By Sarah E. Murphy

My mother and I have lived parallel lives.

She had no choice but to become a mother of a large family, and while I’ve never doubted her love for my five siblings and me, watching her be unfulfilled in that role gave me no other choice than to pursue an alternative path. 

I was afraid of motherhood.

When I was in seventh grade, trying to reclaim my identity after being bullied by a female classmate the previous year, my mother was spiraling into a deep depression, after decades of losing herself to the obligations of a patriarchal religion and society, not to mention a dysfunctional upbringing.

The story of countless Catholic-American women, particularly Irish-Catholic immigrant families.

My father was struggling too, self-medicating with alcohol to numb the pain of losing his beloved father, a traumatic loss for both of us, which also occurred when I was in sixth grade, however I had seen his drinking escalate for a few years prior to Papa’s passing.

I now know my dad was also suffering from undiagnosed PTSD that stayed with him decades after the Korean War. He often had loud, violent nightmares you could hear down the hallway, which he later told me were about the Chinese soldier he killed with a knife in self-defense. Killing a human being with a rifle was traumatic enough, but to him, the act of stabbing someone was more intimate and harrowing, a flashback on repeat throughout his life.

When I was in junior high, my mother went for a routine physical, and when her female doctor asked in conversation how she was doing, my mom burst into tears.

Recognizing her overwhelm, the doctor referred her to a psychotherapist – the father of one of my classmates – although I knew none of this back then.

Somehow, my mother found the precious time to escape her many responsibilities and sit for an hour in his home office in Sippewissett, finally verbalizing the shame, guilt, low self-esteem, and justified resentment she had been carrying for essentially her entire life.

I probably assumed at the time she was at Stop & Shop getting ready for the roast beef dinner she dutifully prepared for her six children and husband on an average week night, before or after teaching CCD. All of this after giving up her career as an English teacher in order to raise her family.

During this time, and throughout high school, I witnessed the humanity in my parents’ seemingly perfect marriage and how their respective wounds impacted their relationship.

My journal includes entries about Mom “taking off” to spend a few days up in West Newton at what was then a rental property for supplemental income to my dad’s teaching salary. My parents bought “Auburndale Ave” right before they were married, for owning a home was expected by Mom’s lace curtain Irish family. We lived there until 1973, when I was a year old, relocating to our renovated summer cottage in Falmouth for my dad’s new job as head of the English Department at Sandwich High School, leading to his career at Mass Maritime Academy and Boston College.

I’m saddened and ashamed when I read those cavalier reflections now, especially since they’re written  critically and dismissively by an adolescent girl who didn’t understand or necessarily sympathize with my mother.

I still beat myself up, like so many things in my life for which I actually owe myself grace. For, like my mother, I’m harder on myself than anyone else.

It’s like the 1980s drug prevention commercials, but with shame instead of weed.

“I learned it by watching you,” the kid dramatically cried to his incredulous dad.

I have to remind myself that I was understandably confused, mistaking my mother’s depression as a rejection of our family and, perhaps, specifically of me. My younger sister had a different relationship with her, especially after I got my period, and they had an emotional closeness I always envied, one of the reasons I grew closer to my father.

I became a quintessential Daddy’s Girl while my mother and I grew farther apart.

I also became more introverted and independent, afraid to ask for help, afraid to make mistakes.

My mother flourished in therapy, for there she felt safe to share her feelings and vulnerabilities, including those perceived as “negative,” which was never permitted while growing up.

She was also reminded of her capabilities.

When Dr. Dmowchowski commented on her intellect, she was taken by surprise.

“Hasn’t anyone ever told you that before, Margaret?”

My grandparents didn’t know how to show affection or emotion, so my father was the only person in her life who ever made her feel “smart.” But Dad’s own personal growth was stunted by his parochial “education,” which included physical, verbal, and emotional abuse, particularly when the nuns shamed him because he came from a “poor” family. He was also told when he was in high school that he’d be lucky to graduate, mocked for setting his sights on Boston College like his friends and classmates from more “well-off” families.

Therefore, neither of my parents ever truly believed in themselves.

It’s also frowned upon by the Irish to pat oneself on the back for anything. We’re supposed to be humble. We’re lucky to even be in this country.

No Irish Need Apply.

My mom didn’t go to therapy for very long, probably due to lack of time more than anything else. She eventually discovered Al-Anon and left Catholicism, finding her community at her  meetings instead of in a church.

I’m happy she did, but I also wish she had continued her sessions with Dr. Dmowchowski, making that invaluable time for herself.

At 89, she is still her own worst critic, building up others but never seeing her own worth. Focusing instead on perceived flaws or inadequacies.

I’ve always been grateful from afar to Dr. Dmochowski for the positive impact he made on Mom, despite the fact that their sessions were few. The note below was written the day after my thirteenth birthday.

My mom was 50 when she sought therapy. I just turned 53, and I’ve spent the last year sitting in a therapist’s office, staring at a poster of a Jackson Pollock painting, trying to connect the dots of previous generations, on both sides of my family, while giving voice and breath to 25 years of deeply-buried pain.

I’m also trying to learn how to believe in myself again, after a lifetime of being an obedient little girl who often abandoned her own best interest and gut instincts in order to please everyone else. 

I also carry permanent scars from a person who once made me feel loved and safe and then convinced me I was weak and worthless. “Getting over” that emotional and verbal abuse, which I tolerated by justifying his severe drug addiction, is one of the most difficult experiences of my life, along with my dad’s death and my mother’s dementia, which has taken hold over the past two years. Having no one to turn to for validation and missing my dad more than I thought humanly possible has forced me to rely on my own inner strength. One of my few comforts is knowing he’s waiting to welcome her, something she thinks about too.

Sometimes, all this self-reflection and attempts to “work” at myself in a world full of uncaring individuals feels futile, and everything my parents sacrificed and believed in was in vain.

In America, entitlement has replaced empathy, and compassion is considered a weakness. I  live in a country where women don’t have the same fundamental rights as men.

It’s as simple as that but profoundly difficult to process.

I’m back in the pews at St. Patrick’s in the 1980s, being told by priests who abuse parishioners that girls aren’t as important as boys, and never will be, and women are merely vessels for procreation.

Or stuck in the worst high school class  possible, surrounded by idiocy and arrogance, but somehow it’s even worse now. Racism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobia. Unashamed and unapologetic in 2025.

A recent book-banning event in my hometown (call it what you like, but more on that later) “presented” by  members of an equally cult-like religion called MAGA, who tout their involvement in the Falmouth Republican Town Committee, recently made their views quite clear: sex isn’t meant for pleasure. The same spiritual abuse and brainwashing I endured for far too long until renouncing Catholicism as a teenager, which impacts me to this day.

Forget equal pay; we don’t even have  bodily autonomy in today’s America. Our fundamental human rights are now determined by geography.

For someone who lost control of her body at age 23, nearly losing all hope for her dreams and her future, it’s traumatic to even read the news. Maintaining my mental health has become my main priority, a daily struggle in this country.

It’s probably even harder for my mother, who is only religious now in regard to her daily consumption of the Boston Globe, which was always the paper of record for my parents.

Although she’s struggling with her memory, she’s the same wise woman she’s always been.

She’s the only person I can have certain conversations with and vice-versa – those we had with my dad in the very same room where she and I talk now, overlooking Falmouth Heights ballpark, where more than 20 years ago, the three of us read every single word by the Spotlight team as they uncovered and exposed the clergy sex abuse scandal within the Archdiocese of Boston, and the widespread corruption and cover-up which enabled those crimes.

When Mom and I saw the movie in the theater, a few months after Dad passed away, we could feel him with us, and practically hear him cheering from above during the climactic scene when the papers finally hit the newsstands. A different time in journalism. Before social media and clickbait.

I’m like my dad and his side of the family in many ways – a poetic dreamer with wanderlust and a passionate need to advocate for social justice and equality. My beloved Papa Murphy famously told the nuns at Our Lady’s never to lay a hand on his son again after he learned of the routine beatings my dad was enduring as a child. Papa also later told off the Jesuits at Boston College when my dad was an undergrad, for they looked down on him because he was a “poor” student whose family couldn’t afford generous donations, if any.

It’s one of the reasons I had no desire to go to BC. The bullshit hypocrisy of religion.

The same shame I felt at St. Patrick’s when we couldn’t put much in the collection basket, especially on two-collection, double-dipping Sundays. My earliest memories of economic classism.

My mom was always the more practical of of my parents, and like virtually all mothers and daughters, we’ve had plenty of challenges over the years, but, also like so many who share that unique bond, we’re more alike than different. Ever the teacher, my mother has been educating people in her own way about the hypocrisy of patriarchy and Catholicism for decades. She’s ahead of her time in countless ways, and while she’s probably the person I was most afraid to finally tell about the secret abortion I had in 1995, she’s been my biggest supporter since that conversation in October 2020, right before the election, back when no one was saying that “dirty” word except the media and people in my everyday life, who judge “women like us.”

My mother has encouraged and empowered me to speak my truth and take pride in my journey.

I tell her constantly that she has inspired everything I stand for and all that I do, but she forgets.

Not just due to the dementia but because she’s a woman who still has trouble taking a compliment or owning her achievements.

My dad was always the one to remind her of all that she’s done and all that she is, but he’s been gone nearly a decade now.

She may have forgotten, but I never will, and I’ll keep reminding her, for all three of us.