Francis Mendoza, wife of Mets manager Carlos, sacrificed her career as dentist in Venezuela so husband could chase dream

Francis Mendoza spent six years in college following in her father’s footsteps. She spent one year working alongside him at his dental practice in Venezuela, and two more years saying goodbye — watching as a brain tumor sapped his strength and eventually took his life.

This is, of course, what family does.

Francis, wife to Mets manager Carlos Mendoza, knows that loving someone can mean admiring them, or collaborating with them. But in the case of her father, Jose Francisco Reyes, it meant letting that love intertwine with the scarring sort of grief that stands as testament to relationships that live on in memories alone.

“It was very, very hard,” Mendoza told Newsday of those months in 2010. “I cried every day after he passed away until I found out I was pregnant [two months later]. I had been trying to get pregnant since I got married because I wanted my dad to have a grandkid before he passed. And so, when I got pregnant, it was just like a message from him — l need you to not cry anymore because I’m sending this joy to you that you really wanted.”

But there was a problem.

Carlos had been named manager of the Gulf Coast League Yankees — the team’s rookie ball affiliate — and would be in Tampa. With political and economic unrest overtaking Venezuela, Francis decided to stay with her husband in Florida until her eldest son, Adrian, was born — eventually returning home to continue taking over her father’s practice.

"I literally told my patients I would be back in six months," she said.

She learned quickly, though, that the year-long process to get her green card meant that she couldn’t return to her country while the application was pending. She had a choice to make: return to her dream career, or stay in the United States to provide more security for her family, and support her husband in the pursuit of his own dream of becoming a major-league manager. In the process of doing the latter, she’d have to give up her ability to practice.

She chose Carlos and Adrian over herself.

Because that, too, is what family does.

“She has been my everything,” Carlos said. “I will always be grateful for the sacrifices that she made. She has been there supporting me during the highest of highs and lowest of lows. She is a wonderful wife, mother and I look forward to spending the rest of my life together with her.”

Of course, most people wouldn’t know any of this if Carlos hadn’t climbed the ranks, taking over for Buck Showalter as the Mets rookie manager. Thirteen years after making her sacrifice, Francis sat in the front row of his introductory news conference at Citi Field last November, beaming alongside Adrian, 12, and the couple’s youngest son, Andres, 10.

Carlos, addressing Francis from the dais that day, said: “I remember having this conversation with you: ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’” “You gave up your career as a dentist . . . [And] you said, ‘I’m ready to do this with you.’ And here we are, Francis. I love you so much and I can’t wait for this next new chapter in our lives.”

Smiles and tribulations

Though she regrets none of it — “I’m 100% sure I made the right decision,” she said — right does not mean easy.

She grew up sitting at her father’s practice, and in the process, learned the inherent joy of making someone smile.

“It’s a priceless moment when someone doesn’t smile and you have the ability of giving back that smile,” she said. “For me, it was always seeing him, going there with him. I just fell in love with it.”

That, though, meant traveling about five hours from her hometown of Barquisimeto to Caracas, Venezuela’s capital. Dental school is six years, and when she graduated from Universidad Santa Maria, the plan was to work under her father for a little bit and then progress with her career.

But then, the diagnosis: brain cancer, terminal.

“I started working with him even more — kind of being his dental assistant, even though he had his dental assistant that was always there with us,” Mendoza said. “She wanted me to learn from him because we knew what was coming. There were patients that were halfway done and we had to finish.”

She married Carlos in 2009, her father died a year later and she was in the U.S. shortly after that, learning that she couldn’t practice here. Getting a license to practice in the U.S. would have required passing four tests that she said take an average of two years to prepare for, in addition to three more years of school. Between her two sons, supporting Carlos, and the fact that, at that time, the closest dental school was in Gainesville — two hours from their home in Tampa — returning to school was untenable.

“It was frustrating because of course I miss what I was doing . . . but like me, there are thousands of Venezuelans who went to school to become someone and because of the situation in the country, they’ve left for different countries — not just the United States — just to have a better future for themselves and their families,” she said, noting that, at one point, she and Carlos were shipping toilet paper back home because inflation and scarcity had made even that necessity a luxury. “Like me, there are hundreds of stories of people like me who had to give up my career, my family, because still, to this day, we have no family in the United States. Everyone is still in Venezuela.”

'Never say never'

But though there are bouts of missing home, the Mendozas are long established in the U.S. Now that Carlos is managing the Mets, they’re moving the family to New York. Her sons look up to their father, and wouldn’t mind following in his footsteps.

“This was a goal — for him to get here, where he is right now,” she said. “That’s why it was so worth it, because it paid off for our family. I’m so, so proud of him . . . we’re so excited for him and we can’t wait to see what he’s going to do because this is his passion and that’s why I made that decision, leaving my career and my life to support him because I know how much he loves it.”

Her dream, though, will have to be deferred a little longer. She tried working as a dental assistant, but with her training and perfect English — honed from a year as a foreign exchange student in New York — she was used to performing dental procedures while being paid as only an assistant. Mendoza still thinks about going back to school, though it’ll have to wait until the boys are in college.

"In another life, I'd be a dentist," she said. "I always talk to Carlos about it — never say never."

Her sons, understandably, have gravitated toward baseball rather than dentistry. Adrian, though, has considered a backup plan.

“Maybe I’ll go to school to find a cure for cancer,” he told his mom.

His inspiration is the grandfather he never met. Because that’s what family is.

By Laura Albanese

laura.albanese@newsday.com@AlbaneseLaura

Laura Albanese is a reporter, feature writer and columnist covering local professional sports teams; she began at Newsday in 2007 as an intern.