1835 Dock Road

an essay on a place

My mom made my first therapy appointment when I was seventeen.

I was a senior in high school and I had just experienced a traumatic series of events: my childhood friend suddenly passing, not getting selected for the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Royal Court (AKA my dreams getting crushed live on KTLA), my boyfriend and I broke up, I was selected as an “alternate” to the Homecoming Court (a real affirmation to my newly adopted “wow, I’m always almost good enough” mantra), my best friend told me she didn’t want to be friends anymore, one of my friends threatened suicide and disappeared for a few hours forcing me to alert his parents and the police, my double dutch team (yes, competitive jump rope is a thing) fell apart, and finally, to top it all off, on Halloween night, my beloved orange cat didn’t come home. And, unfortunately for me, the next day, my next-door neighbor thought it was appropriate to describe to me, in detail, the coyote attack he had heard in his backyard the night before.

To say I needed therapy was probably an understatement and I was glad my mom found me a therapist and made an appointment. I’ll always remember walking into that office with her for the first time.

*

My mom grew up in Madison. No, it’s not the one in Wisconsin or Alabama or Arkansas or Pennsylvania or New York, I’m talking about the one in Ohio right on Lake Erie, okay? The little town no one knows about. I asked my boss who grew up a few towns over if he had ever been to Madison and he said “who’s Madison?”. Not even other people from Ohio know it. 

Madison is a village in Lake County, it was incorporated in 1867 and its total area is a little more than 5 square miles. As of 2018, the total population was 3,170. Okay, now imagine northeast Ohio. Are you picturing white people? You’d be correct. I’m sure you can imagine that it lacks diversity. The racial makeup of Madison was 96.3% White, 0.6% African American, 0.1% Native American, 0.5% Asian, 0.8% from other races, and 1.6% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 1.5% of the population. To think I grew up confused about why no one knew where Madison was makes me laugh to this day—I thought everyone cared about this little corner of the world as much as I did. Now when I talk about it I usually just call it Cleveland. “My mom grew up in Cleveland”. It kind of feels like a lie?

The median resident age is 40.6 years (Ohio’s is 39.3), but growing up I would’ve sworn it was like 75. I only ever interacted with old people. The estimated median household income in 2017 was $62,091…about as much as a single year of college cost me. I mean, what a single year of college for me cost my parents.

All of this is to say…my mom grew up on this little piece of property called Old Millrace Farm in Madison. Its address is 1835 Dock Road and it resides in the 44057 zip code. While Old Millrace Farm is a pretty good name, I’ve only ever referred to this house, affectionately, as “the House on Dock Road”.

The house was built in 1868 and looks like a box. It’s always been white with red shutters and had a long, red brick chimney. It’s absolutely nothing special. It honestly blends into the neighborhood as much as any other house you drive by on any given day. There’s not even a cute garden gnome that would capture your attention or an American flag hanging up—it’s so plain you probably wouldn’t notice you drove by anything at all.

But I love it!

The House on Dock Road was owned by my mom’s dad’s mom’s aunt and uncle. They didn’t have children so they told my great-grandma, Flora, that if she named her child Donald, they would give her the house. So she did. And they left her the house. Isn’t it great when promises are kept? Warms my heart.

Donald, of course, was supposed to inherit the house. His identity was wrapped around the fact that someday this house would be his. But get this! When the time came, Donald didn’t even want it! Florida was way more appealing than a house in Ohio. My great-grandma Flora kept the property and treated it like a seasonal home, only living there in the summer months. Her actual house was also in the, apparently better, state of Florida. However, the better state of Florida also has “oppressively hot summers” (my mother’s words, not mine), so she insisted on keeping the farm in Madison. While I have only ever understood Ohio to have wacky weather in the summer months (have you ever felt hot rain? Seen a lightning storm in July after an 80° day?), that seems like nothing compared to an oppressively hot summer in Florida.

Eventually, like a true coming-of-age movie, my then seventeen-year-old grandpa, Bill (to me, Pop-Pop), who came up to Madison in the summers met then seventeen-year-old Barb (to me, Grandma Barbara), courted her (my grandma has used the words “harassed via mail”), married her, and moved his new little family of two into an apartment in 1954. My mom found their love letters from the months that followed their introduction when she was a little girl and described them as “corny” and thought her mother should “grow a backbone”. My mom doesn’t understand writers nor does she seem to understand her mother. She’s a painter, but she has no idea about painting pictures with words.

Eventually, after they married, my grandpa lost his job and they left their apartment and moved into the house on Dock Road in 1956. Okay, now this fact is really important: Barb didn’t want to move into that house. Grandma Barbara did not like the house on Dock Road.

The thing about my grandpa moving his little family (now a party of three, insert my Uncle Jim) into the house is that his parents still showed up to live there every summer. My mom doesn’t remember when they stopped doing that, if it was before or after she was born in 1962, but eventually, my grandpa worked up the courage to say “hey…you know, this is my house now” and they agreed. Pop-pop’s mom and dad gave him the house under the precedence he would get less inheritance when they perished. While this makes sense to me personally—this didn’t go down without drama. My Great Aunt Frances, Donald’s wife, thought the fact Pop-pop was handed this amazing Madison property was quite the issue and was jealous her family wasn’t given something of similar value. My mom stands by the fact Aunt Frances had no idea how worn down the house had become and just wanted something to complain about. As a middle kid, I get it. Whenever I get snubbed, I will, without fail, make a dramatic declaration of what is and isn’t fair. Half the things I do are for the drama. The House on Dock Road resulted in quite a bit of contention between the families; my mom remembers growing up hearing from her cousins about how they must be the favorites because they got the house in Madison. On the other hand, my mom thought they were the favorites. Her family got an old, rundown house while her cousins (who only visited them twice) got to live in Florida near her grandparents and therefore got to see them all the time. I think there was a lot of resentment in my mom’s family for a lot of various reasons. Everyone seemed to be jealous of someone else. And a lot of people lived in houses they wished were somewhere else.

To put it simply, the house was shit. At first. But it became valuable because it was cared for. 

*

My first therapy session went well despite the traumatic beginning of my senior year. Truthfully, I more so felt like I was in therapy to figure out my relationship with my dad and talk through my classic teenage girl daddy issues rather than anything else I was experiencing.

My relationship with my dad has always been complicated. I was always told it’s because we’re too similar, but truthfully I think we just have completely different love languages. My dad is the embodiment of “work is love made visible” and growing up I was the embodiment of “give me words of affirmation or I will assume you hate me”. In high school, I did not respond well to tough love, I took everything incredibly personally, and I was just generally...sad. 

But after I started therapy, I felt like I was starting to get better. I was getting better because I was caring for myself and felt cared for by my therapist. I felt more value for myself because I started caring.

I grew up under the impression I had to fix all my problems. My brothers and I were all raised as individuals, which was beneficial to my adult life but created a weird divide between all of us growing up. We felt less like a family and more like five people living in a house together. I learned the value of hard work, discipline, and frugality, but I never really learned how to communicate with or love those around me. I learned those things the hard way. There was a lot of trial and error.

*

My mom was seven when they started working on the farm. She remembers being young with a hammer, hitting the plaster off the walls, putting drywall up, and doing whatever else her dad told her to (not always enthusiastically). They were going to turn this old structure into a home. Pop-pop poured concrete for a patio, built a garage, and put a new coat of paint on it. It went from having an outhouse to indoor plumbing, the well was rebuilt, and my grandpa decided to buy five acres of forest behind the house. These five acres became one of the most charming parts of the property. There’s something magical about an expansive backyard.

The backyard was so big Pop-pop built a tennis court. He cleared the land, flattened it, and paved it. My Uncle Bill was 16 when he had to paint the lines on the tennis court. He walked to the brand new library to find out the measurements in the back of the encyclopedia. When my mom was growing up, people thought they were rich because they had a tennis court. On the other hand, my friends thought I was poor because I didn’t leave the country every summer. Instead, I went to Ohio.

My mom didn’t know Madison was a poor area for a long time. Her parents were good at hiding it. I think “hiding things'' was fairly normal in her household. But growing up, they were barely middle class. They had decent, never expensive clothes usually made by my grandma. To portray a certain image, they were always kept as clean as they could be. While she wasn’t sure about where they stood financially, she knew they weren’t as poor as other families they knew. Since they were given the house, they never had a house payment, which made a big, positive impact on their finances and at one point they even had three convertibles (a Yellow Grand Torino, a blue Mustang, and a red Ford….XL? Limit? She doesn’t remember).

My mom was kept under a tight leash. My grandparents were a no-bullshit type of couple and expected my mom and uncles to behave a certain way. Everything was swept under the rug immediately after they were disciplined. I think my mom grew up with the expectation she had to be perfect and if she wasn’t, she needed to try harder.

*

My little brother didn’t know I was in therapy in high school until after I graduated college and my older brother, to my knowledge, still doesn’t know. My dad never even acknowledged I was in therapy and one time yelled at me for confiding in one of my friends about my eating disorder. It wouldn’t have been a big deal, but she told her parents and her parents called mine. He told me to stop telling people things that weren’t true. I didn’t realize I had to throw up in front of him for it to be real to him. I guess I also have parents who want to “portray a certain image”.

I’ve been a perfectionist my whole life. I’m not entirely sure where it came from. But I know it comes out in the way I live my life and the way I treat my body. People always tell me I’m someone who seems like I have it all figured out and I know it has everything to do with perfectionism. I have nothing figured out.

But most of my perfectionism comes out in my ability to procrastinate. I didn’t know this until recently, but procrastination is often a symptom of perfectionism because perfectionists fear being unable to complete a task perfectly. So they put it off tasks as long as possible.

*

My mom’s childhood was defined by her neighborhood, as most of ours are. She grew up sitting in the back of pickup trucks, driving down country roads by Lake Erie, and riding her bike everywhere. But you had to be smart while you were on your bike. If you didn’t know where you were, suddenly a dog was chasing you and trying to bite your leg. Do you know what you have to do while you’re on a bike getting chased by a dog? You gotta lift your feet, kick the dog, and pedal harder. But even if you weren’t getting chased by a dog, you had to practice proper bike etiquette. My mom always followed bike boundaries, but Uncle Bill didn’t. One time he flew over his handlebars and broke his front teeth. Grandma was so livid that she didn’t even fix them right away. He has a few school pictures with broken teeth. Upsetting and annoying then, hilarious and charming now.

When she wasn’t biking or doing chores, she would wade in the creek in her backyard or hangout by Lake Erie. The lake was clean when she was little, you could open your eyes underwater and it wasn’t a big deal if you swallowed lake water. I, on the other hand, have never once opened my eyes in Lake Erie, nor have I ever swallowed lake water. The lake smells like fish and I bet it tastes like fish, too.

I love hearing about my mom’s childhood, but there are always elements of melancholy and sadness whenever she reminisces. I think I romanticize it because it was so different from mine. I’ve asked her about it, but she won’t ever get specific. Every once in a while she’ll just make a backhanded comment about either of my grandparents. For example, my grandma needing to grow a backbone. But she’ll never go deeper than that.

*

Therapy, as a whole, was great for me and I went for the entirety of my senior year. I looked forward to it every week and I felt like it was helping me get through the day-to-day miserable high school experience I thought I was having. I was learning tools to handle my depression and learning all those little internal dialogue switches you can make to soothe your anxiety. But therapy isn’t always sunshine and rainbows.

During one of my more...painful...therapy sessions, my therapist interrupted me with a comment that effectively changed my perspective of my life. She asked me if I remembered what my mom said during my first session. I didn’t until she reminded me. My mom had expressed how she had been thinking about sending me to therapy since I was thirteen, so we were happy it was finally happening.

I thought this was a positive, optimistic comment. We did it! I was finally in therapy! My mom was right, starting therapy was a long time coming and we were happy it was happening. I thought of it as sharing the joy in a step towards healing, but my therapist didn’t agree. After months of hearing about everything I went through as a young teenager, my therapist snapped and said, “Your mom is so lucky she didn’t lose you. Your mom is so lucky you made it to seventeen. You should’ve been in here a long time ago.”

I had never blamed anything on my mom before. I was so fixated on my relationship with my dad that I never even considered my relationship with my mom. Not only that, I never considered what my mom’s complacency towards my relationship with my dad implied nor did it ever cross my mind. I thought just because she wasn’t yelling at me all the time, that meant we had a great relationship. Why would I have thought of anything otherwise?

*

We were in Ohio at the house when Pop-pop died in 2005; he had been sick for a while. While my mom and Uncle Bill went straight to the hospital to meet my grandma after we got the call, my brothers and I stayed behind with Bill’s girlfriend at the time, my now-aunt Melinda. I asked Melinda if we could go outside to catch frogs, but I was too shaken by the confusion of losing my first family member that I didn’t catch anything. Ohio summers changed a lot after Pop-pop died.

Grandma sold the house for $135,000 and moved to the next town over, Geneva, in 2007. My mom was mad we had to help her pack up the house while we were on “vacation”. When Grandma announced she was moving, I was crushed because I knew the Ohio I loved was never going to be the same. Grandma lived in the house on Dock Road for 52 years. And don’t forget what I said—Grandma lived in the house on Dock Road for 52 years even though she never wanted to live there at all. Don’t get me wrong, I like Grandma’s new house on Eastwood Street, but it’s not Dock Road. I’ve caught exactly zero frogs in her backyard at the new house. My mom didn’t care as much about my grandma moving. She can be hard to read.

*

One time my mom asked me about my therapy sessions and I ended up describing my depression to her. I thought she would sympathize with me, but instead, she got quiet, shrugged, and said she thought everyone felt that way.

I don’t think I ever really thought of my parents as people until that moment. It was one of those, “oh, you’re just as broken as me” moments. One of those “oh, you aren’t perfect and I guess no one has it figured out” moments. I started wondering if my mom was overdue for therapy, too. If it took her so long to send me, I have no idea how long it would take her to send herself.

*

The last time I saw 1835 Dock Road with my own eyes and not through the hazy memories that overwhelm the childhood I remember was on January 7, 2019. My mom and I were visiting Grandma in Geneva when I asked my mom if we would drive by the House on Dock Road, but when we pulled up to the house, my heart dropped. There have been a few owners since my grandma and I don’t want to blame anyone for what I saw, but the house was destroyed. It’s nothing like it used to be. The grass I used to run through was overgrown and dead, many of the trees I used to climb were cut down, the tennis court I used to jump rope on was torn up, the side yard looked like it had been completely ignored for years, there were old eviction notices still taped in the window, and the well was rusty. I was so excited to see one of my homes again, but it looked like no one had been loving it for quite some time.

I asked my mom if I could take a picture of her in front of it and she said “I don’t want anyone knowing that I grew up here, this is so sad”.

*

I don’t think my mom will ever address her feelings surrounding her childhood and I honestly don’t expect her to. I’m not sure I’ll ever ask for more details, at least not for a while. I think she grew up comfortable hiding things and having things hidden from her. I’m not someone who advocates for suppressing emotions, bottling things up, and not addressing (or writing about) most feelings that cross your mind, but everything with our family always feels different. I don’t expect myself to tell her anything that came up during my therapy sessions, nor do I plan on blaming her for any feelings I used to hold. I think she is a perfectionist who was raised by a perfectionist who also raised a perfectionist. I think we’re all more similar than we realize. This is the one exception I’ll make. I don’t care how my mom’s actions or lack thereof impacted who I became. I think the pain made me a better, more compassionate person.

And I am going to take that compassion and ensure my future children feel cared for, valued, and that their pain is important to me and seen. I want to break the cycle we’ve somehow created.

I still love my mom and I still believe she is and was a good mom. And I’m sure I’ll always love the house on Dock Road.