Home is where I want to be
Pick me up and turn me round
I feel numb – born with a weak heart
I guess I must be having fun
The less we say about it the better
Make it up as we go along
Feet on the ground
Head in the sky
It’s ok I know nothing’s wrong . . . nothing

Lyrics: David Byrne

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I am supposed to be in Phoenix, but like many of you, I am not going anywhere. This Mother’s Day weekend coincides with what has been projected as the peak of coronavirus contagion here in Mexico, and we are being urged to stay at home. There have been social distancing measures in place since mid-March, but they have intensified this week, in an attempt to keep crowds from gathering to celebrate Día de las Madre in the traditional ways. This year, health officials are urging the people of Mexico to reimagine those time-honored tributes that define Día de las Madre and to cherish mothers and grandmothers from a distance. To that end, most restaurants, flower markets, and plazas will be closed on Sunday. To prevent people from visiting their mother’s graves, even cemeteries will be closed. Hopes are for a quiet Sunday, more likely now with a ban on in-person serenades of “Las Mañanitas” in the states of Sinaloa, Chihuahua, Zacateas, and here, in Guadalajara, Jalisco, the heartland of the mariachi.

Where we can no longer reach out with our hands, we must now reach out with our hearts.

I understand all of this, having availed myself of technology-enabled engagement to remain connected while physically distant. The only journeys I have planned for the foreseeable future are virtual, daily Brady-Bunch style Zoom meetings with my colleagues at 9:30AM, WhatsApp calls with my parents, still isolated at home in Northern Ireland, and the celebration of my only child’s college graduation on Monday. The right thing to do, her university has announced that due to the spread of the COVID-19 virus and its attendant public health recommendations, Arizona State University will move its 2020 Spring commencement to a virtual, online ceremony temporarily turning upside down my plans to be there to cheer wildly with her tribe as my darling girl strides across the stage to receive her diploma and to reflect quietly on this accomplishment in our Phoenix home, the place where she learned to walk and talk and read – the place where she first knew love. In addition to the online ceremony, graduates like Sophie can also participate in an in-person ceremony in December. She has opted for the latter, preferring to postpone rather than participate in what might feel like just another Zoom meeting. I know she is doing this for me. After so many months of social distancing, I will be ready for an in-person and personal party on the patio to celebrate all she has accomplished. There will be handshakes and hugs and high-fives, won’t there? Or maybe there won’t. I remind myself we are only four months into a global pandemic, and my fifty days in a house in Mexico may be but a drop in the bucket.

The President of ASU is saying the right things, encouraging graduates like Sophie to deal with the disappointment and this departure from tradition by tapping into “the same resourcefulness” that has guided their journey to earn a degree at ASU. He tells them they have “demonstrated an ability to adapt and to persevere. That is what makes a Sun Devil.” This is also what makes Sophie.

Home is were I want to be.

Overly sentimental today, I am remembering her high school graduation ceremony, the small Senior class filing into the auditorium to the sound of the Talking Heads – “This Must be the Place (Naive Melody). An appropriately hip processional at an artsy school, it was one of her dad’s favorite songs, five fabulous minutes of toe-tapping polyphony.  (He liked a tune that would inspire ‘happy feet,’ a fact that prompted me, one St. Patrick’s Day, to take him to see The Chieftains perform a particularly joyous show in Scottsdale). I had never been so utterly happy to hear the Talking Heads, or so utterly lost. By the time Sophie reached her seat on the stage, I had brushed away memories of David Byrne dancing in his big white suit, and instead was back where she started, asleep and swaddled, six pounds of potential, snug in the space between the crook of her daddy’s arm and the tips of his fingers, safe and secure. Certain sure.

Home is where I want to be, but I guess I’m already there.

I stayed home with my daughter for a year after she was born. For twelve idyllic months, with her father off at work, it was the best year of my life. Our baby girl was all mine. Spectacularly high on new baby smell, there were mornings when I danced just like the sign says – like nobody’s watching – around a house filled with sunshine and Van Morrison. Some days I made it out of my pajamas, but that was only if I felt like walking out to the mailbox. Other days, I might even have showered, but mostly, I was a bit like the imaginative little girl I once was, the one who had to be reminded to wash her face or brush her teeth because she was so absorbed in play and a world of pretending. How 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.

I spent interminable hours just looking at her. Just. Looking. At. Her. Examining every tiny feature, every furrow, every flicker across her face, for resemblances to me, her father, her grandparents,  all the while marveling that two imperfect people had made this perfection. Maybe my hovering bothered her the way it would later in her life. I’m not sure. This was before she had found words or discovered those beautiful hands that fly with expression today, a magical milestone in her development. She was surely the first child to ever make such a discovery, those slender fingers in constant motion. I remember we called it hand ballet. Transfixed, as though under a spell, she paid rapt attention, staring intently, unblinking, at the dancing fingers that would too soon cooperate to clap hands, tie laces, make music, whisk eggs, and wipe away tears.

Mostly, Sophie bounced with curiosity and glee. When she cried, it was for food or comfort or perhaps just to let us know she was there. In spite of criticism from well-meaning friends who were convinced they knew better, I refused to let her “cry it out.” I picked her up the instant I heard her begin to cry at night. From afar, my mother encouraged me, reminding me the way Irish mammies do, that there would be plenty of times as an adult when my daughter would have to cry herself to sleep without me there to make it all better. It has indeed been in such desperate times that I have found myself wishing that we mothers could somehow bank all those hours spent holding and comforting our infant children in a rainy day fund to help us help them weather whatever storms await them.

When the time came for me to return to work, I was unprepared for the crying – hers and mine – that preceded and continued after I deposited her in the waiting arms of Bonnie, the cheery classroom assistant at a Montessori school. Most of the other mothers didn’t appear to have jobs outside the home. In their cargo pants and Birkenstocks with big mugs of coffee brought from home – this was pre-Starbucks – they were usually still chatting in the parking lot as I left for work.  I like to think I left them with a vague impression of adulthood, in my boring Anne Klein suits and my hair on the verge of sensible. I pretended (mostly to myself) that I had evolved into “A Professional Working Mother,” that I could do it all or have it all – impossible, I know now, to achieve at the same time.

In spite of my grown-up job and my navy suit, I did not impress Bonnie. Mortified and avoiding eye-contact with her, I handed over my wailing, flailing girl. Coolly, she placated me with reassurances that Sophie would be just fine as soon as I was out of sight. Although she had to say it more than once, she showed restraint, never once rolling her eyes in response to my wild-eyed fretting about the impending separation from my daughter. Irrational and crazed, I know, but the unspoken truth was that I wanted the unflappable Bonnie to lavish on Sophie her undivided attention. I wanted her to spend hours staring, like the Madonna (mother of Jesus, not of Lourdes) at my beautiful girl, cheering with delight and recording on film and in writing the moment Sophie did anything for the very first time. I was sad that I would miss the first time she watered a plant in the school garden or threw a rock or cracked a nut or blew a bubble and the ceremony that followed when I would immediately notify her dad, my parents, my friends – just falling short of alerting the media – that Sophie had experienced another developmental milestone as monumental as when she uttered her first word – daddy – or clapped her hands for the first time – just in time for daddy’s birthday – or let go of my hand to stand erect, like a little warrior, to our doting ovation, “Sophie’s standing! Sophie’s standing!”

I was madly jealous that it was this magnanimous pre-school teacher – not me – with the right kind of magic up her sleeve to charm my inconsolable daughter and make the crying stop.  The daily choice to walk away from the little girl writhing in the arms of “the other woman,” cleaved me in two. I would pretend to leave but then sit in my car with the air-conditioning on and the window down, torturing myself as I listened to the sound of my child’s crying distinct from the simultaneous crying of all the other mother’s children. How, out of that early morning cacophony, could each of us pluck out the unique sound of our children’s specific anxiety?

Every day, I waited in the parking lot until those wails gave way to worn-out sobs and a final shuddering stop. Then I would reapply the makeup I had cried away, and when my face matched the boring business suit with no glimmer of guilt-stricken working mother remaining, off I went to work – for other people’s children.

Around this time, I discovered Kathi Appelt’s book, Oh My Baby Little One. Like me, Appelt knew this anguish, and she relived it when her twelve-year-old son went off to summer camp. Bracing herself for how she would feel as he left for college and inspired by the lovely Sweet Sorrow in the Wind sung by Emmylou Harris, she wrote the book I would eventually find on the discard table in a Borders when we still had a physical bookstore where I could also get the print edition of The Irish Sunday Times albeit on a Wednesday. Every night for a long time, I read to Sophie the story of Appelt’s 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 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.

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 our secret:

All around, mama. The love is all around.

This refrain would become the salve that soothed those morning goodbyes for both of us, when I left her with Bonnie and other teachers who never seemed to understand that I was her first teacher and that I was sending them the very best child I have. Dissatisfied, I switched schools so much that by the time she finished high school, Sophie had become a veritable tourist in the public education system, becoming ever more resilient, while I kept searching for the one teacher who might change her life as Mr. Jones had changed mine.

You have demonstrated an ability to adapt and to persevere. That is what makes a Sun Devil.

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The President of ASU has never met Sophie, but if I could sit down with him, I would share with him examples of her Sun Devil spirit. I would tell him about the time before her fourteenth birthday when I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I would invite him to stand in a hospital hallway outside the ICU, where she, impersonating “strong and stoic,” is leaning on her beloved daddy and he on her as they wait for surgeons bearing good tidings. Neither of them feels safe nor secure. Squaring up with a false bravado, she is at once confronting the wild fear that I might die yet balking at the notion of wearing the “kid with the sick mom” mantel. She did not want her teachers to know all she did to help during my recovery, in case they felt sorry for her and awarded good grades out of sympathy.

Remember fourteen? A time for rebellion, for rolling your eyes at your mother’s taste in clothes or music because she was your mother for God’s sake and therefore “so embarrassing.” Fourteen was for pushing boundaries and buttons; for experimenting with make-up; for discovering myriad ways to style your hair or sign your name – with hearts instead of dots above “i’s”. For my Sun Devil, this rite of passage was marred by my breast cancer diagnosis, before which she didn’t have to feel as guilty about perfectly acceptable and anticipated acts of rebellion. It was unforgivably unfair. But that’s the nature of the disease, isn’t it? Unfair. 

You have demonstrated an ability to adapt and to persevere. That is what makes a Sun Devil.

And then, like a Dickensian ghost, I would take the university president to another time, two years later, just before her sixteenth birthday. Sophie is with me in my mother’s kitchen, far away in rural Derry. She is concentrating on a sketch, and I am on the phone, trying to reach her dad in Phoenix. He does not answer, and the silence from the other side of America on the other side of the Atlantic troubles me so much that I text my best friend to please drive from Chandler to our house in Central Phoenix just to make sure all is well. Sophie is still drawing when my friend calls to tell me that both our cars are in the driveway, that our little dog, Edgar, is sitting on the couch, staring out the window at her. Sophie is still drawing when I hear my friend call out my husband’s name once, twice, and then a third time to no response. He is gone. We stop the clocks.

When we return to our home in Arizona, it is to a space we no longer recognize. The trees her dad planted especially for her no longer make any sense, casting elegant shadows on blades of grass that will never again flatten under his footsteps.  The mailman continues to deliver letters bearing his name. We don’t know what to do with them? The hummingbirds flit about the honeysuckle waiting for him to feed them.  Disoriented and uncertain, we get lost in our own home, no longer confident about what might happen at three o’clock or seven o’clock. Before, there was no doubt. Now we have to adapt. We persevere. We are becoming Sun Devils.

Today, my daughter is 22. Named after my mother, who has unhelpfully responded to so many of my predicaments with the same question, “What would the wise woman do?” Sophie Elizabeth has earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Family And Human Development, with an emphasis on child psychology, her goal ultimately to work in counseling, to help children who have lost parents or been frightened by the prospect of losing a sick parent to cancer. She has adapted to life without the man who was her first word and who took her for ice cream to a local Dairy Queen, since demolished, every Friday after school, the man who loved the Talking Heads and who would have loved being surprised by that high school graduation processional. He would have tapped his feet and by the end of it would have brushed away a tear, because by then he would have grown sentimental, contemplating the significance of the milestone and the prospect of so many more on the horizon. I like to think he knows somehow that she has navigated every one of them, with an independence and vulnerability that takes my breath away.

He would be so proud of her. He always was, from the first time she spoke right up to about a month before his death, when, unbeknownst to me, he had taken her to a workshop for teen drivers, designed to help her pass her Learner’s Permit test. She needed twenty-one correct answers in a row. Once accomplished, she looked out to where he was waiting and gave him a thumbs-up that prompted the wink and proud-as-punch smile she knew so well. It was still there on his face when I came home from work that day – “Look what we did today!” – and he beamed as our baby girl pressed her new Learner’s Permit into my hand. That was the last milestone our family shared – ordinary yet momentous.

I would also tell the university president that, on one of the six anniversaries of her father’s death, this Sun Devil told me it was beyond her grasp that one day it would be ten years, twenty years, forty years, since her dad last held her hand in the frozen food section of the grocery store – to keep her warm. I would emphasize that she is no longer undone by this fact. It is not a sadness that envelops her on these red-letter days. In fact, she sometimes faces the reality of these fatherless moments with a humor that others may find irreverent. The daily reminder that he is not here, that the saddest thing that could ever have happened has already happened reminds her that whatever happens today or on any day could not be worse. No fender-bender or unfair grade or postponed commencement ceremony could be any worse. This is how my Sun Devil rolls, going about her days, working, drawing, laughing, loving, singing, studying, seeking out and finding joy and hope, pausing during our texting the other day to don a pair of oven gloves to help catch and gently usher out the frightened woodpecker that had flown into the kitchen.

Unlike so many of us, who are in this very moment and the next and for who knows how long, struggling to find their way within an extraordinarily altered world, and seeing in front of us only what’s missing, my Sun Devil is focused on the present and the opportunities it presents – “keeping going.”

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Raised by a mother who invoked Seamus Heaney to deliver all the most important life lessons – because there really is nothing better than a Heaney poem to explain us to ourselves – Sophie would expect nothing less than advice from our poet on the occasion of her graduation from university. I am here to deliver it. The year before she was born, and coincidentally on Mother’s Day, Seamus Heaney gave to the graduating class of 1996 at Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina, a commencement speech in which he shared what he described as the essential rhythm of not only survival but achievement: “getting started, keeping going, getting started again.” Our history – collectively and individually – depends on this rhythm, starting and starting over. Now more than ever perhaps we all need to be reminded of this. I know I do . This pandemic is a stepping stone, a place to pause and contemplate the distance covered and – this is important – to find another one. As Heaney told those graduates, it is the next move that is the test for all of us.

Here’s to your next move, Sophie. I am immeasurably proud to be your mother. Congratulations, graduate.

Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit. There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you. But there is a pride and joy also, a pride and joy that is surging through this crowd today, through the emotions of your parents and your mothers particularly on Mothers Day, your families and your assembled friends. And through you yourselves especially. And so, my fellow graduates, make the world before you a better one by going into it with all boldness. You are up to it and you are fit for it; you deserve it and if you make your own best contribution, the world before you will become a bit more deserving of you.

Seamus Heaney 1996