Chapter 1: Wingaersheek Beach
The only memory I have of my mother as a healthy person lives on a beach.
It was the summer of 1970 at Wingaersheek Beach in Gloucester, Massachusetts. I was small enough to believe the day would last forever and young enough not to notice the quiet bargains adults make with pain. My mother and I ran along the shoreline, our feet sinking into the wet sand as we laughed and tried, again and again, to build sandcastles close enough to the water to tempt fate.
Each time, the tide erased our work.
We’d yell in comical frustration and run farther down the beach, building another one, only to watch that castle collapse too. Eventually, we gave up entirely and rolled in the sand, laughing so hard we couldn’t breathe. My mother wore a 1960s, style bathing suit with a stiff, ice-cream-cone-shaped bra, the kind that suggested structure even when nothing underneath was holding.
At the time, the game felt exhilarating and absurd. Why bother building something you know will disappear?
Looking back, I see the irony. As I watched my mother struggle with her pain I felt helpless and desperately wanted it to stop. It never did. She met suffering with noise, as if volume itself could undo it. If you freak out about your pain and how nobody cares, you don’t have to acknowledge what lead to the pain in the first place pretending it is an innocent circumstance that she doesn’t deserve refusing to see that it is the pain that we ignore that festers within and will eventually lead to the demise of your mere existence.
That afternoon, sitting on the front porch of the cottage, she read Life Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank by Erma Bombeck and laughed until she cried. Her best friend at the time, Gracey, cooked an army, style meal inside, while she drank beer and smoked cigarettes, and for a brief moment, my mother seemed genuinely happy, unburdened, even playful.
It wouldn’t last.
A few years later, 1974, the house at 58 Partridge Road was packed.
People spilled in from the driveway carrying coats that smelled like mothballs and cigarettes. Drinking. Smoking. Laughing too loudly. My father answered the door like a host on a stage, ushering guests in as they complimented him on the house, the décor, the dining room he had redesigned in black, gold and leather: he called it Gothic drama.
“Kristen,” he said, handing me a stack of coats, “Say hi and take these to the den.” I waited, holding the coats, for him to introduce me. He didn’t. I did what I was trained to do and disappeared with them.
In the dining room, he held court, showing off the chair he built and carved, he paintings from his “dark period" during his years training to be a fine artist at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. One of the guests, Father Lawler, the head of St. Mary’s Parish, joking about putting the chair on the altar which delighted my father to no end. There was laughter. Slapping backs. Performance.
In the kitchen, my mother drank V.O. and ginger with Gracey and her brother who stuck to beer and cigarettes. She and Tom argued loudly while Gracey listened, knowing the rhythm by heart: they yelled, they disagreed, someone made a joke at someone else’s expense, and then they laughed. The topics were always sports or religion, usually to someone’s discomfort. My mother’s voice rose and fell, sharp and animated, already carrying the edge it always did when alcohol met grievance.
Upstairs, my siblings and I sat on my parents’ bed watching The Love Boat, shoving Cheese Puffs, Doritos and Pepsi Free into our mouths. We turned the TV up louder to drown out the noise below. When Mary told me to turn it up, I jumped. I always jumped.
Later, we stood on the balcony overlooking the great room while my father launched into his routine, joke after joke, punchline after punchline, the room hanging on his timing leading up to a roar of laughter only to settle down to hear the next joke with great anticipation and joy.
Then it broke.
My mother and her brother Jack were suddenly outside, fist fighting on the front lawn.
People rushed toward them. Voices shouted. Someone pulled someone else back. My father and uncle broke it up while my mother screamed, not incoherently, but with purpose.
“How dare you let your wife insult Marie and me!” she yelled.
“I don’t give a shit what anyone else tolerates, I won’t!” Then she turned to Janet claiming, “You’ve been dividing this family since the day you married him!”
Her rage was focused. Moral. Unrelenting.
Later, after the party broke up, in the early morning hours, my mother called Jack and Janet’s house again and again, hanging up and calling back into the early morning hours. They never picked up and there lay my father passed out beside her, unavailable as always.
Finally, she went out onto the porch and cried, not for the scene she had made, but for something unspoken that periodically bubbled up when everything else fell quiet.
I stood beside her and asked if she was okay. She half-hugged me, then pushed me away, “Go back to bed,” she said. I did.
I lay there awake, clutching my stomach in pain I didn’t yet have language for.
~*~
That night taught me more than the beach ever did.
Joy could vanish without warning.
Love could flip into chaos.
Pain could be loud and still unanswered.
And most of all, I learned this: You could scream your truth at the top of your lungs and still be sent to bed alone only to be misunderstood.
That was the blueprint.
That beach, the night of that party, and many more to follow… laughter, the disappearing sandcastles, the unspoken pain became the blueprint for much of my life. I would spend years building things with people who quietly stood back and watched the tide take them away. I would learn early how to laugh while losing ground, how to mistake endurance for love, and how to keep building even when no one else was holding the walls steady.
I didn’t know then that I was learning how to survive. I also didn’t know that one day I would sit at another table, far from the ocean, and finally understand why some structures are never meant to last.