The Thing My Parents Told Me That I Still Can’t Get Out of My Head

What’s wrong with getting your hopes up?

The other day I was on the phone with my mom, telling her about a story of mine that was sitting in an editor’s inbox along with the high hopes I had pinned to it. My policy is to forget about a submission as soon as I hit “send,” but I’d worked hard on this one, and I was proud of myself for finishing it. As a friend of mine says when she accomplishes something, I needed someone to throw me a parade. Just a small one!

My mom didn’t say anything, so I kept going. I told her that I was shaking off the despair that had descended upon me after spending six months writing a memoir proposal that didn’t sell—a disappointment so enormous that, like a teenager slamming her door and pouting, I’d vowed never to write again.

Finally, she spoke.

“I just hate for you to get your hopes up, after what happened before. Remember how devastated you were? I don’t want you to go through that again.”

Getting my hopes up is something I am very good at. Case in point: I am 50 years old, and I still keep hoping my mom will respond with enthusiasm and excitement when I tell her something I’m enthusiastic and excited about.

You’d think I’d have learned. When I was 10 years old, I read The Medical Detectives, by Berton Roueché, and decided I wanted to be a doctor. My parents had been divorced since I was a toddler and hated each other so much they refused to be in the same room together, so it amuses me now to realize how united they were in their knee-jerk impulse to discourage me.

“Honey, you’re smart, but doctors have to be really smart.”

“Medical students have to stay up all night studying.”

“It’s very hard to become a doctor. Plus, it’s expensive.”

“Our family doesn’t have money for medical school.”

“Maybe you could be a nurse.”

I don’t remember who delivered which lines, just that all of them were said, by both parents, more than once. After that, when adults asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up (why do adults always ask children this?), I continued to tell them I wanted to be a doctor, but I said it past a lump in my throat, hoping my parents wouldn’t hear me and laugh the embarrassed laugh they laughed, when, for example, I ordered shrimp at a burger restaurant and someone else was picking up the check. 

“I know you probably didn’t realize it, but that was very rude,” my mother said that night as she watched me brush my teeth.

I failed the class, gave up on being a doctor, and decided to pursue acting instead. This was a more blatant pie-in-the-sky dream, which somehow made it hurt less when people told me I couldn’t do it.

“You’re not pretty enough.”

“I know you think you’re good at this, but you’re going to be up against people who are really good at it.”

“You’re too quiet.”

“There’s something timid about your stage presence. You could never play a character like Kate in Taming of the Shrew. You’re weak. You come off like a victim.”

That last came from the head of the theater department at my college, during the one-on-one sit-down he had with each student before graduation, when he gave us his unvarnished opinion of our chances out in the world. I’d been raped at a party the year before, something he didn’t know, but which made his words even more painful. I was weak. I was a victim. Everyone could see it.

I stopped acting, got a job at a coffee shop, got pregnant, and got married.

The other day I was digging through a box of papers, looking for something, when I came across a folder full of things I hadn’t been looking for. One of them was a letter, carefully tucked inside its envelope, postmarked April 2006. It’s from an editor at The Denver Post, telling me that while I hadn’t been selected as one of the paper’s new cohort of op-ed writers, I’d been a finalist. It’s a form letter, but at the bottom was a note just for me.

I’d grabbed that letter out of my mailbox in Denver as I headed out to pick up my daughter from preschool. It was a warm spring day, and I was delirious with the smell of fresh-cut grass and apple blossoms as I opened the envelope, heart thumping, hands shaking. I was disappointed for about five seconds, and then I was laughing and crying at the same time, filled with a specific kind of joy I’d never felt before.

“Elizabeth, our judges just loved your writing. Your talent is extraordinary!” To me, someone who had only ever been discouraged from doing anything I cared about, this praise was heroin injected directly into my veins. I was high for days.

The crash came when I showed the letter to my father. He’d been teaching English at Red Rocks Community College since my mom was pregnant with me; I remember him whipping out the felt-tip pen he carried in his pocket to correct the punctuation on a sign at a McDonald’s Playland when I was little. He was a loyal Rocky Mountain News man, but I thought he’d still be excited for me. I was wrong.

My dad’s pained expression as he read, and the way he cleared his throat before saying, “Well done, babe,” made me fold the letter up and slide it back in its envelope. I knew he longed to be a published writer, but it hadn’t occurred to me that he might be jealous. 

I felt like an idiot, not to have realized that my happiness might hurt his feelings. Worse, I felt cruel. Neither of us ever mentioned the letter again.

Where might I be now, if instead of showing my dad the letter, I’d started pitching the editor at The Denver Post who encouraged me to keep writing and said she would be happy to look at my work? 

And why didn’t I? Hard as I try, I cannot remember. I was only 30 years old. How I wish I could go back in time and talk to that Elizabeth, a baby with two babies of her own, and push her to be a little bit bolder, a little bit braver.

I suppose, though, that 30-year-old me was brave in another way, because soon after I got that letter, I convinced my husband that we should sell our house and move to New York City, where we had no family and no jobs. We hadn’t been there long when I submitted a story to Hip Mama. I’d been a devoted fan of the magazine since the first time I saw two pink lines on a pregnancy test, and once again, I remember the rush of joy that flooded me when I got the news that my essay had been chosen for publication. I’m pretty sure I jumped up and down screaming.

Once again, however, I made the mistake of hoping my mom would be proud of me. I didn’t consider the fact that I’d written about being raped, or that I’d recounted an incident that didn’t put my mother in the most flattering light. I thought only of how carefully I’d crafted my words, and how exhilarating it was to see them in print.

When my mother came to visit us in Brooklyn soon after the story was published, I handed her the magazine, beaming. I busied myself washing dishes while she read it. And then—nothing. Face drawn and avoiding my eyes, she handed the magazine back and said she was going to bed.

A few weeks after she left, she asked if I’d gotten a letter she’d written me, responding to the essay. I hadn’t. It was long, she told me. My local post office was notorious for losing mail, I told her. She didn’t say what had been in the letter, and I never got it. Eighteen years later, I still don’t know what that letter said.

I spent a few weeks this spring at my mom’s house, helping her prepare to move to a retirement community. She has dozens of friends there, and she’ll have easy access to care as it becomes needed. The move will be good for her, but going through all her old letters, photographs, magazines, and scribbled-on scraps, looking back over a life that’s largely consisted of heartbreak and tragedy, has been brutal.

I hate for you to get your hopes up. I know my mother doesn’t say it to hurt me. She says it to protect me from the harsh reality she’s known her whole life. 

So, what now?

I could keep ruminating about where my career might be if I’d believed in myself sooner. I could wish I’d written more, pitched more, hustled harder, and tuned out the naysayers. I could tell myself that if I had, then I’d have more to show for myself now than one New York Times byline and a book proposal that died on submission.

But also, I have a New York Times byline—and a pretty coveted one, at that. I’ve published literally hundreds of stories over the last decade. I’m a working writer. My words pay the rent. (Not always, but often.)

And so, I’m going to keep getting my hopes up. If not for myself, then for the little girl who was told she wasn’t smart enough, or pretty enough. And I’m going to buy her all the shrimp cocktail she wants.

A version of this story was originally published on Elizabeth’s Substack, Sorry That Happened.

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