Mari Provencher's family is rocked by changes -- starting with her mother's decision to become an entomologist.
Mari Provencher is a Los Angeles based photographer who's spent a decade exploring the contemporary circus boom. Her work has been featured in Variety, Forbes, The Huffington Post, Time Out Chicago, The LA Times, and more. Her photos have also been featured in the ad campaigns for two international circus festivals, Circuba and Festival Internacional Circo Albecete. In her spare time she volunteers with the educational nonprofit 826LA, teaching writing to students K-12. She loves to take in stories in any format, and is a voracious reader and podcast listener. Raised by a boundlessly curious entomologist mother, she and Story Collider were bound to cross paths.
This story originally aired on Mar. 30, 2018, in an episode titled “New Beginnings”.
Story Transcript
This is the story of my weird family and the way my mom led the charge to all of us living our most authentic lives.
When she was in her early thirties, she thought her life was pretty much settled. She was married and had a kid (me), and she had a job as a gardener in our small town in Massachusetts. One day, she was at work weeding a garden and she pulled up a clump of weeds that came up way too easily. She went flying back and dirt went everywhere - and then she realized it wasn’t dirt. It was yellow jackets, a huge swarm of yellow jackets, furious that she had just yanked up their underground nest.
She took off running and the swarm took off chasing her. The neighbor’s Great Dane saw this and also started chasing her, thinking that this was the funnest game.
This is one of my favorite mental images of my mother: her running cartoon-like across a stranger’s yard, being chased by a swarm of wasps and a giant dog, laughing maniacally at her own situation.
Eventually, the yellow jackets went back to guard their nest. So having escaped them, she now had to figure out how to deal with them. She did some research and found out the best thing to do would be to fumigate at night, so she came back later and took them out. For anyone else that might have been it, but her interest was piqued, and she decided to make it official and get a degree in entomology.
I loved her metamorphosis into the bug lady. I was so proud as a kid of all the weird things we did for fun at my house. I didn’t know anybody else that would spend their Saturdays kayaking out to the middle of a swamp so they could collect pitcher plants, take them home, cut them open and identify all the half-digested bugs inside.
And I never heard my dad disapprove either. We were both in it to win it for whatever this insect-ridden ride had in store for us.
But that was okay, because pretty much everyone else disapproved on our behalf. My mom’s excitement meant that dinners with our big Italian family were often punctuated by, “Lisa, stop talking about maggots at the table!”
One time, the cops showed up on suspicion of Satanic rituals because she had staked down some roadkill in the woods behind our house because foxes kept dragging it off while she was trying to study the bugs that were eating it. Also, neighborhood kids threw away our Halloween candy one year because she thought that it was very whimsical to let her pet Madagascar hissing cockroach wander around in the Trick-or-Treat bowl. (In her defense, the Snickers bars were individually wrapped and that cockroach lived in a very clean fish tank and ate sweet potato for dinner, not garbage.)
When I was a seventh grade band geek, my grandfather imperiously warned my mother that if she went back to school, I would fall in with the bad crowd and get pregnant. That did not happen. She got into her program at UMass Amherst and spent the next four years driving over a snowy mountain getting her degree.
To deal with the long drive and the long hours spent alone in her office, she got a guinea pig, because what else are you going to do? You need company. So she spent all that time getting her degree, working in labs, and dealing with all of the fun misogyny that late ‘90s academia had for a kooky mom going into science in her late thirties.
It was around this time that she was diagnosed with breast cancer. I was old enough to know that this was bad and scary but young enough to be kept from the worst of it. She kept it casual in front of me. I remember she once struck a Doctor Evil pose while she was bald in front of an Austin Powers poster, because that’s what was going on in pop culture at the time. Very relevant. She and my dad had me completely convinced that everything was going to be okay.
Miraculously, it was okay and everything went back to normal.
By the time I graduated high school, she had three science degrees. My dad’s degree is in fisheries and wildlife. (Which I had to Google. I didn’t know that was a thing.) But when I announced that I was moving to Chicago to be a circus photographer, there was no problem. Nobody batted an eye. There was no hand-wringing about the distance or concerns about how I’d make a living as an artist.
And then when I graduated college and announced that I was moving to Los Angeles to be a circus photographer, that was fine too. They really supported every decision that I made.
So everything was fine for a few years and then, one day, I went home to visit my folks and I could tell something was very wrong with my dad. They wouldn’t tell me what it was, but there were vague mentions of doctors’ appointments and I was sure that it was cancer.
When I got back to Los Angeles, my mom called to tell me what they couldn’t bring themselves to say in person. She chose her words very judiciously and I was bracing myself. My mind was racing wondering what kind of cancer is it, how long we had together.
So when she said, “Your father has always known that he was a woman,” my mind just kind of shattered.
Completely unprepared for this left turn, I sputtered something along the lines of, “But he's not... dying?”
She reassured me that this was not the case and that they were going to stay together (“I guess I'll just be a lesbian now!”) And she kept me calm as the shock set in.
The strain of keeping the secret was what was making my dad so sick, and it couldn’t be kept anymore. This was 2010, which was right before Laverne Cox and Caitlyn Jenner, when trans wasn’t really part of the everyday lexicon like it is now. The news took everybody by surprise.
But my mom handled it really well. While I...needed a minute.
The next few days were kind of a blur. Shock is a fascinating thing. I would find myself in these weird places, like sitting between the couch and the wall all scrunched up, and I'd have no memory of how I got there. There was one day where I started to cook lunch, realized I was missing an ingredient and just walked away without turning the stove off. There was a lot to wrap my head around, and all of my processing power was going there.
But it only took four days for me to get used to it and come to terms with the idea because, unknowingly, my mom had been preparing our family for this our entire lives. She had gotten us ready for the idea of making a big change later in life. We were already used to being the weird family that nobody really understood, and we all were ready to explain ourselves to everyone we met, whether it was explaining what an entomologist is or what the structure of the modern American circus looks like...or what it’s like to be one gender when society insists that you're another.
My dad and I didn’t know that all years that we were supporting her dreams she was setting us up to accept our own dreams and our own paths. My mom isn’t just a mom, a wife, a scientist: she's a trailblazer.
Thank you.