Tags
children's books, Going back to work, High School Graduation, Irish DIASPORA, Memoir, mother daughter relationship, Separation, Talking Heads, Themes of childhood
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
At my daughter’s high school graduation, the Senior class filed into the auditorium to the sound of the Talking Heads – “This Must be the Place (Naive Melody). A perfectly hip processional, it was one of her father’s favorite songs, five minutes of toe-tapping polyphony. I had never been so happy, or so lost. Somehow, by the time she reached her seat on the stage, I had brushed away thoughts of David Byrne in his big suit, and I was back where she started.
“Home is where I want to be, but I guess I’m already there.”
The best year of my life was the one I spent at home after she was born. For twelve idyllic months, with her daddy off at work, our girl was all mine, and I inhaled. Spectacularly high on new baby smell, there were mornings when I danced like the sign says – like nobody’s watching – around a house filled with sunshine and Van Morrison or Aretha Franklin or The Talking Heads. I spent interminable hours just looking at her. Just. Looking. At. Her. Examining every tiny feature, every furrow, every flicker across her face, I searched for resemblances to me, her father, her grandparents, all the while marveling that two imperfect people had made this perfection. She didn’t mind my hovering, or maybe she did, but this was before she had found words or discovered those beautiful hands that fly with expression today. We called it hand ballet.
Mostly, our girl bounced with curiosity and glee. When she cried, it was for food or comfort or just to let me know she was there. 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 would not let her baby “cry it out.” I picked her up the instant she began to cry at night. From far away, 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 been in such desperate times, I have found myself wishing that we mothers could somehow bank all those hours spent holding and comforting our infant children and build 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 comfortable cargo pants and Birkenstocks and (this was pre-Starbucks) with mugs of coffee brought from home, they were still chatting in the parking lot as I left for work. I like to think I left them with a vague impression of adulthood, with my Anne Klein suits and my hair on the verge of sensible. I pretended (mostly to myself) that I was now “A Professional Working Mother,” that I could do it all or have it all, but not really at the same time.
In spite of my grown-up job and my business suit, I did not impress Bonnie. Mortified and avoiding eye-contact with her, I’d hand over my wailing, flailing girl. Cool and calm, she would placate me with reassurances that Sophie would be just fine as soon as I was out of sight. If only I would just leave . . .
Although she had to say it 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 know, but the truth was that I wanted my child to have Bonnie’s undivided attention, to be her favorite. I wanted the unflappable 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 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 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 that would charm my inconsolable daughter and make the crying stop. My daily choice to walk away from the little girl writhing in the arms of “the other woman,” was one that 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 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?
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 cried away, and when my face matched the boring business suit and no glimmer of guilt-stricken working mother remained, 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 to Sophie 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 Sophie, “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. And, there were too many of them. Never quite satisfied with her teachers because they never seemed to understand that I was her first teacher and that I knew best what was best for her, we kept switching schools. I was sending them the very best child I have. So by the time she finished high school, 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 day of school, I packed a lunch for my girl – the graduate, a young woman – and slipped a note inside the brown paper sack the way I used to do when she was so little. Watching as she strode to the car her father used to drive, my heart cracked – another milestone without him.
But I pulled myself together and she did too and we both gave into the day – the way we always 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.
Sometimes, in an unguarded moment at work, between emails and meetings, in the middle of things that matter and things that don’t, I wonder what she is doing, and I find myself smiling as I recall my three-year-old darling, fighting sleep with all her might and poring over Jane Dyer’s watercolor illustrations, searching for the love so cleverly hidden on each page.
And I will remind myself, today and every day, that the love is all around.
Home, is where I want to be
But I guess I’m already there
