R. Marin is the pen name of a 49-year-old writer, born in Italy and now living in France, who has spent the last several years turning his own life into a series of novels rather than a conventional memoir. His first book, Despite It All, I Made It Through, covers his life from birth to age eighteen. What follows is his account, largely in his own words, of what that life actually was — an account of a biological mother who couldn’t stay, a foster mother who could, and a childhood spent between the two of them.
Marin’s story begins before he has any memory of it, pieced together later from what he was told. “My biological mother didn’t keep to me a lot,” he said. “She always put me in a hospital.” There was, in his account, no single dramatic moment of abandonment — just an absence that repeated itself. He has an older half-brother who is four years older than him, whom his biological mother placed in an institution in much the same way. “I have an older half-brother who is four years older than me,” he said. “And I know she did almost the same thing that she did with me. She left him in the institute. And me, she left me at the hospital.”
He never met his biological father at all, and has made a kind of peace with that absence that comes across as almost matter-of-fact. “It seems it’s an adventure from my mother and these men, and he never tried to meet me,” he said, “and honestly, I never tried to, because when I hear that it was an adventure, I say, it’s an adventure, he will not care. So for what?”
For years, Marin didn’t fully understand what had driven his biological mother to give him up not once but repeatedly. Understanding came later, and it came gently. “With time, I understood that she was sick,” he said. “She had a problem, so she could not keep any children.”
The Woman Who Became His Mother
If the first thread of Marin’s story is loss, the second is the woman who filled the space it left. He refers to her simply as his mother—no qualifier needed, even though legally she remained his foster mother. He remembers being told, as a small child, that she hadn’t given birth to him. “I cried a lot,” he said. “I say to her, it’s impossible, you are my mother. I don’t believe you.” He recalls telling her, eventually, that it didn’t matter. “I can believe you,” he told her. “I imagine because I really love you a lot.”
That love is the emotional center of gravity in Marin’s account of his childhood, and it’s the reason he pushes back so firmly against the idea that children who come to a family later, rather than being born into it, are somehow different from other children. Asked what misconceptions people might have about kids raised the way he was, he answered without much hesitation. “We just maybe, yes, we didn’t have the luck of other families who have children who are born and grow up directly in this family,” he said. “Maybe we just came after. But… if this family loves us really a lot, for me, my mother, she is not my real mother, but she became my mother. I love her, like, even more than I don’t know what. So I don’t think we have any difference. The only difference is you need more patience and more love.”
His mother’s two biological sons also became important figures in his life. When she eventually left Italy for the United States, one remained in Italy and the other lived in France, and both were there to support him. “They were there for me,” he said simply. “They were there. Really nice.”
Not every wound from Marin’s childhood could be healed by love alone… and he was candid, if visibly careful, about the hardest material in his book — what he refers to only as chapter five. He chose, deliberately, not to name what happened to him there in our conversation, and not to dwell on the man responsible with anger. “I don’t want to say the word,” he said, “but if you read a little, you see then… I try to put the history and don’t say exactly the word, don’t make pity or anger to these men, because at the end it’s my history.”
What he would say is that it happened at night, repeatedly, throughout part of his childhood, and that his mother—the woman who raised him—had no idea until he told her himself, years later. “My poor mother didn’t know,” he said. “I told her when I was 18 years old, when I finally had the courage to tell her… She was completely in shock. She says, how? I say, when I was 18, I remember, I say, he was very smart. Unfortunately.”
When he finally told her, the guilt she carried wasn’t his to give her, but she carried it anyway. “She felt really guilty because she said, how could I not see that?” he said. “And you do not talk with me. Say, mama, I was a child. How could I say this to you?”
There was another moment, separate from that chapter, that he described as just as formative — a moment when, in crisis as a young man, he turned to his biological mother for help and came away with nothing. He doesn’t linger on it in detail, but he’s clear about how much it cost him. “This was a big shock,” he said. “This is what I can tell you.”
Marin is careful not to frame his own story as one with a tidy resolution, and he pushed back on the idea directly when asked whether there was ever a point where he felt like he’d truly made it through. “No,” he said, “because every time there is, in life, there is something to fight, if I can say like that. There is always something difficult, and we need to always fight and go up… I don’t have this impression that we can say, “ah, everything is fine now.”
Asked what advice he’d give his younger self, if he could, his answer was short and unadorned. “Be strong,” he said. “You will have a better time.”
That combination — no illusion of a finished story, paired with an insistence on pushing forward anyway — is, in his telling, the whole point of the book. He continues the story in a second volume, Standing (French title: Debout), which picks up his life once he’d moved to France as a young adult, continuing to trace his life forward in installments rather than trying to compress it into a single account.
Marin’s closing thoughts weren’t really about his own story at all, but about the kind of family that gave him his. Asked if there was anything else he wanted to say, he turned, unprompted, to anyone considering opening their home to a child the way his mother once did. “Give a big message to people who want to adopt a child,” he said. “Think about it. If you are sure, be ready to give a lot of love and, uh, they will be your child. This is my heartfelt message to them, whatever is coming.”
It’s a fitting place to end, since it’s really the argument his whole childhood makes, whether or not it was ever legally recognized as such: that the family that loves you is the one that counts.
You can find the link to R. Marin’s book on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H2SLM12X
