Origin Story

On a catamaran cruise during our honeymoon in Jamaica, we met a couple from Canandaigua, New York. Drunk and sunburnt, I was disproportionately excited to share the coincidence that I had once lived there, too. Long ago, for about 18 months, when I was three. Just before we permanently relocated to my dad’s home state of North Carolina. From our catamaran acquaintances, I learned bits of new trivia about the town I barely remember. That they have wineries, for instance; and that boating is a popular pastime. The winery piece made sense, as I could easily imagine my young parents, with just two of the five kids they’d eventually have, moving to a place with the romantic illusion of wine-drinking during the warm weekends of their short Upstate summers. Boating was a bit of a curve-ball, since my mother was famously prone to sea-sickness and generally avoided getting her head wet in front of others. The prospect of bobbing around in a life-jacket on the fourth largest Finger Lake would not have been a big draw for her. Then again, it was still early in my parents’ marriage. Perhaps my dad mistakenly believed he’d one day coerce my mom onto a pontoon for an afternoon of “boating”. Unfortunately, we wouldn’t live there long enough for hell to freeze over. And that’s what it would’ve taken to get my mom on that lake in anything smaller than a cruise ship. 

What I do remember from Canandaigua is limited to the scope of a 3-year-old’s experience. The ice cream truck. The undeveloped cul-de-sac my sister and I were forbidden to explore but still did. The scent of fresh-cut grass smelled from the creaky aluminum swing set. The green beans from the backyard garden that I’d eat raw, to the consternation of my parents and digestive system alike. The image of my mom’s pregnant belly and the understanding that my younger sister was inside. The punishing cold typically associated with Upstate New York is almost absent from my memory, although I do recall getting very heavily dressed in snow clothes and then crying to go back inside after roughly five minutes. 

My lasting impression of Canandaigua is vague and distant, but overwhelmingly pleasant. The mental picture of it seemed to line up nicely with that of the half-drunk couple on the catamaran. In contrast, my mom’s review of Canandaigua had always included a long lament about the snow, probably because she’d been forced to shovel it so often while pregnant when my dad was away as a Marine Corps reservist. For any adult who spent 18 months in an area that averages 55 inches of snowfall per year, winter is likely to feature prominently in their critique. Then again, my mom was always cautious about being too positive. While she loved all five of her kids, she didn’t hesitate to hate a broad range of other things. Sand. Laundry. Fish. Medium-rare meat. Mayonnaise. War movies. High literature. Other people’s parties. And my dad’s aging family home in North Carolina, where we lived for the rest of my childhood. 

When I was three, our suburban, Canandaigua neighborhood, with its fleeting summers and traumatizing winters, was exchanged for expansive acres of woods, grass, gravel roads, and a big, white house built in the late 1940s. “Winter” was a month rather than a season and usually produced only one or two sad little dustings of snow. An otherwise temperate North Carolina year was annually punctuated by the oppressive humidity of summer, when we darted between bedrooms cooled by window units through steaming-hot hallways, like kids jumping between the hot tub and the lap lanes at a hotel pool. From mid-May to early October, we ran around barefoot with store-bought Jello pudding pops in the backyard. No ice cream truck would ever bother to visit and the only neighbor for a mile in all directions was our aunt’s double-wide trailer a football-field away. 

While my mom thoroughly enjoyed the isolation and lack of winter weather, she was not at all enchanted by the antique charm of the house her father-in-law had built. At one point, when she was cursing the poor insulation, shoddy plumbing, and revolving cast of pests that continuously emerged from the old home’s crevices, I asked my mom to name a place she’d actually liked living. “The house in Canandaigua”, she’d said to my surprise without pausing. Snow-shoveling be damned, she admitted she’d been happy there. I had already forgotten more than I’d ever remember about that place and couldn’t even recognize it in pictures. But it was still at the forefront of my mom’s mind, further enshrined as a long-lost ideal with every subsequent year she spent cooking and cleaning in a house she couldn’t stand.

By the time I had my own kids, my parents had moved across the road to a respectable double-wide on a piece of land that belonged to my dad. They added an addition and a wrap-around deck that successfully disguised it as a modest ranch house. It was situated on a secluded, wooded lot and my mom loved it because it was hers. Meanwhile, staying at home full-time with my own young sons, I had started posting stories from my childhood on a personal blog during nap time. My parents enjoyed reading them, so their birthday presents that year were collections of those stories that I’d cut-and-pasted into photo books online and had printed. My mom’s version contained, among others, two stories from Canandaigua that were a mix of personal experience and family lore passed down by my mom from a time that preceded my recollection. 

One story was called “Canandaigua Open House” about the time I fell off the toilet and hit my head during a real estate showing of our house. Prospective buyers had rung the doorbell at precisely the moment that my infant sister’s diaper had erupted onto the adjacent wall. At the very same time, I’d been calling for my mom from the toilet in the next room, because my feet could not yet touch the floor and I needed her to hand me some toilet paper. When my mom didn’t respond (because she was furiously scraping feces from the light switch before trying to answer the door), I attempted to reach it myself and split my forehead open in a precipitous descent from the toilet. The story had long been a family classic, but the absurdity of trying to complete adult tasks while simultaneously parenting was much more relatable now that I had become a mother myself. 

The other Canandaigua story was called “Whatever You Want To Be” about the time a neighbor’s dad told my older sister that she couldn’t be a doctor. We were at a get-together in our Canandaigua neighborhood and the host had been making conversation with the kids about what they wanted to be when they grew up. When my older sister had said she wanted to be a doctor, he was quick to correct her. A nurse, he assured her. That’s what she meant. Because girls couldn’t be doctors. It was the early 1980s, so I wasn’t old enough to remember this encounter, but the story was retold again and again over the years until I could almost hear the record scratch reverberating throughout the house as his words reached my mom’s ears. My mom, likely clutching her rum and Tab or some other quintessentially-80s adult beverage, got down on the level of my sister, who was roughly four at the time. She looked her dead in the eye and proclaimed in a tone of muted rage for her and the rest of the party to hear: “You can be whatever you want to be.” My mom then turned to the man and addressed him directly. “Don’t you EVER tell my daughter what she CAN or CANNOT BE.” 

It was never clear what exactly happened after that. Did my mom over-turn a coffee table and challenge the neighbor with the neck of a broken Shasta bottle in her angry fist? Or did normal activity resume all around them like nothing had ever happened? The truth is, neither I nor any of my four siblings ever bothered to ask. Those two lines of dialogue were the microphone drop that mattered. They shaped our perception of ourselves and elevated our expectations for how we should be treated. My mom’s resounding message to her children was that women were powerful; strong, smart, and capable. And in our eyes, no one embodied those qualities more so than she did. That story was confirmation of what we already knew to be true: our mother was a bad-ass.

My mom was raised in a small corner of 1950s-Manhattan, populated mostly by Irish-Catholic, working-class families. After losing her dad at the age of six, her strongest role models were almost exclusively female: her widowed mother of four, who worked full-time to support them single-handedly; her three older sisters, who excelled in math and were among the early generations of computer programmers; the Catholic nuns, who dominated her academic life until she attended Hunter College. The women in my mother’s life were strong, smart, independent, and relevant. By their influence and direction, they rendered her equally so. At least, that was their intention. And by all outward appearances, they had succeeded.

During my childhood, there was no “wait til your dad gets home” because deferment of authority was unnecessary. At the end of the day, all accounts were squared with the management, and my mom was it. She was the rule-maker, the reckoning, and the preeminent multi-tasker. She not only wore the pants, she could sew her own pair while nursing a baby and folding two loads of laundry in the length of time it took to watch an episode of General Hospital. She hand-packed our lunches with culinary expertise, cleaned like a woman possessed, cooked two hot meals a day, and wrangled up to five kids in addition to her own five children at the daycare she ran out of our house. She could craft a triple-layer cheesecake from scratch, pluck a bloated deer tick from her kid’s scalp, and once caught a mouse with her bare hands in our dining room. She’d fallen asleep on the floor while coloring with us after a lengthy bout of parenting young children alone. And she’d stood at the top of the stairs with a blunt object, yelling into the dark at imagined intruders as we slept, ready to defend us on nights she was the only adult in the house. She was selfless and nurturing, but also fierce and formidable.

She had fears and flaws and insecurities, of course. But she turned those into teachable moments for us. When boys teased us about our weight or the shape of our bodies, when we doubted ourselves and repeatedly told her “I’m never gonna learn how to....”, when we got wait-listed for our first choice of colleges, when we struggled in all the ways that make a mom want to cringe or cry, she encouraged us. That, son or daughter, boy or girl, we were worthy of respect and capable of incredible things. She was our superhero. And that Canandaigua garden party was her origin story.

When I was in my teens, my mom returned to her chosen profession of nutrition. She was nervous about the transition, but to us, it seemed more appropriate that her colleagues should be nervous about how much ass she was going to kick when she got there. And kick ass, she did. But along the way, she mentored fellow nutritionists who were not much older than her own children; people who described her as their friend and work-mom alike; young women who were searching for strength and guidance in their new profession. She became their superhero, too.

In reality, my mom’s perception of herself was not the one she presented to the world. The older I got, the more I realized that she saw herself as weak, insignificant, and unworthy, even if her every word and deed suggested quite the opposite. She became who she needed to be for her kids, for anyone who needed her; and our belief in her was infectious. Even as our relentless demands exhausted her, our unwavering faith empowered her. 

Once we were grown and she had retired, it was harder and harder for her to stay in character. When her body began to fail her, she abandoned life-long interests, lost the will to maintain her own health, and too often conceded defeat in the face of bad behavior. Because she never truly believed she deserved any better. And as her physical strength dissolved, so too did her belief in herself. 

My mom died in March of 2022 at the age of 72 from what the doctors could only describe as “auto-immune causes”. The last few months of her life were a series of hospital stays. One night, about ten days before she died, she called to say that she felt like her soul was slipping away. When I got to the hospital, she asked me to read her a story from the book I’d given her a few years back. She wanted me to tell her “the story about Canandaigua”, which I took to mean “that story about me falling off the toilet”. It was about me, and it’s human nature, I suppose, to put ourselves at the center of every story. So I started reading, but as nurses came in and out with exhausting regularity, I became distracted and never got around to finishing it. 

By the time we got to hospice a week later, there wasn’t much time left. She was no longer conscious, but I did get a chance to finish reading the Canandaigua story out loud when I was alone with her. Unfortunately, I realized too late that I had read her the wrong one. “Tell me the story about Canandaigua,” she’d said, “The one where I told the guy off”. I’d heard the first part of what she’d said and just read the one with Canandaigua in the title. But she’d wanted to hear the other one. Her origin story. She was scared at the end of her life, and she wanted to remember a time when she felt strong, confident, and fearless. Because that’s who she wished she was. All the power she’d once gathered and given in the service of others, she needed to summon at last for herself. 

When I mentioned the mistake to my brother a few months after she died, he quickly reassured me. “Oh, I read her that one,” he said. A rotating cast of my mom’s children had been in and out of her various hospital rooms over the last weeks of her life, and apparently, she’d just kept asking until one of us got it right. I hope it reminded her what it felt like to be powerful. One last time.

Two years past her death, my mom’s origin story echoes through the accomplishments of a child who took her words to heart. My oldest sister, the original recipient of my mom’s quavering edict, did get her doctorate degree. While not a medical doctor of the sort she first envisioned, my sister has healed countless patients as a physical therapist in an ongoing career spanning more than two decades. Just last month, she miraculously healed my hip injury from several states away through a series of video chats and phone calls. I went from hardly bearing weight on my left leg to walking normally in a matter of weeks. Sure—a surgeon can cut you open and possibly save your life, but a physical therapist can fix what’s broken and get you back to doing what makes you feel alive. If that’s not a super-power, I don’t know what is. I do know that my mom was very proud of my sister and valued her medical input to the very end. I like to think that whenever someone addresses my sister as “doctor”, my mom winks from Beyond and raises a glass of celestial Chardonnay to my sister’s determination. And that maybe, just maybe, she makes a bookcase spontaneously topple over on a misogynist who happens to be running his mouth somewhere. Because that just feels like something my mom would enjoy, and she deserves to be happy after all. 

As for me, I’ve never made it back to Canandaigua, even after the glowing recommendation of the couple on the catamaran. I do have neighbors now, but I still live in North Carolina, in a town with more breweries than wineries and a nearby lake I never go out on. It almost never snows here, so I’ve never shoveled a drive-way while pregnant. My lasting legacy with my sons will likely be the silly songs that I make up to get their attention and the fact I’ve yet to audibly fart in their presence. I have no secret super-powers, and that’s ok. I now suspect that all of our seem-to-be-superheroes are mere mortals in disguise, rising to the occasion of their own adversity and offering themselves up in the service of others. I’m no longer convinced I can be whatever I want to be, but I’m fairly certain I’ve inherited the will to become what I need to be for the people I love. And there’s honor in that as well.