It’s one of my favorite pictures – her T-shirt reminding me the way she always does, “good things will come.”  It is my darling girl’s birthday, and with COVID keeping us in our respective places once again this year, we’ll have to make do with text messages and embarrassing photos on Facebook instead of a celebration here in Mexico. I’m going to wake up missing her and remembering that it’s really hard to remember life before her.

Suddenly, one day, there was this thing called parenting. Parenting was serious. Parenting was fierce. Parenting was solemn. Parenting was a participle, like going and doing and crusading and worrying; it was active, it was energetic, it was unrelenting. Parenting meant playing Mozart CDs while you were pregnant, doing without the epidural, and breast-feeding your child until it was old enough to unbutton your blouse.

I stayed home with Sophie for a year after she was born. It was, and I’m pretty sure it will always be – The Best Year of My Life  with her attached to me in one of those Baby Bjorn carriers without which I would have been completely unprepared for the kind of “parenting” Nora Ephron warned us about, as one of those hovering salespeople in Babies R Us had warned me.

Just the way I like it, business was slow that first year. Some days I made it out of my pajamas – only some and only if I felt like walking out to the mailbox –  unlike Dolly Parton who checks the mail in full makeup and heels and while we’re on the subject absolutely should be Time’s Person of the Year 2021  Other days, I also showered, but mostly I was mostly like the imaginative little girl I had once been, the one who had to be reminded to wash her hands or brush her teeth because she was so absorbed in play and a world of pretending.  I loved playing with my very own baby girl, feeding her, dressing her in miniature clothes with impossibly tiny buttons, brushing what little hair she had with a soft toothbrush, and bathing her in the kitchen sink. For twelve idyllic months, with her daddy off at work, our girl was all mine, I danced around a house filled with sunshine and Van Morrison – when I still liked him before he weighed in on COVID with bad songs railing against masks, social distancing, and, well, science. Spectacularly high on new baby smell, I inhaled, and I remember thinking about sixteen years later, that a bottle of that very fragrance would go a long way, if only to mask the Teen Spirit.

There were interminable hours spent simply looking at her. Just. Looking. At. Her. Examining every tiny feature and flicker across her face, searching for resemblances to me, her father, her grandparents, and wondering how it was that two imperfect people had made this one perfect thing. She didn’t mind the attention. Or she did, but this was before she had words or discovered those beautiful hands that fly with expression today. We used to call it hand ballet.

Mostly, she bounced with curiosity and glee. When she cried, it was for food or comfort or just to let us know she was there. I couldn’t bear it. I hovered constantly and still do albeit from another country and much to her chagrin. I was one of those mothers who picked her up the instant she began to cry at night. On long-distance telephone calls, my mother urged me to do so by reminding me the way only an Irish mammy can, to mark her words that the day would come  when my daughter would have to cry herself to sleep without me there to make it all better.

Wouldn’t it be great if we mothers could bank all those hours of holding and comforting for such a day, like the day I spent in the ICU following over 8 hours surgery while my fourteen-year-old girl wept in bed and rocked herself to sleep? This is why I hate cancer.

When the time came for me to go back to work and take Sophie to pre-school, I was wholly unprepared for the crying – especially mine – that preceded and continued for some time after the moment I deposited her in the waiting arms of Bonnie, a cheery classroom assistant at the Montessori school where it seemed that all the other mothers didn’t have jobs outside the home. They loitered in the parking lot in khaki shorts from the Gap and Birkenstock sandals, gossiping over coffee in mugs filled at home – this was in the days before there was a Starbucks on every corner. While I was not dressed like Dolly Parton for a turn at the Ryman, I like to believe I conveyed a vague impression of adulthood with my Anne Klein suits bought on sale at Lohemanns and my hair on the verge of sensible. But only on the verge – where I remain.  I had returned to a career in public education, trying to impress on someone – myself – that I was “A Professional Working Mother.”

Sophie was unimpressed by all of this and showed it by crying, daily, all over my dry-clean-only blouses. In retrospect, I made this a much bigger deal than it needed to be, realizing eventually that there must be some sort of lucrative pact between dry cleaners and the fashion industry. By accident, I discovered that if I didn’t put things in the tumble dryer, the dry-clean-only-blouses turned out just fine.  Therefore, I took umbrage against the dryer, and to this day rarely feed it anything other than towels and jeans and my boyfriend’s T-shirts.

I never really understood the concept of a dryer for people who live in sunny places. The clothes will dry if we just hang them on a clothesline, but nobody in our Phoenix neighborhood had a clothes line in the backyard.  We didn’t. And, this is odd. Not just because the sun shines 300 days a year there, but also because I’m from Northern Ireland, where “doing a load of washing” is in my DNA, where everybody hangs clothes out on the line and then runs like hell to rescue them when the rain invariably falls. I remember the first thing I bought for my mother with my first real pay check from not-really-a-job as a receptionist at a local “leisure” center, was a tumble dryer from the Electricity Board.

Airing all this laundry has nothing to do with where the love is, actually, but the question remains – is it not illogical to own a tumble dryer in places like Phoenix? I once asked my late husband about it, and he just looked at me like I had two heads. He wasn’t very good at it – the drying of things. He either didn’t read them or had an aversion to directions like  “tumble dry low,”  “remove quickly from dryer,” “dry flat,” or “dry clean only.” His favorite setting was “Permanent Press,” but I don’t think he ever knew what that meant. Also, he was a man, the kind who never read manuals or  labels or asked for directions. Never. To be scrupulously honest,  I don’t know what “permanent press” means either except it has something to do with often reducing some of my favorite skirts and shirts to napkin-sized deformities. But back when I was pretending to be a grown-up – for a whole year at home with Sophie – he didn’t do the laundry. I did. All the clothes were safe. And so was I. This is not to suggest that I’m dangerous now, but, as earlier noted, I am on the verge.

In spite of my safe clothes and my sensible job, Bonnie was nonplussed. Mortified and avoiding eye-contact with her, I handed over my wailing, flailing girl, and she would try to placate me with reassurances that Sophie would be just fine as soon as I was out of sight. If only I would just leave . . . Although she had to say it three times,  she showed restraint and never once rolled her eyes as I stood there wild-eyed and fretting about the impending separation from my daughter.  I know – of course I know – that it was irrational to expect that Bonnie would spend hours staring – as Madonna (mother of Jesus, not of Lourdes) – at my beautiful girl and cheering with delight and subsequently documenting on film and in writing when she did something for the first time. Anything. I was mad and sad that I would miss the first time Sophie watered a plant in the school garden or cracked a nut – this was a big deal in the Montessori classroom – or completed a puzzle. I would miss telling her father,  my parents, my friends – just falling short of alerting the media – about any time she experienced another developmental milestone  like that time she had spoken her first word – daddy –  or clapped her hands for the first time – for daddy –  or let go of my hand and stood straight like a little warrior to my ovation – and for daddy, “Sophie’s standing! Sophie’s standing!”

I was jealous  that it would be the magnanimous Bonnie – not me – who had the magic trick to distract my inconsolable daughter and make the damn crying stop. Walking away from my little girl writhing in the arms of “the other woman,” cleaved me in two. I’d pretend to leave, but instead I sat in the car with the air-conditioning on because it was hot (because it was Phoenix) and also with the window down so I could continue to listen to the unmistakable sound of my child’s crying. I would wait until the wails gave way to worn-out sobs and when she finally stopped, I would reapply my makeup until my face matched the boring business suit and not even a  glimmer of guilt-stricken working mother remained. Meanwhile, all the other mother’s children were crying. It always amazed me that out of that early morning cacophony, each of us could pluck out the unique sound of our children’s specific anxiety. Mothers know the cries of their babies.

Around this time, I discovered a book by Kathi Appelt. Like me, Appelt knew the anguish of leaving a child. She experienced it again when her son was 12 and going off to summer camp. Bracing herself for how she would feel as he prepared to go off to college and inspired by the lovely Sweet Sorrow in the Wind sung by Emmylou Harris, she wrote “Oh My Baby Little One.”

I found it on the discard table in a Borders when we still had a real bookstore where I could also get The Irish Sunday Times – on a Wednesday.

Every night, I read to Sophie the story of Mama Bird who reassured Baby Bird that every day when she was off at work, her love would still be with him. Magically, it would slip inside his lunch box or sit on his shoulder during playtime or nestle on his pillow at nap-time. At the same time, it would curl around Mama Bird’s coffee cup as she went about her daily business.

And every night, before closing the book and kissing her goodnight, I would ask Sophie, “Where’s the love?” and she would whisper as though it were a secret:

All around, mama. The love is all around.

How it eased those morning goodbyes with Bonnie and numerous other teachers throughout the years. And there were lots of them. Never satisfied with her teachers because they never seemed to understand that I was her first teacher and that I knew her best, we kept switching schools. By the time she was in 2nd grade, my daughter had become a veritable tourist in the public education system, hopping from school to school, becoming ever more resilient, while I kept searching for that one teacher who would change her life as Mr. Jones had changed mine.  That one teacher never showed up. 

I remember watching from my car as she strode onto the community college campus one summer to study art with students who were ancient – at least in their twenties. She was as tall as me but infinitely more brave. I knew she knew I was watching and waiting for her to turn around and wave. And, she did. She never lets me down.  

So blow a kiss and wave good-bye – my baby, don’t you cry.

This love is always with you, like the sun is in the sky.

Thus our days began,  each of us released to our respective distractions and mundanities, finding therein both delight and difficulty, the way we all do. Sometimes, in an unguarded moment, between emails and Zoom meetings,  things that matter and things that don’t, I’ll wonder what she’s doing, and I’ll find myself smiling as I recall her as a three-year-old, fighting sleep with all her might and poring over Jane Dyer’s watercolor illustrations, searching for the love – a tiny red heart – so cleverly hidden on each page.

And sometimes, I wish this book had been available to my own mother, given all the goodbyes and  reunions we have shared at airports on either side of the Atlantic. I love that my baby girl knew that the love was all around long before Hugh Grant’s Prime Minister told us so in Love Actually. Before you pounce on me with all the reasons why  it’s a terrible movie and I’m therefore un-evolved  for loving it, I don’t care. I agree with the fictional PM – in the end, if you’re looking for love, you are sure to find evidence of it at the airport, where those who stay and those who go are often telling the only truths that matter:

Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often, it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there – fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge – they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you’ll find that love actually is all around.

Happy Birthday, Sophie. It’s a privilege to be your mother.

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