Peach Pie and Police Uniforms
For my mother, Carol.
Twenty years gone, never far from me.
Everything good in my life is rooted in you.
I was a senior in high school the day I told my mother I didn’t want her life.
I had just come home from school, dropped my bag on the floor, and poured a glass of milk. I cut a slice of peach pie from the tin and sat down at the kitchen table, still wearing my Catholic school uniform. The house was quiet in that late-afternoon way it always was. My mom—Carol—was at the ironing board, smoothing my dad’s police uniforms. Steam rose in little clouds as the iron hissed against the fabric. The smell of starch, the steady scrape of the board legs. I could’ve closed my eyes and known exactly where I was.
But something hit me. A kind of panic, fast and full-body. I looked at her—at the calm way she moved through that room—and felt like I was staring down a warning. A future I didn’t want.
I was already dreaming of college. I had my sights set on New York. A life in motion, full of ambition and noise. I was going to build something that looked nothing like hers.
I thought her life was miserable. I thought it was a life she hadn’t chosen, just one she ended up in. And I had already decided I would never settle for anything so ordinary. Serving other people looked like disappearing. Like giving yourself away one chore at a time until there was nothing left. I didn’t see love. I saw loss. And I wanted no part of it.
So I said it.
“I don’t want your life.”
She didn’t flinch. Didn’t pause. Just said, “I don’t want you to have my life. I want you to have your own.” And she went back to ironing. Like it didn’t gut her. Like she had already made peace with it.
Years later, she told me she had talked to my grandmother about that day. Told her what I said. And my grandmother, who always saw more than she let on, replied, “That one’s gonna leave one day and not come back.”
And I did.
I left Philadelphia. Left the sidewalks I grew up on. The rowhomes, the church, the corner stores. The noise and closeness of a family that was always right there, whether you wanted them or not. I made a life that looked nothing like hers. Built a career. Got married. Stayed busy. Stayed moving. Told myself I had done it. I had escaped.
But life has a way of stripping you down to the bone. The ambitions, the titles, the marriage—they all cracked and fell away. I found myself standing alone in the wreckage of a life I thought I had built right. And when everything else collapsed, the only thing that remained was the kind of love my mother had lived out every day. The kind of love that isn’t loud. The kind that holds families together through sheer will.
I’m a mother now. Fiercely so. And the part of my life that feels the most real—the part I will never apologize for—is the way I show up for my son. The lunches I pack. The clothes I fold just the way he likes them. The “Did you eat?” that comes out of my mouth like a reflex, like a prayer.
I used to think those things were small. They are not small. They are everything. They are life. And I know exactly where that comes from.
It’s my mother’s strength living in me now—the strength to keep loving when no one’s watching, to keep showing up when it would be easier to walk away. It’s the strength that carried me through every loss, every reinvention, every hard thing life has thrown at me.
My mother died twenty years ago today. When she died, I had been living in San Diego for three years.
She didn’t know I already wanted to come home.
I was lonely. My parents had built a life teeming with family. A week didn’t go by without an aunt or uncle dropping in or a Sunday dinner at my grandparents’ house. There were barbecues, backyard parties, christenings, first communions, birthdays, anniversaries. Even funerals were a reason to gather and feed people. Presence was part of the design. She made that happen. She didn’t just build a family. She kept it alive by keeping us together.
I grew up surrounded by love. Not the showy kind, but the kind that fills a house with noise and bodies and overlapping conversations. I took it for granted, like most kids do.
In San Diego, I was more alone than I’d ever been in my life. Cut off from my family. Married into a family that wasn’t mine and never would be. I didn’t know how much I needed to be known until I wasn’t anymore.
She didn’t know I had started to understand. Because what she built wasn’t something she settled for. She didn’t get stuck. She didn’t give up. She built something sacred. And she did it without ever needing the world to clap for her.
My mother fought for her family. Through years of infertility. Through adoption. Through finally carrying a pregnancy to term when every doctor said it might not happen. She wanted this life. She wanted us. She didn’t fall into motherhood by accident. She built it by choice, by determination, by love so deep it anchored every day she lived.
And once she built it, she honored it. Every dinner. Every laundry basket. Every backyard party. Every Sunday mass. Every bedtime. Every fight and reconciliation and holiday meal cooked a little too early because someone had to get to work. She loved without announcement. She stayed without asking to be seen.
And when everything in my own life broke apart—when the marriage ended, when the career cracked, when the noise I thought I wanted fell silent—it was her kind of love that held. The quiet, steady kind. The kind that doesn’t walk away.
I said I didn’t want her life. But the life I once rejected became the one I now hold sacred. I live it. I love it. I carry it forward every day—in the way I mother my son, in the way I stand by the people I love, in the way I build a home not with grand gestures but with small, stubborn acts of devotion.
It’s times like these that my Catholic upbringing kicks in, and I hope—maybe even pray—that she’s watching me. That she sees. That she knows.
Everything good in my life is because of her.
Because she fought for us.
Because she stayed.
Because she loved.
I love you forever, Mom.
