My mother. She gave this photo to my father and wrote on the back, “When you first met me.”

My mother wasn’t different from many children of immigrants. Their parents, born in other countries, had left the worlds they knew to start new lives for their children. Yes, they wanted to leave poverty behind and find something better in America, but at what cost?

My mother was born in Pittsburgh to immigrants from Southern Italy who wanted something better for their family. Her parents spoke an Italian dialect and held tightly to the customs, beliefs, and traditions they had known all their lives. America was where they had sailed to, but Italy was the world they understood.

My mother wanted something different.

She wanted to speak English. She wanted to dress like American girls, listen to American music, and have American friends. She wanted an education. She wanted the freedom and opportunities she saw around her. She didn’t want to live the life her mother had lived.

This wasn’t unique to my family. It is part of the immigrant story in America. My grandparents had crossed an ocean, but when their daughter embraced that new life, when she began moving away from their language and traditions, she was also moving away from the only world they understood.

And the tension between them grew.

And then, sometimes, something else happens.

A generation or two later, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren begin looking back. We want to know where we came from. We want the language they didn’t teach us, the recipes no one wrote down, the stories we never thought to ask about. We travel back to our grandparents’ villages and wonder how they found the strength to begin again in a new world.

My mother spent much of her life wanting to be American.

I have spent much of mine trying to understand what she had to leave behind in order to become one.