Yes, Chef, I’ll Fix the Homeplace
She was obsessed with repairing the Alabama home where she grew up. But some things just can’t be fixed.
In the Hulu series “The Bear,” the James Beard Award-winning chef Carmen Berzatto, known as “Carmy,” returns home after his brother Michael commits suicide. Carmy plans to modernize the family sandwich shop, Original Beef of Chicagoland, which his father had established and was owned by his late brother. One day, Carmy’s sister confronts him. She demands to know if he will sell the restaurant, a reasonable response to the financial disaster his late brother’s addiction has left behind.
“No,” he says. “I’m going to fix it.”
She looks at him, baffled.
“No one asked you to fix it,” she says.
The entire series focuses on Carmy’s journey to rehabilitate the restaurant, even though he’s drowning in debt and faces other insurmountable problems.
I’m a lot like Carmy. His brother’s addiction left the once-renowned family restaurant in financial despair; my father’s drinking left our once stately home in severe disrepair.
As a co-dependent person who grew up with alcoholism, it took me until middle age to accept that trying to fix someone, much less a place like a restaurant, is a compulsion as destructive as an addict’s substance abuse. I know because I spent an entire lifetime trying to rehabilitate my family’s farmhouse — the home I grew up in — just southeast of Birmingham, Alabama.
My grandparents moved from downtown Birmingham in 1917 and settled on 40 acres of pinewoods and pastureland to raise their family. My mother and her six siblings grew up in the two-story wood-frame house built of heart pine, painted a deep forest green with white trim.
My grandfather “Daddy Mac,” a lanky man with high cheekbones originally from Maryland, worked as a government administrator for the Panama Canal Commission. He met “Mama Jo,” a blue-eyed Wisconsin farmgirl of Norwegian descent, when she was visiting her sister, a nurse, in Panama. Once the world-changing waterway was finished, they started their married life in Birmingham, so he could run a business in the thriving concrete industry.
Until I was 6, I lived two doors from my grandparents’ house. A guardian on a slight slope, it was a perpetual presence, always a beacon and a soft reminder that my story, my family’s story, a tale knitted before my birth, now caught me in the threaded web of the present. I could stand on our second story screened porch and see past the neighbor’s roofline and trees to the bay windows of Daddy Mac and Mama Jo’s house. I could imagine Daddy Mac puttering around in his grey cardigan and Mama Jo in her velvet chair, the armrests covered in crocheted white doilies, as she sewed behind the wavy glass windows where time had melted.
When he left home in 1977, I was 12. My mother was 41 and broke, with only volunteer work on her resume. She had four kids to raise in that ramshackle house. Determined a developer shouldn't subdivide the property, she refused to sell. She believed my father would return.
After my grandmother’s death, my family moved into the old house. By then, my grandfather had sold all but several acres of the property. My mother, whose sporty glamour was a cross between Katherine and Audrey Hepburn, had a fierce independent streak. My father, Billy, had a perennial baby face and prematurely white hair. Until my father drank away the family savings in bars all over the state, he drove around Alabama in his Starsky and Hutch baby blue Gran Torino. We nicknamed it “Dimples” for all his fender benders. He sold large machinery for Dixie Equipment.
During humid summers, my three older brothers and I raced underwater to see who could swim the length of our pool filled with ice-cold well water. My father skimmed sycamore leaves and June bugs from the water’s surface, his empty vodka bottles buried beneath the large boxwoods nearby. Thirty years later, when he lived in a nursing home, he often waited on the city sidewalk for a cab to take him to the ABC Store, his crumpled blazer swallowing his thin frame, still wearing his tan bedroom slippers. The staff called him “Otis,” after the harmless drunk from “The Andy Griffith Show.”
When he left home in 1977, I was 12. My mother was 41 and broke, with only volunteer work on her resume. She had four kids to raise in that ramshackle house in the growing suburb of Mountain Brook outside Birmingham. Determined a developer wouldn’t subdivide the property, she refused to sell. She believed my father would return.
She sent him long letters written in her backward-slanting script, asking for money and urging him to quit drinking. She included newspaper clips chronicling my high school running career. At night, I cupped my hand over the yellow push-button phone’s mouthpiece and eavesdropped on my parents’ tangled arguments. Often, I heard my mother cry herself to sleep. My father never came home, and my parents finally divorced when I was in college.
When I married right after college, my husband Hugo liked to say I only married him because he could fix roof leaks and use a chainsaw. He and I bought the house from my mother as a young married couple. Over the next 30 years, we transformed the house and the overgrown land it sat on, neglected from decades of deferred maintenance and the damage my father’s alcoholism had visited upon my family. The place I grew up, where my mother grew up, became my starter home, then the sacred space where we raised our son and daughter and loved and buried 10 dogs. By that time, my mother, who had moved to a downtown loft apartment, returned to live in the garage apartment.
After school, my daughter would run up the steep steps to my mother’s place to eat peanut butter crackers, drink tea, and pet Pasha, the half-feral cat. Every July, we picked and canned figs from the trees Mama Jo planted. My mother soon spent more and more time staying with and traveling abroad with her new partner. Despite the many joyful moments celebrating holidays and communing in the gardens, this arrangement was frustrating for both of us.
As I took a wrecking ball to the past and resurrected a new framework for my life by becoming a parent and rehabilitating the house, I felt empowered by the endless list we tackled. We added a metal roof, buried powerlines, replaced clay sewer pipes, installed 200 sprinkler heads, replumbed the pool, fixed the pool house, updated the appliances, and embarked on significant renovations. Where my parents had failed, I would prevail. But in my mother’s eyes, I was throwing away the past.
After 15 years there, we couldn’t afford the maintenance. I explained our dilemma to my dying father, who’d returned to Birmingham a few years before.
“You’ve never really been happy in that house,” the counselor said, referring to my upbringing and the chronic difficulties with my mother. I paused, offended, and later realized maybe she was right.
“What should we do?” I asked before he died in the hospital from a lifetime of drinking.
He didn’t hesitate.
“Sell the house,” he said.
But we stayed, and a few years later, during the Great Recession, Hugo and I argued over the endless bills, having invested all our savings into numerous renovations. At the same time, I struggled to pacify both my mother and my husband by pretending to cut costs but keeping our family rituals the same.
On our 20th anniversary, we sat in a marriage counselor’s office.
“You’ve never really been happy in that house,” the counselor said, referring to my upbringing and the chronic difficulties with my mother. I paused, offended, and later realized maybe she was right.
As I tried to navigate my current family’s needs with my belief I had to honor and keep the past alive, I convened countless stressful family discussions with my brothers and drank too much red wine, creating an atmosphere dangerously reminiscent of my childhood with unpredictable outbursts, smoldering withdrawals, and suffocating denial.
“We have to get out from under this,” Hugo said one evening as a continuation of our discussions about moving. Earlier, he’d stood on the shelf of the library bay window with a can of wasp spray, the large yellow nozzle aimed at the ceiling. Dried, crisp husks of wasp bodies were scattered all over the library floor. We were battling a super colony that had embedded itself within the wall on one side of the house.
I looked out the window at the oak trees towering across the driveway. I’d stared at them practically my whole life. If we moved, I’d miss the cherry trees I’d planted when my son was born, which bloomed on his birthday. I’d miss the lilac bush I’d planted for my daughter’s birth and every other plant or flower I’d tended and watched grow.
“It’s time,” Hugo said.
“I know.”
“We’ve made it a long time.” Hugo had now lived in the house longer than my brothers and, certainly, my father. He’d given his best years and everything he had to the place and our family.
“Look, I don’t want to move,” he said. “I can’t imagine living anywhere else. I’d like to stay here for the rest of our lives, but it’s killing us. Every time something breaks, it’s a $1,000 fix, minimum. The yard is an estate. This is a place for a rich person.”
Or someone who doesn’t care that everything had character or a shabby chic look to it. The truth was we never could afford to be there as young schoolteachers or even when Hugo became a successful commercial real estate broker. I was quiet for a minute, thinking about how I’d tell my mother we planned to move.
“I dread telling my mother.”
“She’s a grown woman, Lanier. She’ll deal.” I thought about what my cousin, who’d escaped out west and never come back, told me unprompted when she came through town: “I don’t envy you if you ever sell this house. You’d be selling other people’s memories.”
“You can have anything you want, but you can’t have everything,” Hugo reminded me.
When we began house hunting, my mother said, “I hope you wait until I die before you sell the house,” her brown eyes narrowed against her sharp cheekbones and dangling yin-yang earrings.
At lunch one day, a friend told me seriously, “I’m having issues. You can’t sell. I’m counting on some things to stay the same.” Everyone I ran into expressed dismay at our decision. Even the bag boy at the Piggly Wiggly had an opinion.
When we found another house, I called my oldest brother first. He has lived on the open road since I was a teenager. He moves with the seasons with his two dogs Uh-Oh and Oops, to different jobs out west and is known as “Ninja Bill” at the Quartzite Yacht Club, the Arizona bar where he sometimes works.
“Where am I supposed to park my camper?” he asked, half serious, half joking. He always parked his camper in the back driveway when he came to town. His long gray ponytail snaked down his back, and his blue eyes were always merry underneath his camouflage hat when he sauntered in during the evenings to chat and sit a spell while I was cooking dinner. From his perch as a solitary traveler living off the grid as he staked out the best “hidey-holes” tucked in the mountains or on the edge of a wilderness area, he had a jaundiced, bemused view in which he found the rest of us housebound folks “curious.”
At the end of the phone conversation, he commented about the house he’d painted several times, “It’s always been a burden and a money pit.”
I mentioned my mother. “She’ll handle it better than you think,” he assured me. We talked about all the dogs buried there, and before we hung up, he said, “When the house is gone, the memories remain.”
When I spoke to my middle brother, who lived down the street, he was very quiet. I could hear the sadness in his voice over the phone, but he quickly switched to practical mode, saying he understood.
My California brother didn’t miss a beat.
“You can’t move,” he said. “That means I won’t have the same home phone number I’ve had all my life.”
People still called trying to reach family members who hadn’t lived there in decades — usually the organizations they didn’t want to call them at their current homes. In recent years, we had a slew of my mother’s old, widowed boyfriends calling. During elections, the National Rifle Association and politicians pandering to the dominant conservative demographic called daily.
At lunch one day, a friend told me seriously, “I’m having issues. You can’t sell. I’m counting on some things to stay the same.”
Everyone I ran into expressed dismay at our decision. Even the bag boy at the Piggly Wiggly had an opinion.
When I gathered the nerve to tell my mother, I resorted to our most effective mode of communication: the telephone. She rose to the occasion and said, “We’re going down life’s highway. It’s time.” She later told me in person, “I’m at peace with it. It’s time to let go of attachments. This will release me, us, of the burden of the McCullough family.”
She was 85, prone to falling, and had been living in a single-story garden home down the road for five years.
In an email to the extended family, she wrote, “As the Bible says, ‘There is a time.’” My aunt quipped back, “That’s the first time I’ve heard you quote the Bible.” My mother responded, “Well, it’s the only quote I know, and I picked it up from funerals. However, this is not a funeral. It is a new beginning for the Isoms.”
Thirty years ago, I’d returned unknowingly to this house to mother myself and mother my mother. At the same time, I came back for reparations, demanding my mother give me something she couldn’t when I was growing up. My mother often summed up the tension between us in one mantra: “You never liked me.” A familiar cadence I’d come to expect, just as she always said, “You got the McCullough hangover gene” or “You inherited that awful Norwegian dry skin.”
She says as a child I refused to let her kiss me goodnight, but she didn’t ask why that little girl had withdrawn from her. She didn’t understand that all I wanted was to feel safe in a volatile, sometimes violent, household. All I wanted was security, and for her to confront the chaos we often lived with. Now I know my mother’s actions or inaction were her own trauma response, but even as an adult, I never felt I could earn her approval and love. She felt judged by me, and I felt abandoned by her.
When I began my married life so young, I thought rebuilding the family home was my cure. It wasn’t. I mistook the house for me. I believed replacing rotten boards and repairing cracked cement could rebuild our broken family. But the renovation of my soul was the actual remedy.
When I began my married life so young, I thought rebuilding the family home was my cure. It wasn’t. I mistook the house for me. I believed replacing rotten boards and repairing cracked cement could rebuild our broken family. But the renovation of my soul was the actual remedy. The scaffolding of my heart needed reconfiguring.
Despite our deep pain, it was time to leave behind the manufactured McCullough myths and troubled ghosts. We sold our home to a family who fell in love with the rambling front porch made of stacked stone and the old oak tree by the back door. The closing came almost exactly 100 years after my grandparents moved into it.
I was middle-aged when I finally left home. By staying in one place most of my life, refusing to grieve the losses and let go, I’d failed to carve a life for myself outside the legacy of lost dreams and myths. I had mistakenly taken it upon myself, along with Hugo, to become a guardian of the house. My attachments were thick and gnarled like the ancient ivy vines woven between the fieldstone rock on the porch, the cords of my identity so deeply attached all I could do was resist my own evolution until something outside myself forced me to grow and expand beyond the only story I’d created for myself.
For too long, I thought restoring the house would cure my family’s heartbreak. It didn’t. My actions were reactions rooted in an unconscious motivation to fix what couldn’t be fixed. I refused to accept that alcoholism — a disease of losses — destroyed my family financially, spiritually, practically, and emotionally. Instead, I tried to redeem all of us with my good deeds by making the house respectable again.
By rescuing the house all those years, I’d tried to change an external structure to create my future when I’d really needed to heal my internal structure from the diseased perceptions I’d inherited as a child of an alcoholic.
Never did it occur to me, with my savior mentality, that no one, especially not my mother, had ever asked me to fix anything.
About the author
Lanier Isom is a journalist based in Birmingham, Alabama, coauthor of the award-winning memoir Grace and Grit: My Fight for Equal Pay and Fairness at Goodyear and Beyond. The film Lilly, based on her book, starring Patricia Clarkson, is in post-production. Her work has been featured in Al Jazeera, The Los Angeles Times, The Lily and Huffington Post. A frequent contributor to al.com, she is an Alabama Library Association Nonfiction Award recipient and a 2023 Alabama State Council on the Arts Fellow.
- Lanier Isomhttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/lanier-isom/
- Lanier Isomhttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/lanier-isom/
Moving story. It’s so hard to let go of meaningful places.
Lanier, thank you for sharing your story. It is incredibly candid and moving, and it resonates on some level. So glad that you now understand your motivation and found your peace. I think many of us women naturally have the ‘fix it’ gene.