beatings. Fighting back against Cookie would result in getting tied to the radiator and punched. I often received the worst of the assault, because my father was the one who broke Cookie’s heart.
To escape the violence, we’d put the little kids in the stroller and walk the two miles to Cordwood Beach, passing beauti-ful homes surrounded by tall, iron gates.
We would spend all day at the beach. We could blend in easily because everyone there looks the same regardless of social status. It’s just you and your bathing suit.
While the rich Long Islanders would munch on their snacks, we were a ragtag bunch, sitting under the trees filling our bellies with onion grass we’d picked for lunch.
In the fall, the five of us would board the school bus and go to classes, even though we weren’t always registered. Cookie often had warrants out for her arrest, and registering us for school gave the cops an easy way to track her down. Back in the ’70s, it was easy to live under the radar. We’d be in school for a few months, then miss a few months running from the cops, or taking turns staying home with the younger kids.
It also helped to lie. I started making up stories with my siblings to explain our absent mother (she was always working), truancy records (we just moved and lost the paperwork from the other school) and bruises and burns (falling down stairs, holding an iron). We pretended to look and act like the other kids at school — not always easy in such a wealthy part of Long Island. Sometimes the authorities got wind of how we were living, and we’d be placed in separate foster homes.
Despite the worry about getting caught out, I loved learning and school. It was a temperature-controlled environment with free food and a reassuring routine. It occupied my brain and kept me thinking about other things.
And, while school was usually an escape, my second-grade teacher exposed my home life, making class a nightmare.
“This is Regina, she’s a foster child, so she won’t be around for very long,” he said in the front of the classroom.
I felt paralyzed. The blood rushed to my face. My cover story was that I lived with an aunt and an uncle, but now that was blown.
We eventually ended up back in Cookie’s care and spent most of 1977 living out of her station wagon. We hung out at gas stations, where we bathed in the sinks and were forced to beg around the customers.
As fancy cars lined up for gas on their way back from the Hamptons, Cookie would walk up to them and point to her car full of children. We knew the drill. We’d put on our most miserable, desperate faces and eventually some kind stranger would fill up our gas tank.
That winter we moved into a rental, and I went back to school. A teacher recognized me sitting in the lunchroom eating the free breakfast and took me to the principal’s office.
“You aren’t registered, Regina. Why have you and your siblings been out of school for the last few months?” the teacher asked.
“Oh, it’s because we moved and were in a different school then,” I explained innocently. “We just moved back here. And I think we lost the paperwork in the move.”
The truth? We’d failed the health exam required to register for school because of lice.
By the time I was 12, I considered myself the mother figure to little Norman, 10, and Rosie, 6.
I would shoplift Kraft mac ’n’ cheese for them. The box was very thin, so I could slide it into my pants and walk out with it. So, I’d feed the kids that and I’d steal uppers from Cookie’s pills and drink vinegar to make my own hunger go away. I started losing clumps of hair from malnutrition.
One day Cookie came home, irritable from her hangover, and began hitting Rosie. I jumped to her defense, and Cookie grabbed me by my hair and began bashing my face into the ground.
That time, the injuries were so severe that when I went to school the next day, my teacher notified the authorities.
A social worker was waiting at the house after school and explained to me that, at nearly 14 years old, I could be emancipated from my mother. I signed the papers, giving me freedom and immediately putting Norman and Rosie into safe foster care.
I was away from her, but I never felt relief. When my mother found out about my efforts to emancipate myself and take away her guardianship of my siblings, she kidnapped them and fled to another state.
I was distracted and constantly worried about my younger siblings, but I finished high school living with foster parents, who gave me structure and rules for the first time in my life, even though I never felt like I was their own. The couple received $360 a month for taking me in, and I’d get $62, which I’d use for school supplies and clothes. I mowed lawns and cleaned houses after class for extra money.
But I was a teenage girl! I needed certain things. And this was the early ’80s, so I needed pink lipstick, blue eye shadow and lots of hair spray. My classmates wore Jordache and Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, which I still couldn’t afford with my measly allowance from the state. I never completely fit in.
A teacher at my high school knew I was living with a foster family.
“Regina, you need to sign up for the ACTs and SATs,” he said. “You’re smart enough to get into college.”
There were certain teachers in my life that made a big difference and who taught me that a college degree was my ticket out of poverty.
But the day I graduated from high school wasn’t a celebration.
It felt like a relief, like checking one more thing off my list. And when I was up there in my cap and gown accepting my diploma, I looked into the audience, and my family wasn’t there.
I went to college at SUNY New Paltz, where I avoided talking about my past.
When I started dating someone new, and the conversation turned to “tell me about your family,” I’d say my dad was a contractor and my mom a homemaker, a script based on my foster parents.
I was embarrassed — not of my foster parents. I just didn’t want anyone to know I wasn’t like them, that I was different.
Keeping my walls up made intimacy difficult, but I was fine with that. I was more comfortable being standoffish and drawing barriers than letting people know about my past.
Close girlfriends were different. I’d let them in a little more. Once I knew they were someone I could trust and wouldn’t judge me, I’d move on to my second script: that my siblings and I grew up in and out of foster care, without giving too many details. But I never used the word “homeless.”
It’s weird because my abusive childhood did teach me something valuable. All that standing up for myself and talking back to Cookie proved I could argue effectively, so I applied to law school at Seton Hall University.
When I got in, the feeling was surreal. To go from living on onion grass to studying at one of the top 100 law schools in the country was humongous. Even so, I never aspired to be a lawyer. My goal was to avoid becoming a teen mother and to get enough food for myself and my family.
After law school I was working for the private sector practicing law, when I finally earned enough money to move into my own place on the Upper East Side. It was tiny, but I didn’t care. It was proof that I wasn’t a slave to poverty. I finally felt stable.
Meanwhile, I was finding love in the city. Todd Ciaravino was a cute aide in Mayor
Giuliani’s office who I flirted with on trips to City Hall. We started dating, and I gradually told him I’d had a tough upbringing without confessing to the painful depth of it.
Eventually, I moved to a law firm and worked my way up to partner. I made friends with many other privileged people in New York, including the CEO of Nicole Miller. I bought a beautiful home near the beach on the North Fork of Long Island, a place I thought I’d never return to. But my older sisters live there, and my town is called New Suffolk, which sounded like a fresh start from the old Suffolk, where I’d suffered so much.
For 40 years, I had proved myself in my career without anyone giving me handouts or taking pity on me, because I’d managed to keep most of my terrible past a secret. But now that I had made it, I felt like I could begin to tell the truth.
My opportunity came out of the blue. A friend asked me to become an honorary chairman on the board of the Children of Bellevue, which raises money for kids who are abused.
It was like a lightning bolt. These kids were me. And telling my story might help these children so they wouldn’t have to fight to succeed like I did. When my friend asked me to give a keynote speech at an event for the program, I agreed right away — and I had a plan.
At the Time Warner Center event, overlooking Central Park, the city’s elite were assembled in their finest gowns and tuxes. As I stepped up to the podium, my heart was pounding in my ears.
I began telling a story about a little girl and her siblings who grew up homeless. How they were abused and never had enough to eat.
The wealthy New Yorkers waiting in line at the lavish tasting stations slowly quieted down. I looked into the audience and saw Camille, my nieces and nephews and my boyfriend, Todd, smiling back at me.
I gulped. And then said, “That little girl was me.”
The room went silent. Finally, after years of holding back, here I was standing on a stage revealing the truth to the world. I have never felt so vulnerable — or so relieved.
That night, the event raised more money than it ever had in its 10-year history — more than $300,000.
That was my turning point. It encouraged me to keep opening up, so I started writing a book about my past. In it, I reveal the sexual abuse, the violence, the worst stories of my poverty — and how my scrappy little band of siblings survived on our own.
I showed the drafts to Todd and felt conscious that I was really telling him about my past for the first time. He took it in stride and accepted it, just as I hoped he would.
My memoir, “Etched in Sand: A True Story of Five Siblings Who Survived an Unspeakable Childhood on Long Island” ($15.99), is out today from Harper Collins, and I’m nervous to see how my colleagues, friends and other family members react.
Cookie passed away in 1999. And in 2003, I finally got proof of who my father is. He spent years denying paternity, until I won a lawsuit ordering him to take a DNA test.
I only met my dad once, years after winning the lawsuit. He told me he’d drive by the foster homes I was in and watch me. He was usually living only a few miles away in these nice homes with his other family. And although I don’t remain in contact with him, I have a relationship with his daughter, who told me he ordered a copy of my book.
In his heart, how will he digest all of this? He knew I was living in foster care and he didn’t take responsibility. But I don’t feel resentful because I need to get on with my life.
As far as my future, anything is possible. I ran for State Senate in 2010, and although I was disqualified for residency reasons, I hope to do more in politics. My experience growing up with Cookie has made me a more compassionate person. I spoil my two dogs and cat rotten, and I’m very involved in the lives of my nieces and nephews. I’m now 46, and I’m no longer running from my past. I’m embracing it.