All around, mama.

I used to think the hardest part would be balancing everything.

It wasn’t.

It was the leaving.

For years, women like me were encouraged to “have it all,” which in my experience looked like learning how to walk away from what I loved every morning and do it convincingly. A new mother, I was not yet fluent in that language, holding a career together with one hand, my child with the other, and the rest of you braced against the nearest wall in a daycare parking lot, practicing a show of strength that mostly involved not crying until you were safely back in the car.

When it was time for me to return to work after a year of maternity leave, I was unprepared for the crying— my daughter’s and mine – that immediately preceded and continued for some time after I placed my baby in the waiting arms of Bonnie, a cheery classroom assistant at a Montessori school where all the other mothers appeared not to have jobs outside the home. Every morning, they loitered in the parking lot in their shorts and Birkenstocks, drinking coffee from mugs filled at home. This was B.S. (Before Starbucks).

Sophie was unimpressed with this version of me and demonstrated her feelings about it daily by crying all over my work clothes. This turned out not to be the catastrophe I imagined because eventually I discovered that if you simply didn’t put dry-clean-only blouses in the dryer, they survived perfectly well. Realizing there was almost certainly a financial arrangement between the fashion industry and dry cleaners, I developed a lasting distrust of tumble dryers and have spent most of my adult life feeding mine only towels and jeans.

This made me something of an outlier in Arizona, where people dry everything despite living in a climate so relentlessly sunny that any Northern Irish mother would stand in the backyard admiring the “great drying.”

Where I grew up, everybody hung their clothes on a washing line in the back garden and then sprinted to rescue them when the rain inevitably arrived five minutes later. This is why the first thing I bought my mother with my first real paycheck was a tumble dryer from the Northern Ireland Electricity Board.

She loved it.

I remember once asking my late husband why we even owned a dryer in Phoenix. He looked at me as though I had questioned the existence of indoor plumbing. He loved that machine with irrational devotion and used it on all fabrics indiscriminately. His favorite setting was Permanent Press, which permanently altered several of my skirts into proportions suitable for decorative napkins.

To be fair, during my brief and unconvincing period as a proper working woman with sensible suits and a corner office, he did not do my laundry.

I did.

Which meant my clothes survived intact.

Unlike me.

Mostly, though, our baby was a bright, bouncing little thing, full of curiosity and joy. When she cried, it was for food or comfort, or simply to let us know she was there. Still, I couldn’t bear it. I hovered. I was one of those mothers who picked her up the moment she began to cry at night, as if love were something that had to act immediately or risk failing altogether.

My mother noticed this.

She did not correct me. Instead, she encouraged me, gently warning me that there would be times in life when my daughter would have to cry herself to sleep without me there to make it better.

I did not understand her then in the way I understand her now.

She was right. Of course she was right.

If only we could deposit all those hours of holding and comforting into some sort of emotional savings account, to be withdrawn years later in case of emergency. Like that night I spent in the ICU after eight hours of surgery, when my teenage daughter wept in a chair beside my bed and then, eventually, rocked herself to sleep in a way I could not reach.

I hate cancer.

What I’ve learned is that there are things we learn in their aftermath that we don’t consent to learning. How love sharpens. How time rearranges itself. How children become the ones who hold you still.

And yet life continues in the only way it knows how to – ordinary, unremarkable, insistent.

So I handed my crying child over to Montessori Bonnie and stood there, trying to look like a composed professional woman instead of someone abandoning her firstborn to strangers with construction paper and paint.

Bonnie, to her eternal credit, never rolled her eyes at me, though she certainly had reason to. Patiently holding my sobbing child, she repeated the same reassurance every morning:

“She’ll be fine once you leave.”

The implication being that I was now the primary obstacle to peace.

Still, I lingered. Every day, I walked away from my baby girl writhing in Bonnie’s arms, pretending to leave but often sitting in the car afterwards with the air-conditioning running and the window cracked open, listening to her cries give way to exhausted sobs and finally silence. Then I would re-apply my brightest lipstick until my face once again matched the boring business suit and drive off to work for other people’s children.

I worried I would miss everything important – like the first time Sophie watered a plant in the school garden or threw a rock or blew bubbles or cracked a nut in the classroom nutcracker. Not your typical developmental milestones, but Bonnie’s boss, an avid fan of Maria Montessori, had deemed them important. I would miss telling my husband, my parents, my friends – just falling short of alerting the media – that our brilliant child had experienced another genuis-level achievement like that time she spoke her first word – daddy – or when she clapped her hands for the first time, or let go of our hands and stood straight like a little warrior to an ovation, “Sophie’s standing! Sophie’s standing!”

Around this time, I found a discarded children’s book in Borders Bookstore back when central Phoenix still had actual bookstores, and I could buy The Irish Sunday Times three days late but still happily.

The book was Oh My Baby, Little One by Kathi Appelt, inspired by Emmylou Harris’s Sweet Sorrow in the Wind. Every night, I read it to Sophie before bed.

In it, Mama Bird explains to Baby Bird how love stays with you even after goodbye. It curls around coffee cups, hides in lunchboxes, sits quietly on shoulders through difficult days. It slips into nap-time and playtime and follows you into the world long after your mother has walked away.

And every night, before closing the book and kissing her goodnight, I would ask Sophie, “Where’s the love?” and she would whisper to me as though revealing classified information:

“All around, Mama. The love is all around.”

It did not make leaving her easier exactly.

But it made it survivable.

There were many teachers after Bonnie, so many that by the end of second grade, my little girl had become something of a tourist in Arizona’s public education system while I continued searching for the super-hero teacher every mother hopes exists, the one who will change everything the way Mr. Jones had done for me.

I’m not entirely sure that teacher ever appeared.

But Sophie turned out beautifully anyway.

One summer morning, I watched from my car as she walked across a community college campus to study art with students who seemed impossibly grown-up to me at the time. She was tall and self-possessed and brave. I waited for her to turn around and wave.

She did.

She never lets me down that way

.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.

Sometimes now — my mother in Northern Ireland, me in Mexico, my daughter in Arizona — somewhere between grocery stores and Zoom meetings and all the ordinary mechanics of a life, one of us will suddenly think of the others and pick up the phone.

Looking for love.

Finding it.

In the same way I find that wave goodbye – small, certain, always there when I turn around.

It’s been the shape of things for a long time.

When I go back home to visit my mother, I take a quick phone shot of her in the doorway as I leave. She’s already lifting her hand before I’ve properly gone, as if she’s always done it. Nothing posed, nothing marked – just that familiar lift of the hand, wishing me safe journey.

So many goodbyes just like this – at airports, train stations, bus stops, driveways, doorways. The same moment, again and again.

And still …

I can’t help but smile remembering my Sophie at three years old, fighting sleep while carefully studying Jane Dyer’s watercolor illustrations, searching for the tiny red heart cleverly hidden on each page.

Those drawings inspired a growing collection of hearts found in unexpected places over the years. Scattered around my home – and hers – are little reminders in stone and glass and fabric that the love actually is all around – something we have known long before Hugh Grant’s Prime Minister told us so.

Proof, perhaps, of something we already knew.

That love is usually less dramatic than people think.

It is not in grand declarations.

It is in showing up.

It is tumble dryers and lunchboxes and phone calls and maps and waiting for somebody to turn around and wave.

And I see it differently now, living where I live, where love has taken on a quieter, more physical shape.

In the Mexican village I call home, the weather is perfect for a clothes-line strung across the backyard -linen and cotton moving through the heat like they’ve finally been given permission to rest. My mother would love it here. It has something of rural County Derry in it, that steady rhythm, the kind you hear in a Seamus Heaney poem – men like my father, makers of things, building a life that looked simple only from a distance.

One day, a stonemason working on the wall around our house asked me about the corazón-shaped stone in the pile on the street. Would I like it set into the wall?

I would.

A small heart lifted from the road and placed where it could belong.

Home is where the heart is.