When I was a teenager, my mother, who had quit modeling to marry my father and not worked outside our home in sixteen years, went to the store where she ordered her party invitations and printed out a resume. She used her resume to apply for a job reviewing restaurants for a local magazine in my suburban New York town, and then she told my alcoholic, unkind father she was done. My two younger sisters and I packed our things and moved out of the sprawling home where we’d grown up and into a tiny yellow house behind the YMCA, next-door to my mother’s former golf caddy from the club she was no longer allowed to be a member of, as a single woman.
I think about my mother’s courage often…how much strength it must have taken to print out her resume that day, what emotions she must have felt as she acknowledged that the life she’d built would need to change, that her story wasn’t going to be the one she’d imagined for herself after all.
Our new home had been occupied by a father with sons, boys we’d heard of around town. My mother’s friends arrived to cover the bare walls with Laura Ashley wallpaper; the floors with coral-colored wall-to-wall; and the kitchen with potted plants and laughter. Our tiny home became the happiest place I’d ever known. There was a Boston Chicken takeout restaurant around the corner, and to this day, the smell of chicken makes me smile.
I can still remember waking up on my first morning in the little yellow house, the familiar dread and fear washing over me (it was the worst on weekends, when my father was home from work), but then I felt the sweetest joy: we had escaped. It was just us in this new house, just my beautiful mother and my beloved sisters. We had made it and were free.
Coupled with our fresh start, however, was a tough adjustment to life on the opposite side of the same, small town. But on vacation, there was no sadness or sense of failure lingering at the edges of our days. All the dark memories could be forgotten in a new locale.
“It was just us in this new house, just my beautiful mother and my beloved sisters. We had made it and were free.”
My mom loved to travel and wanted us to keep some sense of normalcy. With the help of my grandparents, she scrimped and saved to take us on adventures to experience the world.
I remember a magical trip to Florence, Italy. On a shoestring budget, my mom and her three daughters crammed into a room meant for two. We had to sneak inside through the back door so the owner wouldn’t know, and we shared breakfast rolls in the morning. But as we strolled through the Galleria degli Uffizi, taking in the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, and Michelangelo, then eating bowls of pasta afterward, we felt like millionaires.
Although Charlotte Perkins is a fictional character, my mother inspires all of my strong female characters. My mom even had a shipboard romance in her twenties with an Italian porter on the Queen Mary, but when her hapless suitor came to visit her in New York, she snubbed him. “He wore such shiny shoes!” she recalls. But besides the surface similarities, what I admire about both my mother and Charlotte is their courage. I will always be grateful that my mother was strong enough to leave her pampered nest, even when it meant working for years at jobs that wore her out, even though it required her to furnish her living room with castoffs and shop at “Sidewalk Sales” rather than Saks Fifth Avenue.
My mother has now been married to my kind and handsome stepfather for twenty years. I marvel at the journey she’s taken from the day when she printed out her first resume to her happy life as a golf-cart-driving retiree in Savannah, Georgia.
Whether it’s a trip to Europe and faraway coasts or a move across the town we called home, my mother’s ability to create a rich and magical life for my sisters and me—even when we left behind security and money, and my mom’s own dreams were crashing around her—taught me the transformative power of a new adventure. My mother continues to inspire me to be vulnerable, loving, brave…and when a day seems gray and bleak, to book a ticket, pack a bag, and jetset out of town.
