walking away on the last first day of school

18 Friday Aug 2023

Posted by Editor in Aging, Art, Children's Books, Coming of age, Death of parent, Education, Fatherless daughters, learning to drive, Memoir, Milestones, Mother Daughter Relationship, Mr. Jones, Poetry, Rituals, The Gone of You

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Cecil Day Lewis, children's books, Going back to work, Irish DIASPORA, Memoir, mother daughter relationship, Separation, Themes of childhood, Walking Away

Her last first day at school – 2015

WALKING AWAY – Cecil Day Lewis

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 I spent at home after the birth of my baby girl. With her daddy off at work, our girl was all mine. Spectacularly high on new baby smell, I held her in my arms as I danced around a house filled with sunshine and Van Morrison. In the afternoons, 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, marveling that two imperfect people had created this perfection. Unbothered by my hovering, or maybe she was, these were the days before she had a cache of words or discovered the 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 us know she was right there in front of us. 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 let her ‘cry it out’ at night. When 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 an Irish mammy could, that there would be plenty of nights further on 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 right, and 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, a cheery classroom assistant at the Montessori school. Most of the other mothers didn’t appear to have jobs outside the home. In their comfortable cargo pants and Birkenstocks and – in the era pre-Starbucks – sipping coffee in mugs 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 a hairdo on the verge of sensible. A school principal at the time, I was hell-bent on impressing on someone – mostly me – 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 failed to impress Bonnie. Mortified and avoiding eye-contact with her, I would hand to her my wailing, flailing girl. Unflappable, Bonnie would placate me with reassurances that the writhing child in her arms would be absolutely fine as soon as I was out of sight. If only I would just leave . . . Although she had to tell me 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!”

I was madly jealous that it would be the magnanimous Bonnie – not me – with a magic trick up her sleeve to charm my inconsolable daughter and make the crying stop. Walking away from the child writhing in the arms of “the other woman,” cleaved me in two. I would pretend to leave, but I remained in the car with the air-conditioning on and the window down, torturing myself as I listened to children crying. How, out of that early morning cacophony, could we mothers pluck out the sound of even the tiniest whimper from our own children?

Daily, I waited until the wails gave way to worn-out sobs and the final shuddering stop. Then I would reapply the makeup I had wept off, 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. Appelt knew this anguish of leaving a child to go back to work and relived it when her 12 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 one Saturday afternoon on the discard table at 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.

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. Why didn’t they understand I was sending them the very best child I have? 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, while I kept searching for the one teacher who would change her life as Mr. Jones had changed mine. Regrets? Yes.

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 when she was in grade school. Watching her stride to the car her dad used to drive, my heart cracked open – another milestone without him.

But I pulled myself together the way we do and gave into the day, knowing as it released us to our respective distractions and mundanities, it would unfold with 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’s 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.

by the river on independence day

04 Tuesday Jul 2023

Posted by Editor in Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band, Cadillac Ranch, Coming of age, Drive All Night, The Price You Pay, The River, The River Tour 2016

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Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Coming of Age, Independence Day, love story, The River Tour 2016

I’m remembering the fireworks that exploded into the sky over Slane Castle on a summer evening in 1985 when Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band made their Irish debut. Close to 100,000 of us had made the pilgrimage through the sleepy and disapproving village of Slane to see The Boss. Between assurances of increased security and a promise–– that remains unfulfilled–– that this would be the last rock concert to disturb them, the residents had been placated. Even the weather cooperated. It was the kind of sun-drenched day the Irish pray for. Everybody was young that day, even the crotchety old farmers who let us park our cars on their fields. Everybody was Irish, even Bruce Springsteen. When the band burst on stage with Born in the USA, he turned his baseball cap backwards and bragged, “I had a grandmother from here.”

We basked in his pride, denying for a few hours the truth that our weather was rarely that sunny, and that many of us would be forced out of Ireland as economic immigrants, forever branded the “brain drain” of the 1980s. But on that glorious day, in spite of Ireland’s economic and political realities and the narrowing possibilities before us, a defiant Springsteen held us aloft, and we all believed in America.

I first heard Bruce Springsteen’s “The River” when I was 17 years old. I bought the record and played it until I had memorized every song. Mr. Jones, my English teacher, was responsible, sensing that Springsteen’s plainspoken poetry would appeal to my blue-collar sensibilities. He knew I had never seen a Cadillac or a State Trooper ––most likely he hadn’t either. I had never heard a screen door slam or the crack of a baseball bat. But Mr. Jones also knew I knew disappointment. I knew about the dole and diminished opportunities. I knew men who worked at the factory, and when the factory stopped working, they did too. I knew they would never be the same. I knew pregnant girls whose boyfriends married them. I knew Derry Girls and Jersey Girls stood on a different stretch of the same river. I knew the drizzle of rain and small-town life in a tiny troubled country on the other side of the Atlantic. I knew young people were leaving that life for an American dream, and that I would too. Springsteen was talking to us.

When he revisited “The River” one Thursday night in Phoenix, Arizona, over three decades later, flashes of my teenage self resurfaced, a little tougher, and wiser maybe, hardened by the beginnings and endings that make up a full life; the marriage, the mortgage, the raising of a good person, the career, the cancer, the death of the man who had for so many years quickened my heart, the worry about what might come next, and the waiting – always the waiting – for the other shoe to drop. In the middle of my life, it occurred to me that my parents–– the people I rebelled against at 17, determined to escape my circumstances–– were once in the middle of their lives with beautiful dreams that were dashed, just like some of mine. I know now the darkness that sometimes got the best of us . . .

Papa now I know the things you wanted that you could not say . . . I swear I never meant to take those things away

From the cheap seats, I listened to Springsteen tell the stories of an American life, stories that could have been plucked from my dead husband’s life. The one about not being drafted to Vietnam because he was the only surviving son of a man who died in military service; the one about how he cut his hippie hair when his buddies didn’t come back; and, the one about trading in his beloved motorcycle and the muscle car to settle down when he and his girl were just too young. He had settled. She had too. They continued to settle for too long, each of them making compromises and taking care of what became obligations until they didn’t even care much for each other.

With a shot of courage one hot Saturday afternoon in a Phoenix parking lot outside a place that could have been Frankie’s Joint – he showed his cards. All of them. And, in the space of a heartbeat, he turned from that life, to follow instead a heart beating wildly, to follow me. The alternative he later told me felt like “dying by inches.”

Cause point blank, bang bang baby you’re dead.

He brought with him the shirt on his back and a shiny Ford Thunderbird. He had the heart – and he had the stomach – for all of it. All of it. He was all in. He would drive all night just to buy me some shoes.

For as long as we could be young, we had a great run. Born to run, we raised the kind of hell that belongs in a rollicking Springsteen song. It had lost much of its luster before he died because the “in sickness” part of the deal was tougher than either of us could have imagined. Through it all, he was in my corner – always – and any regrets are so small now, they don’t matter. We were married for one day shy of 22 years, and together we had done something good – really good. The lesson? It’s about time. It is always about time. We have only so much and not enough to waste to learn how to live and to live well with another person, a partner.

Over 40 years since I first listened to it, “The River” reminds me to take stock. Just like the America we’re celebrating today, something good is just up the road. It always is.

The River is how you learn the adult life and you choose your partner and you choose your work and that clock starts ticking and you walk alongside not only the people you’ve chosen to live your life with but you walk alongside of your own mortality and you realize you have a limited amount of time to raise your family, to do your job, to try and do something good. That’s ‘The River.’

That’s Independence Day.

How to ride a bike . . .

18 Sunday Jun 2023

Posted by Editor in Being young, Coming of age, Death and dying, John Lennon, learning to drive, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, riding a bicycle, saying goodbye, Starting over, Time, widowed

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developmental milestones, father's day, identity, Learning to drive, learning to ride a bike, Memoir, mother daughter relationship

“The first grip I ever got on things
Was when I learnt the art of pedaling
(By hand) a bike turned upside down, and drove
its back wheel preternaturally fast.”

~ from Wheels within Wheels by SEAMUS HEANEY

It’s Father’s Day—it’s a big deal. In a recent survey, the National Retail Foundation found that 76 percent of Americans plan to celebrate it. That celebration will look different for all of us. Scrolling through social media, my feed is already lit up with photos of fathers – including my own – all poignant reminders that my daughter has been without her dad for some of the biggest moments of her life, the moments that don’t happen on Father’s Day. It feels unfair. We can’t dodge it of course. On the one hand, we celebrate my dad, her grandfather—grateful for the fatherly people in our lives. On the other, the day is a keen reminder that my daughter’s father is physically not here.

The list of milestones continues to grow, the stuff of Hallmark greeting cards and scrapbooks and Facebook memories. He has missed so much—her graduations and her first real job and the first time she pored over a ballot and voted in a Presidential election for the candidate that might deliver the kind of America he had dreamed would be hers. He missed meeting her boyfriend, a gentle soul with hair as long as his used to be and a vinyl record collection and who studies archeology—the subject he once told me he would study in his next life. He missed hearing all about her Senior trip to the Galapagos Islands—the only destination on a bucket-list of places he would have loved to see before he died. He also missed the first time she got behind the wheel of a car, his car. And, she missed him.

It was on our first Christmas Day without him, that my daughter took me for a drive. My father, far from rural Derry, had been teaching her to drive on what he considered the wrong side of the road. Watching from the passenger seat as his only granddaughter drove around the quiet streets of our Phoenix neighborhood, her elegant hands at ten-to-two on the steering wheel, he encouraged her to “go easy,” to just believe in herself in a way I don’t recall from my driving lessons with him on the Dublin Road in the late 1970s.

Watching from our door as she proceeded west on Montebello Avenue, maintaining a slow and steady 25 mph, I was transported from adolescence remembered into motherhood and widowhood. Unaware and seemingly unafraid behind the wheel, my girl was stoic, reminding me then and today of Seamus Heaney’s symbolic passing of a kite from father to sons in “A Poem for Michael and Christopher”

Before the kite plunges down into the wood
and this line goes useless
take in your two hands, boys, and feel
the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.
You were born fit for it.
Stand in here in front of me
and take the strain

~ Take the strain. You are fit for it.

We are fit for it.

When I’m in Phoenix these days, she drives me to places I miss—Target, the bookstore, and her favorite antique store. One morning, as she signaled and turned right onto the highway, I was reminded of a milestone morning in our favorite park—the one where she and her dad regularly fed two bad-tempered geese they had christened “Fight and Bite,” the one where he removed the training wheels from the pink bicycle she got for Christmas that year, and let her go for the first time. It was one of the many lessons in love that have stayed with her.

Life is about trust and balance. Riding a bike requires both, without either you can’t ride.

~ Nikki Giovanni

sophbike

Cute and cozy in her new aran sweater, she opts for a grin for the camera, having lost both front teeth just in time for Christmas. Santa did well, having delivered a pink bicycle exactly as described in her note to him. For good measure, he even added sparkling streamers. Before I’m taken to task about reinforcing gender stereotypes, pink was her favorite color that year. She had whispered to the mall Santa that if it wasn’t too much trouble he could maybe bring “rosy pink wind chimes to make me feel happy like the sunset’s glow.” By the following Christmas, she had moved on. She wanted only a new bike to ride with daddy, and the color was irrelevant.

The pink bike had training wheels—”stabilizers” as we called them when I was a child. Stabilizers. It was my first big word. Even now, I like saying it and conjuring all it connotes—stability, steadfastness, balance, a firm hold.

Had I read MIT engineering professor David Gordon Wilson’s Bicycling Science, I may not have been so adamant about getting a bike with stabilizers for my daughter. Professor Wilson handily dismisses them, pointing out what is now obvious – that they do not teach you how to balance; they teach you how to pedal.

Bicycling is the quintessential balancing act and it makes more sense to follow Wilson’s advice to “adjust the bicycle’s seat low enough for children to plant their feet on the ground and practice by coasting down the grassy slopes.” No wonder we are so afraid when we push off that first time without training wheels – immediately, we have to learn how to balance, just as we are expected to swim if we are thrown in the deep end.

But if we get rid of the training wheels, we also say goodbye to a rite of passage, a milestone. In our family’s story, it was A Big Moment. The morning began with an Irish breakfast—sausages, butter, and bacon purchased from Pat McCrossan at an Irish gift shop in Phoenix. A Derry native, he winked at Sophie and made a joke about how he had given her ma the Protestant discount.

Next on our agenda was the removal of the training wheels. Waiting as her dad fumbled with the wrench that would remove forever the useless stabilizers, our girl was confident that those training wheels had prepared her to ride a bike. Unconvinced, we had brought band-aids along with a video camera to record the moment. You know the one. Her father would run alongside the bike, holding onto the seat, and then let go as she rode into the afternoon sunshine . . .

Naturally, she lost her balance, and she fell. But only once and with only a few tears, and our darling girl kept both nerve and balance when she climbed on again. And then she was doing it—riding a bike. Round and round the park, sunbeams dancing on silver spokes, blue and white streamers flashing from the handlebars, ducks and geese scrambling to get out of her path, and our girl, buoyant in what Heaney calls the “new momentum,” equipped for bicycle riding, for inevitable tumbles and the promise of a blue skies ahead. Just like her mother.

And what is a bicycle? It is trust and balance, and that’s what love is. Love is trust and balance.

memorial day reminder: maya angelou

29 Monday May 2023

Posted by Editor in Awesome Women, Being young, Coming of age, Death and dying, Great Advice, Great teachers, Loss, Maya Angelou, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, saying goodbye

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Great souls, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou, mother daughter relationship, the human condition, wisdom

“We live in direct relation to the heroes and sheroes we have. The men and women who without knowing our names or recognizing our faces, risked and sometimes gave their lives to support our country and our way of living. We must say thank you.”

… a reminder this Memorial Day to say thank you to the strangers who made so much possible for so many of us.

I first encountered Maya Angelou’s writing as a young teacher in America. In the English textbook provided to me by the school district was an excerpt from “I know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” and even though it was the story of a Black woman’s childhood in the South during the 1930s and 1940s, it resonated with me, then a young woman from another generation and from a tiny country on the other side of the world. The humanity in Angelou’s story reaches out into the universe where it will take up permanent residence in millions of hearts.

I remember reading aloud to teenagers from affluent white families, Angelou’s lyrical and clear-eyed account of a harrowing world in which she had been abused, raped as a child by her mother’s boyfriend, abandoned by her parents, left homeless, poor, and, for almost five years, unable to speak. But in this tumultuous life, she also fell in love with William Shakespeare and Dickens, with the written and spoken word. We are all the better for that, and I suppose the lesson for my students and for me was, as Anne Frank wrote in her diary,

I don’t think of all the misery, but of the beauty that still remains.

Such beauty. At 86, the indomitable Maya Angelou was active on Twitter, sending out to almost half a million followers, soul-stirring messages in 140 characters or less. Miniature poems. The day before she died, she took to social media again:

Over the years, I have collected bits and pieces of wisdom and encouragement that I turn to when the going gets tough, as it invariably does. Growing up, I was often told, “show me who your friends are, and I’ll show you who you are.” I was unconvinced of that, but with age comes experience and discernment and a willingness to listen again to advice I may not always have heeded:

people know themselves much better than you do. That’s why it’s important to stop expecting them to be something other than who they are.

As my daughter made her way into to adulthood, I hoped she would learn that the very first time a person lies to her or about her would be the first of all the other times; that the very first time someone wounds her with indifference or arrogance, manipulation or meanness, acts merely as precedent. The same might be said for integrity and loyalty which I suppose is why betrayal hurts so much, or as Arthur Miller once put it, why it is “the only truth that sticks.”

When people show you who they are, believe them.

Believe them – the first time, not the millionth time, so you know sooner rather than later, whether to walk this road with them or without them, dignity intact either way.

And for that perspective, Maya Angelou, I am forever in your debt.