It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away
Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.
That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.
I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.
The best year of my life was the one spent at home after the birth of my baby girl. For twelve idyllic months, with her daddy off at work, our girl was mine – all mine – and I inhaled. Spectacularly high on new baby smell, I danced around a house filled with sunshine and Van Morrison – when I liked Van Morrison. I spent interminable hours just looking at her.
Just. Looking. At. Her.
I examined every feature, every furrow, every flicker across her tiny face, searching for resemblances to me, her father, her grandparents, all the while marveling that two imperfect people had made this perfection. Unbothered by my hovering, or maybe she was, this was before she had a cache of words or discovered those beautiful hands that fly with expression today. We called it hand ballet.
Mostly, our darling girl bounced with curiosity and glee. When she cried, it was for food or comfort or maybe just to let me know she was right there in front of me. I couldn’t bear it. In spite of criticism from well-meaning friends who thought they knew better, I was one of those mothers who refused to her ‘cry it out.’ As soon as I heard the tiniest whimper, I bolted to her bedroom to pick her up and comfort her. My mother encouraged me, reminding me the way only Irish mammies do, that there would be plenty of times down the road when my daughter would have to cry herself to sleep without me there to make it all better. She was right. Of course she was. It has been on such desperate nights that I have found myself wishing we mothers could have banked all those hours spent holding and comforting our infant children and built a rainy day fund to help us help them weather the waiting storms.
When the time came for me to return to work, I was unprepared for the crying – mostly 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 comfortable cargo pants and Birkenstocks and (this was pre-Starbucks) with mugs of coffee brought from home, they chatted in the parking lot. I like to think I conveyed a vague impression of adulthood with my Anne Klein suits and hair on the verge of sensible. As a school administrator, I was hell-bent on impressing on someone – most likely myself – the notion that I was “A Professional Working Mother,” that I could do it all or have it all, all at the same time.
In spite of my grown-up job, I did not impress Bonnie. Mortified and avoiding eye-contact with her, I would hand to her my wailing, flailing girl. Unflappable, Bonnie would attempt placating me with reassurances that the writhing child in her arms would be just fine as soon as I was out of sight. If only I would just leave . . .
Although she had to say it more than once, Bonnie showed restraint, never once rolling her eyes as I stood there wild-eyed and fretting about the impending separation from my daughter. Irrational and crazed, I wanted my child to have Bonnie’s undivided attention. I wanted Bonnie 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 when she did something – anything – for the 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 bubbles. I would miss telling her daddy, my parents, my friends – just falling short of alerting the media – that Sophie had experienced another developmental milestone as when she had spoken her first word, or clapped her hands for the first time, or let go of my hand and stood straight like a little warrior to my ovation, “Sophie’s standing! Sophie’s standing!”
It’s true. I was madly jealous that it would be the magnanimous Bonnie – not me – with a magic trick up her sleeve that would charm my inconsolable daughter and make the crying stop. Walking away from the little girl writhing in the arms of “the other woman,” cleaved me in two. I would pretend to leave but then remain in the car with the air-conditioning on and the window down, torturing myself as I listened to the unmistakable sound of my child’s crying. At the same time, all the other mother’s children were crying. How, out of that early morning cacophony, could each of us pluck out the unique sound of our children’s specific anxiety?
Daily, I waited until the wails gave way to worn-out sobs and a final shuddering stop. Then I would reapply the makeup that I had wept away, and when my face matched the boring business suit with no hint of guilt-stricken working mother, 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 of leaving her child, and she relived it when her twelve-year-old son went 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 the book I would find on the discard table in a Borders when we still had a real bookstore where I could also get The Irish Sunday Times albeit on a Wednesday.
Every night, I read aloud the story of Mama Bird, who reassured Baby Bird that every day when she was off at work, her love – a little red heart – would still be with him. Magically, this love 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 my sleepy girl, “Where’s the love?” and she would whisper, as though it were a secret:
All around, mama. The love is all around.
It eased those morning goodbyes when I left her with Bonnie and numerous other teachers throughout the years. There were too many of them. Never satisfied with them because they never seemed to understand that I was her first teacher and that I knew best what was best for her, I kept switching schools. They never seemed to get it, that I was sending them the very best child I have. So by the time she was in the third 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 the one teacher who would change her life as Mr. Jones had changed mine.
On her last first day at school, I packed a lunch for my girl – now a high school Senior, a young woman – and slipped a note inside the brown paper sack the way I used to do. Watching as she strode to the car her daddy used to drive, my heart cracked open – another milestone without him.
But I pulled myself together and gave into the day – the way I had to do – knowing as it released us to our respective distractions and mundanities, that it would unfold, providing delight or difficulty or both in unequal measure.
Some days still, in an unguarded moment, between emails and zoom meetings, in the middle of things that matter and things that don’t, I wonder what she is doing, and find myself recalling my three-year-old darling, fighting sleep with all her might to search once more for the love so cleverly hidden on each page of Jane Dyer’s watercolor illustrations.
And I will remind myself – as I will again today – that the love is all around.
Almost a decade ago, I enrolled in a college photography class. Not a bucket list kind of thing by most standards, but it was something I had been meaning to do for thirty years. I had never been able to find the time for it, always too busy being busy and bemoaning the pace of life as a woman trying to play equally well the roles of mother, wife, daughter, sister, best friend, teacher. At the same time, I had also been waiting for Tom Petty to show up on my doorstep and beg me to be one of his Heartbreakers.
A dear friend signed up with me, and we were like teenagers competing for an “A” from the photography teacher, a badass with a Nikon. Like me, she had breast cancer and neither time nor patience for pink ribbons. Less technician than artist, she had a penchant for Photoshop and its post-processing capabilities that she knew would made us look competent. Her dead-pan dead-on sense of what was important inspired me to do my homework and never to miss a class. Even as she bristled at our predictable photographs shot straight-on, she would remind us, with a sigh, that “photography is just light” – it’s just light, and we just needed to find it and appreciate it when we did. It was “writing with light.”
I saw magic in it, and I wanted to be good at it, to take the kinds of photographs Amyn Nasser talks about:
I believe in the photographer’s magic — the ability to stir the soul with light and shape and color. To create grand visual moments out of small and simple things, and to infuse big and complicated subjects with unpretentious elegance. He respects classic disciplines, while at the same time insists on being fast, modern and wild.
Determined that we would create such moments in our often pedestrian pictures, she assigned as homework the week of Thanksgiving, a “prepositional scavenger hunt” that required us to shoot from various angles – against, across, beyond, beneath, around, behind, below, between, inside, outside, on top of, toward, through, upon . . . So it was that on a Thanksgiving afternoon, I found myself wandering the grounds of the Arizona State Capitol, eventually pausing beneath a canopy of shimmering green and pink.
I have no idea how long I sat there, looking skyward and thinking, but it was long enough for prepositions and perspectives to give way to gratitude and grace – Amazing Grace – and thoughts of Van Morrison in full flow at The Hollywood Bowl, mystifying me the way he used to do before he became dangerous, denying the COVID-19-pandemic that has left so many families grieving the loss of loved ones this Thanksgiving, contradicting doctors, and protesting the protocols that prevent him from performing and making people sick. For just a moment this morning, I’m remembering Morrison when he was merely grumpy and not as dangerous as Donald Trump. For just a moment, I’m remembering the beautiful Astral Weeks/I Believe I have Transcended, a song he once described as “one where you can see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
In the spirit of the holiday, I could maybe say that Thanksgiving has something to do with that moment of transcendence among the trees in Arizona as I gazed up at those shimmering leaves. But that would not be true. Even after living an American life for over thirty years, the celebration of Thanksgiving does not come naturally to me. Some of my American friends are still surprised when I tell them there is no such holiday in Ireland, that Christmas is the holiday that warms us. Thus, I know whereof she speaks when Carole Coleman, an Irish woman living in America, apologizes to her American family and friends,
. . . we will be doing the turkey thing all over again five weeks from now.
It was something else. Looking up and losing track of time that November afternoon, I think I found my footing once more. I saw the light, I suppose, and the kind of gratitude Annie Lamott describes in her Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers:
Thanks is the prayer of relief that help was on the way, that either the cavalry arrived, or that the plates of the earth shifted and that somehow, you got your sense of humor back, or you avoided the car that was right in front of you that you looked about to hit.
And so it could be the pettiest, dumbest thing, but it could also be that you get the phone call that the diagnosis was much, much, much better than you had been fearing. And you say the full prayer, and its entirety, is: Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. But for reasons of brevity, I just refer to it as Thanks. It’s amazement and relief that you caught a break, that your family caught a break, that you didn’t have any reason to believe that things were really going to be OK, and then they were and you just can’t help but say thank you.
Thank you – a powerful phrase that often goes unsaid right when we need to hear it the most, especially during a pandemic.
There’s a lovely minute or two in the Irish film, “Waking Ned Devine,” that never fails to remind me of this. The hapless Lottery official has just arrived unannounced at Ned Devine’s funeral, right when Jackie O’Shea is beginning the eulogy. Always quick on his feet – and realizing his scheme to cash in on Ned’s winning lottery ticket is about to come crashing down – Jackie pauses. He looks over at his best friend, Michael O’Sullivan, who is posing as Ned, and as an easy smile spreads across his face, he looks out into the congregation and delivers this:
As we look back on the life of . . .
Michael O’Sullivan was my great friend. But I don’t ever remember telling him that. The words that are spoken at a funeral are spoken too late for the man who is dead. What a wonderful thing it would be to visit your own funeral. To sit at the front and hear what was said, maybe say a few things yourself. Michael and I grew old together. But at times, when we laughed, we grew young. If he was here now, if he could hear what I say, I’d congratulate him on being a great man, and thank him for being a friend.
This year, Rabbi Bentzy Stolik tells his congregation in Olney, Md, to start each day by getting “on the treadmill of gratitude.” In these times, when we are replacing all the known ways with new routines and rituals, showiong appreciation is more important than ever.
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
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.
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.”
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.
There’s no word in the language I revere more than ‘teacher.’ My heart sings when a kid refers to me as his teacher, and it always has. I’ve honored myself and the entire family of man by becoming a teacher.
This week, I will not be the only one to invoke Pat Conroy’s Prince of Tides. All over America, during Teacher Appreciation Week, we will honor our teachers and their craft, but we will do it differently this year. We have no choice. Although schools and teachers are doing what they can to keep the doors of learning open, schools are closed, leaving millions of teachers to work from their homes, harnessing the power of whatever technology is available to them to continue connecting with kids they may not see for months. Improvising with phone calls and postcards and hand-written letters to families who do not have access to online Zoom classrooms reminiscent of the Brady Bunch, good teachers know that the most important subject in a school is their students. They understand that every student enters their classroom – online or off – sharing the same basic needs – to feel safe, to learn, to matter. Some children, especially those who are struggling during this pandemic with hunger or poverty or an unsafe home, will remember those schools and teachers who went above and beyond to make sure they made it through. As Henry Adams once said about a teacher’s effect on eternity. “He can never tell where his influence stops.”
Today, on the first day of Teacher Appreciation Week 2020, come away with me to the classroom of your favorite teacher. You know the one. Maybe it was the teacher who knew you were really good at art and entered your drawing in a competition without telling you. Maybe it was the kindly English teacher who cut you some slack when you didn’t finish your book report because your mother was in the hospital, and who you overheard one day tell a student during detention, “you will never earn enough money to do a job you do not love.” Or maybe it was the history teacher who, decades later, is the reason why your mind wanders to the fields of the Antebellum South whenever you use a cotton ball.
Each of us should have this extraordinary teacher.
For me, it was Mr. Jones, my English teacher. A teenager, when I first encountered him, I knew nothing about pedagogy, but, because of him I learned what great teaching looked like. It looked like him in his classroom every day at Antrim Grammar School. Then a young man at the beginning of his career, he wore a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows and on its lapel, a “Save the Otter” button. Naturally, he was well-read, but more importantly, he was accessible. Always the best reader in the room, be brought vividly to life Chaucer’s Pardoner and other questionable characters, knowing the bawdy exchanges that would most appeal to our adolescent sensibilities. With impeccable timing, he knew when we’d had our fill of Richard Church’s Over the Bridge or the Great Expectations of Charles Dickens. And, at such times, he would pause to wax philosophical or tell us to underscore in red great chunks of text we should learn by heart:
That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.
For emphasis, he would add “Great stuff!”
Belfast, 2015. Mr. Jones & me
His classroom offered a place of hope during often hopeless and harrowing days in 1970s Northern Ireland. The daughter of working-class parents who pushed me to do well in school, I was the first in the extended family to pass the eleven-plus exam which gained me a spot at Antrim Grammar, the posh school in our town, where the headmaster and teachers showed up to morning assembly in black gowns. Unsure of my place there, I loved it when Mr. Jones took us away from all that, indulging, with good humor, our wrong answers and red herrings and questions we were never afraid to ask. I remember one day I raised my hand to ask what “pre-Raphaelite” meant and I jotted down the definition in the margin of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native. A few minutes later, I asked if I could go to the toilet, and when I returned to class, Mr. Jones asked – but not unkindly – if I had looked in the mirror to consider if perhaps I too had pre-Raphaelite features like the coquettish Eustacia Vye. Of course I had. And, I remember too the day I said I was surprised one of the women in the novel had turned out to be “that type of woman,” and Mr. Jones, glasses balanced on his head, looked right at me and said, “Yvonne, there is no type. Remember that.” I have never forgotten it.
In those seemingly random conversations, Mr. Jones also revealed to us a little of his life beyond the classroom and his taste in music – Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Jackson Browne – thereby influencing my own. He even let me borrow his records. Then back to business, he would painstakingly guide us through the required reading for O-level and A-level English exams, the routines and rituals of his classroom elevating an ordinary space into a place of possibility. Every. Single Day.
Conversely, I also encountered teachers who didn’t seem to like children very much – the PE teacher who watched as we showered or questioned the validity of notes our mothers had written to excuse us from swimming because we were menstruating and who also asked for evidence. There were teachers who used sarcasm and big words as they undermined working class parents like mine who lacked a formal education but more than made up for it with hard work and a desire to know the things to do and say that would help ensure their children a place in university, a competitive edge in a world foreign to them.
Thinking today of my parents as they observed me, university bound, I am reminded of something Seamus Heaney told Dennis O’Driscoll:
Even Belfast was far away to me. In those days, I was outside the loop, my family had no familiarity with universities, no sense of the choices that there were, no will to go beyond the known procedures, no confidence, for example, about phoning up the local education authority and seeking clarification about what was possible – no phone, for God’s sake.
My mother – my first teacher – took such pride in all aspects of our education, from sewing labels on our uniforms to “backing” our textbooks. I can see her in my mind’s eye, at our kitchen table. It is late on a September evening after our first day back at school. She places each book carefully on the middle of a sheet of brown wrapping paper, and with a few quick snips, folds, and tucks, she has it covered, ready for us to write our names on the front. One September, because she was ill and in the hospital, I took it upon myself to back my new history textbook. Like so many things, this was something my mother had made look easy. Clumsy, I could not fit the brown paper neatly under the spine at both ends, so I gave up and went to school, my book un-backed. For my sins, I was subjected me to a memorably sarcastic tirade from a teacher who made me stand up while he berated me in front of everyone, told me I was useless, and that he didn’t want to hear a word bout my mother who was lying in the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. She may as well have been on the other side of the world in that instant, and over forty years later, I can still feel the sting of embarrassment on my face. I never forgave him.
In the classroom across the hall, however, and because of Mr. Jones, I mattered, and I knew I mattered. Perhaps this is why I became a teacher and remained a teacher for many years, driven I suppose by the hope that kids in my classroom might feel they mattered too.
By the time I had spent more than a decade as a teacher, Mr. Jones had moved on to new teaching post at Friends School in Lisburn. It makes me smile to consider the possibility that, on the same day, Mr. Jones and I might have been introducing our respective students on either side of the Atlantic, to Robert Frost’s Birches. Years later, curious about where his career had taken him, and hoping to connect with him so I could say thank you, I searched online, where I found in the Friends Summer 2012 Newsletter a tribute to my favorite teacher, now middle-aged and retired
Mr Terry Jones, Senior Teacher, joined the staff at Friends’ from Antrim Grammar School as Head of the English Department in 1996. At the heart of his teaching was an abiding love of literature, an endless enthusiasm for books and reading, that enriched and enlivened all in his classroom over the years. At the heart of his work in school were kindness, warmth and good sense – qualities that drew the best from pupils and fostered the good relationships so important in our community. A man with many interests, those good relationships extended throughout the staff at Friends’ and Terry Jones was a most highly valued colleague and friend. Calm and steadfast in upholding what is really important in education, Terry Jones made an immense contribution and his example will be a pattern for those who worked with him here in years to come. There is no doubt that retirement will be busy and fulfilling and Terry Jones has our thanks and very best wishes for the future.
At the heart of his work were kindness, warmth, and good sense – the likes of which we are seeing from teachers everywhere during COVID-19. Perhaps it took a pandemic for us to notice that good teachers are essential. Remember to thank one of them this week.
