My daughter needed an apostle.
At least, I think that’s what she said. She was twenty-one at the time; things got lost in translation.
“Ama, an apostle. You don’t know what that is?”
I could hear the edge of impatience in her voice, and also, the beginning of a Very Big Ask: Would I be willing to drive from Philadelphia to Harrisburg with a notarized copy of her FBI criminal background check so it could get a special stamp—the apostle—from the State Department and become part of her visa application to study abroad in Chile?
I said yes.
That’s how I found myself, on a brisk morning the Friday before Christmas in the midst of a pandemic, face-to-masked-face with a Pennsylvania State Department bureaucrat who first corrected my pronunciation—it’s not an apostle, it’s an apostille—then said she couldn’t help me.
Apparently my daughter had used some kind of online service—NotariesRUs.com, perhaps?—but the document needed to bear the signature of a Pennsylvania notary.
I found one in a UPS office not far from the State Department. But that notary said she couldn’t sign the document unless my daughter was physically present. I explained that my daughter was physically present in New York, where she was taking classes and working nights in a restaurant and counting the days until she could leave for Santiago, days that were diminishing by the second.
No go.
Back at the State Department, as I explained to the same bureaucrat what had happened at the UPS office, I became so exasperated that I started to cry.
“No tears!” the woman scolded. “Tears do not help the situation.” Then she slipped me a business card, face down. “Go there, and she will take care of you.” She said it sotto voce, as if we were suddenly in a spy movie.
I turned the card over, half expecting it to say, “Haha, just kidding!” But the card bore the name of a notary along with a Harrisburg address. I drove there. The notary office turned out to be housed in the hemisphere’s most forlorn shopping mall. The whole place smelled like stale Cinnabons, and half the storefronts were empty.
I passed one that had been completely gutted—no merchandise, not even shelving—except for a single chair set halfway back in the space and, on it, a guy in a Santa suit.
For a second, I thought about going in and telling him my wish, but asking for an apostille seemed a little highbrow for this mall, and if I went in, sat on his lap, and said that what I really wanted for Christmas was a freaking apostle, Santa might get the wrong idea.
So I just waved as I passed by.
Finding the notary office required squinting at the business card, nabbing two strangers for help—one had no idea and the other pointed me toward the exit—and finally leaving the mall to bear right toward a drab little arm of storefronts. Empty. Empty. Shuttered. Lit. I entered a space that very recently—say, the week before?—might have been a nail salon: sinuous counter up front and a trio of black swivel chairs, walls hung with photos of soft-focus sunrises and the sort of saccharine posters—“If you love something, let it go”—typically advertised in airplane seat-back catalogs.
I wish I could explain exactly what transpired there. I think the notary asked me to sign something swearing the FBI was correct in ascertaining that my daughter did not have a criminal record. Then she notarized the document and handed it back.
In the mall’s vast, wind-whipped lot, a green pickup had parked next to me. The driver stepped out: earlobe plugs and beefy arms in a T-shirt reading, “Make hardcore thug again.” I had no clue how to translate that into language I understood, but the vibe was evident.
What was I doing here, a hundred miles from home, in the parking lot of a mall long past its prime, December stinging my ears, staring down a stranger who, I was grateful, could not see the Kamala Harris face mask I’d stuffed in my pocket just in case, clutching a document signed by someone who might or might not be an actual notary, a document that would or would not get my daughter one step closer to her study-abroad dream in Santiago?
My daughter. That’s what I was doing here. Because parenthood thickens your love with grit: the same fierce determination that sent me on a neighborhood grid search after her red bicycle festooned with American Girl stickers was stolen from—of all places!—the rack outside our local food co-op. The same tenacity that drove me to sit for hours on a freezing sidewalk in front of a Broadway theater in the hope of snagging two $25 lottery tickets so my daughter could experience the magic of Pippin.
For all I knew, the pickup owner with the earlobe plugs had a child he hugged each night with those no-joke biceps. I took a leap. “Is there a place to get a sandwich around here?” Even hardcore thugs need to eat.
I followed his directions to a corner diner—counter stools, stainless-steel milkshake machine, actual cash register—where I ordered the only edible menu item for a lactose-intolerant pescatarian, a tuna sandwich on white bread, which cost less than a Starbucks latte and came with a ruffle of iceberg lettuce, a pale wheel of tomato, and a little pile of ridged potato chips. I sat at the counter and gobbled every crumb.
My third trip to the State Department felt a little anticlimactic. I gave the papers to my new pal and sat on a stiff wooden chair to wait. Five minutes later, she called my name and returned the packet, with the apostille, which turned out to be a round gold sticker like something your third-grade teacher would put on a perfect spelling test.
“That’s great,” I thought. “But where’s my award?” Not for spending the entire day in Harrisburg chasing an apostille, but for the two decades of parenting that preceded it.
Where’s my prize for changing three thousand diapers (not exaggerating; I did the math). Or my gold star for the day—I think my daughter was nine—when I kept my voice so neutral as I said, “Hey, sweetie, are the dollhouse people having sex on the pink rug in your closet?”
Or what about a blue ribbon for every time I asked, “Would you like a bagel?” and she said, “I hate bagels! Bagels are disgusting!” and I knew that meant, “My blood sugar is so low right now that I’m not even human.”
I used to joke that moments like that were all part of the Ama contract, clause #17a.
Before I left Harrisburg, I called my daughter. I told her about the apostille, but also about the Tough Love Bureaucrat and the Lonely Santa, and she got hysterical, and then I got hysterical, and it was the kind of hysteria where you can’t tell if the wet hiccups are from laughing or crying.
And I realized: This is my award. Because I got lucky. After the diapers and the dollhouse, I got a kid—okay, an almost-adult—who, according to the FBI, is not a criminal, but who is smart and funny and kind and brave, and who is going places I have never been.
And my job—bold print in the Ama contract—is to help her get there.
Anndee Hochman is a journalist, essayist, storyteller and teaching artist. Her book, Parent Trip: Unexpected Roads to Form a Family—a compilation of personal essays and nine years’ worth of her “Parent Trip” columns from the Philadelphia Inquirer—is due out in February 2026 from Temple University Press. Anndee is also the author of Anatomies: A Novella and Stories (Picador USA) and Everyday Acts & Small Subversions: Women Reinventing Family, Community and Home (The Eighth Mountain Press). Her work appears regularly in Broad Street Review, the Chestnut Hill Local and Moravian University magazine. She is also a ten-time Moth Story Slam winner. For more than 30 years, Anndee has helped writers across the age spectrum lift their voices in poetry, memoir and storytelling. She lives in West Mt. Airy.