I’m just a girl from New York

On love, loss, scars, and the woman I was always meant to become.

The Midlife Becoming

midlifebecoming.substack.com · @themidlifebecoming

by Barb

The last time I saw my mother she was in her nursing home room, and I remember being so grateful just to be there — because for months during Covid I had not been allowed in at all, separated from her by a pandemic and a locked door and a helplessness I had no language for. We had just gotten a short month and a half together again before she left us. It was not enough time. It never would have been enough time. But I held her hand as she took her last breath, her breathing labored and heavy with fluid, and her face was so peaceful — ready, I thought. She was ready to meet Jesus, and I knew it, and I felt, underneath all the grief, a deep and quiet peace settling over me in that room.

Faith has always lived deep in my soul — not loudly, not rigidly, but quietly and persistently, the way the truest things tend to live in us. My parents were God-fearing Catholics who raised us with a belief that there was something bigger than ourselves holding everything together, and even as I have grown into my own relationship with God— attending Mass but not perfectly, believing deeply but not always conventionally —that faith has never left me. On my darkest days, it has been the only thing that carried me. Holding my mother’s hand in that nursing home room, I felt it more clearly than I ever had. She was at peace. She was held. And so, somehow, was I. She was such a good mother. I was grateful for every single moment we had ever shared, right back to the earliest ones I can remember — her moving around her kitchen in her housecoat, always cooking, always caring, showing us her love the only way she knew how, through food and presence and showing up every single day without fail. She was a caretaker to her core. She gave everything she had to her family and maybe never fully found herself outside of that role, and I have thought about that many times over the years— wondered if watching her pour herself out so completely was part of what planted in me such a fierce need to also find and claim myself.

But to understand who I am today, you have to start with my father, because he is the foundation of everything.

My dad was the son of Italian immigrants, the only boy, and he left school somewhere around seventh or eighth grade because sitting still in a classroom was never where his gifts lived. His gifts lived in his hands — big, rough hands, calloused from decades of hard work, from driving an eighteen-wheeler for Volkswagen across the country, from taking apart engines he had never seen before and putting them back together without a manual, from fixing whatever broke in our home without ever calling anyone for help. He joined the Navy when he was young. He grew plants that thrived like they were reaching specifically toward him. He loved his coffee — strong and hot, every single morning —and I think about that every time I pour my own cup because I am so much his daughter in that way and in so many others. He had a loud voice, a strong presence, a big opinion about most things — but underneath all of that, underneath the big Italian man with the big personality, was the gentlest heart I have ever known.

He loved me like I was the greatest thing on earth, and I believed him, because that is what real love does — it makes you believe it.

I was his youngest, his daddy’s little girl, and on Saturday mornings we would get in the car together and just go — to get breakfast, to run errands, to visit relatives, nowhere important — and I was always happy just to be next to him. It did not matter where we were going. It never mattered. He made me feel seen and capable and completely cherished, and I carried that feeling like a lantern into every dark season that followed. He had his first heart attack when I was eight or nine years old, a quadruple bypass that scared us all, and then a valve replacement years later, and then multiple myeloma found him when I was already grown and living at the Shore and building my own life. I lost him anyway — the way we always lose the people we love most, never quite prepared even when we have had years of warning. He took a piece of my heart with him that I have stopped trying to recover, because it was never mine to keep. It belonged to him.

I have leaned on my faith in those moments the way you lean on a wall when your legs stop working — not dramatically, not with any particular words, just with the quiet trust that he is still somewhere close, still proud, and that the love between us does not actually end.

Dad — thank you. I am everything I am today because of the love you gave me without condition or limit, every single day of my life. I could never have become who I am without you believing in me first.

I am the youngest of four — two boys and two girls — and we grew up in New York without a lot of money but with each other, and I always believed that was more than enough. I had a fire in me from the very beginning. I skipped a grade. School came easily and naturally — I was academically gifted in a way that felt like a quiet superpower, and writing especially was always my gift, the place where everything I was thinking and feeling could come out shaped and true. I started working at twelve, tutoring younger students, and I never really stopped after that — a supermarket, drug and alcohol counseling, child protective services, graduate school, and eventually a career as a school psychologist that has now spanned twenty-five years and taught me more about human beings and human pain and human resilience than any textbook ever could. I built everything one deliberate step at a time, fiercely independent, never wanting to ask for help, always certain I could figure it out on my own. That independence served me in a hundred ways and cost me in a hundred others, and I am still learning to tell the difference.

And then there was my sister.

She was the best aunt when she was herself — at my house every weekend when my children were small, filling every room with warmth, loving on my babies with everything she had. She just wanted to be loved. That was the truest and most heartbreaking thing about her — she had so much love to give and she just needed someone to give it back to her in a way that held. When she got cancer she fought hard, went through radiation and chemotherapy, lost her hair, kept going — but the illness pushed her toward things she had already been struggling with, and she slipped into addiction and mental illness in ways I watched from three hours away with two young children and a full-time career and a heart that was breaking quietly every single day.

The hardest part of all of it — the part that still visits me in quiet moments — is that I was a psychologist. I had the education, the clinical language, the professional framework for exactly what she was going through. I had spent my entire career sitting with families in crisis and helping them find a way through. And I could not save my own sister. That helplessness has never fully left me, and neither has the guilt, and I have had to learn —slowly and imperfectly and with a great deal of grace from my faith — to forgive myself for being only human, even when I desperately wished I could have been more.

To my sister — I am so sorry. You were such a good sister and you deserved so much more than what life gave you. I have never stopped loving you, and I never will.

I tell you all of this because I want you to know exactly who you are reading. I am not a curated highlight reel or a polished brand. I am a woman with wounds and scars and losses that shaped her in ways she is still discovering — a girl from New York who pushed through at every turn not because it was easy but because stopping was never in her nature.

I have been married to my husband Bob for almost twenty-five years, since I was barely twenty years old and met him at his family’s restaurant in Wildwood, New Jersey, where I have lived and loved the Jersey Shore ever since. He is quiet where I am loud, steady where I am restless, loyal in a way that has never once wavered through every idea and phase and transformation I have brought into our life together. He is my rock in the truest sense of that word, and I thank God for him regularly.

We raised two children together, and I poured myself into their lives completely — not with money, because money was never the thing we had in abundance, but with love and experiences and presence and the absolute bone-deep certainty that they were cherished. My children attended Catholic school, rooted in the same faith their grandparents planted in me, and I wanted that for them — that sense of something larger than themselves to hold onto when life gets hard, because life always gets hard eventually. I did all of it while my mother was living with us in her final years, declining slowly in the same house where my children were growing up and learning what family looks like, all of those seasons layering over each other the way life tends to do when it has a great deal to teach you at once.

After she was gone, I looked honestly at where I was heading, and I knew something had to change. I had struggled with my weight since my mid-twenties — always knowing I was smart and capable and worthy while never quite feeling at home in my own body, that particular disconnect quietly accompanying everything else I carried. So I made a decision. I had gastric sleeve surgery, and I lost over one hundred pounds. I built a body I am genuinely proud of, and the truest thing I can tell you about all of it is simply this — this is my new body, but it is me. It is who I was always meant to be, because the confidence was inside me the whole time. I just had not known it yet. It took losing my mother and sitting with that loss honestly and deciding that my world was not going to get smaller just because hers had — it took all of that to finally let her out.

Writing was always my gift, and I started this Substack and my Instagram account because I finally had something to say, and I had stopped waiting for the perfect moment to say it. One quiet afternoon a switch just clicked, and I thought — I am doing this — and I did, which is honestly how most of the important decisions of my life have happened. Not perfectly planned. Not perfectly timed. Just a moment of clarity and the willingness to act on it before the fear could talk me out of it.

I want women to know that it is not too late. That you can begin your becoming at any phase of life, from any starting point, carrying whatever you have been carrying. That the hard things — the losses, the regrets, the seasons that nearly broke you — do not have to be the end of your story. They can be, if you let them, the beginning of the most honest and fully alive version of it.

My faith tells me that we are not here by accident. That our stories are not random. That the losses and the scars and the hard seasons are not punishments but invitations — to grow deeper, to love better, to become more fully who we were created to be. I am not a perfect Catholic. I will tell you that honestly right now. But I am a deeply spiritual woman who believes in Jesus and who believes that God has had a hand in every turn of this story— including this one. Including you finding your way here today.

I have a beautiful life. A cozy home at the Shore, a family I love with everything I have, a faith that has carried me through every dark season I have ever walked through, a career behind me I am proud of, and one ahead that genuinely excites me. I do not take a single day for granted. I carry my father’s belief in me and my sister’s memory and my mother’s housecoat and her cooking and Bob’s steady love and my children’s whole futures ahead of them like open water, and I am grateful — deeply, daily, actively grateful — for every single piece of it.

You do not need a lot of money to build something real and beautiful. You need love and determination and the willingness to keep going even when the path is not clear, even when you are grieving, even when you are doing the best you can with what you have.

You need someone who believes in you completely — and if you do not have that yet, I am here to be that for you until you find it in yourself. All good things are possible for you. I believe that with every scar and every loss and every hard-won beautiful imperfect thing I have ever built.

Welcome to The Midlife Becoming.

I am so glad you found your way here.

— Barb

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The Midlife Becoming · midlifebecoming.substack.com · Instagram: @themidlifebecoming

For women who aren’t done becoming.