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airports, Antrim, baby, bookstores, Cancer, children's books, children's literature, Dolly Parton, heroic teachers, Ireland, ironing, Jane Dyer, laundry, life-work balance, Love Actually, Motherhood, Northern Ireland, parting, stay-at-home-mom, Sweet Sorrow in the Wind
I stayed at home with my daughter for a year after her birth. It was the best year of my life, with Sophie attached to me in one of those Baby Bjorn carriers without which I would have been unprepared for motherhood. That’s what the salesperson in Babies R Us said.
Some days I made it out of my pajamas, but only if I felt like walking out to the mailbox. I was usually bare-faced unlike Dolly Parton, who is always in full-make up, “ambulance, tornado, and earthquake ready” – and who is always – always – ready with the right words at the right time.
Some days, I showered. Most days, I resembled the child I once was, the one who had to be reminded to wash her hands or brush her teeth because she was so absorbed in play; the child who made wishes on dandelions and chains out of buttercups and daisies. I loved playing with my very own and very real baby girl, feeding her, dressing her in miniature clothes with impossibly tiny buttons, brushing what little hair she had with the softest toothbrush, and bathing her in the kitchen sink. For twelve idyllic months, with her father off at work, she was all mine. Drunk on new baby smell, I danced in the afternoons around a house filled with sunshine and Van Morrison’s “Bright Side of the Road.” Over 25 years later, I can still smell it.
In those first months of her life, I spent interminable hours looking at her. Just. Looking. At. Her. I examined every tiny feature and flicker across her face, searching for resemblances to me, her father, her grandparents. I often paused to ponder how it was that two imperfect people had made perfection. She stared back at me, cooing like a little bird, babbling and gurgling before discovering the beautiful hands that fly with expression today. We called it hand ballet.
Mostly, Sophie bounced with joy and curiosity. When she cried, it was for food or comfort or maybe just to let us know she was there. I couldn’t bear it. I hovered constantly – and still do, albeit virtually and to her chagrin. I was one of those mothers who picked her up the instant she began to cry at night. My mother encouraged me, reminding me there would be plenty of times as an adult when her granddaughter would have to cry herself to sleep without me there to make it all better. My mother was right.
If only we could deposit all those hours of holding and comforting in an emotional savings account, to be withdrawn years later in case of emergency – like the night I spent in the ICU following eight hours of surgery while my daughter wept in bed and rocked herself to sleep.
I hate cancer.
When it was time for me to return to work after that year at home with her, I was unprepared for the crying – hers and mine – that came immediately before and continuing some time after I placed Sophie 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 in the days before a Starbucks occupied every corner. While I was not dressed like Dolly Parton for a turn at the Ryman, I imagine I conveyed a vague impression of adulthood with Anne Klein suits bought on sale at Lohemanns and my hair on the verge of sensible. An assistant principal at the time, I was trying to impress on someone – most probably myself – that I was “A Professional Working Mother” who could do it all and have it all and lean in blah, blah, blah.
Sophie was unimpressed with this version of me and showed it by crying, daily, all over my dry-clean-only blouses. I made this a much bigger deal than it was, eventually discovering that if I didn’t put the blouses in the tumble dryer, they survived. Realizing there must be a lucrative pact between dry cleaners and the fashion industry, I took a lasting umbrage against the dryer, rarely feeding it anything other than towels and jeans.
For all the years I lived in sunny Arizona – where any Northern Ireland mother will tell you there’s “great drying” – I never understood why I owned a dryer. Where I grew up, everybody hung the washing out on the line and then ran like hell to rescue it when the rain invariably began. The first thing I bought for my mother with my first real pay check was a tumble dryer from the Northern Ireland Electricity Board.
I remember I once asked my late husband about the logic of owning a dryer in Phoenix. He looked at me like I had two heads. He loved that machine so much that he used it to dry all clothes – regardless of fabric. His favorite setting was Permanent Press, and he used it for all my favorite clothes too. I’m not sure I know today what this setting means. It doesn’t press anything permanently. It does, however, do a bang-up job of reducing some of my skirts and shirts to napkin-sized deformities. To be fair, when I was pretending to be a grown-up with a real job that required more than pajamas, he didn’t do my laundry. I did. All my clothes were safe. I was too.
My safe clothes and my sensible job held no clout with Bonnie. Mortified and avoiding eye-contact with her, I handed her my wailing, flailing girl, and Bonnie attempted to placate me with repeated reassurances that Sophie would be fine as soon as I was out of sight. If only I would just leave . . . Although she had to say it at least three times, Bonnie showed restraint and never once rolled her eyes as I stood there wild-eyed and fretting about the impending separation. I wrestled with the reality that Bonnie had other children to attend to. She would not be spending hours like Madonna – mother of Jesus, not Lourdes – at my perfect child or cheering with delight and recording on film and in writing when Sophie did something for the first time. Anything.
I would miss the first time Sophie watered a plant in the school garden or threw a rock or cracked a nut or blew bubbles. I would miss telling my husband, my parents, my friends – just falling short of alerting the media – that she had experienced another developmental milestone like that time she had spoken her first word – daddy – 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!”
If I’m honest – all these years later – I could have and maybe I should have stayed at home for another year. And another.
I was jealous that it would be the magnanimous Bonnie, with some magic trick up her sleeve, who would charm away my daughter’s tears. Every day, I walked away from the little girl writhing in the arms of “the other woman,” pretending to leave but I stayed in the car with the air-conditioning on and the window down, to prolong the agony, listening to Sophie cry. There I waited until the wails gave way to worn-out sobs and a final shuddering stop. Then, I reapplied the makeup until 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 a book by Kathi Appelt. She understood the rhythm of these daily separations – and reunions – and experienced it again when her son was 12 and going off to summer camp. Bracing herself for how she would feel as he prepared to go off to college and inspired by Emmylou Harris’s Sweet Sorrow in the Wind, she wrote “Oh My Baby Little One.”
I found it on the discard table in a Borders when central Phoenix still had a real bookstore where I could also get The Irish Sunday Times albeit on a Wednesday.
Every bedtime, I read to Sophie the story of lovely 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 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 our secret:
All around, mama. The love is all around.
It eased the morning goodbyes when I left her with Bonnie and all the other teachers throughout the years. There were lots of them. I was never satisfied with her teachers because they never seemed to understand that I was Sophie’s first teacher, that I knew her best. By the time she was in 2nd grade, Sophie had become a tourist in Arizona’s public education system, hopping from school to school, becoming ever more resilient, while I kept searching for that one teacher who would change her life as Mr. Jones had changed mine. We never stopped looking. I’m not sure the superhero teacher ever showed up, and Sophie’s formal education is now over with her post-graduate program completed.
One summer morning, I watched from my car as she strode onto a community college campus to study art with students who were ancient – at least in their twenties. Tall as me but braver, I knew she knew I was watching and waiting for her to turn around and wave. She did. She never lets me down.
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, in an unguarded moment – me in Mexico, she in Arizona – between emails and Zoom meetings, home improvement projects and grocery store runs, things that matter and things that don’t, we’ll each wonder what the other is doing and pick up the phone.
She’s only a phone call away, a couple of hours on a plane, and although I miss her terribly, I can’t help but smile as I recall her as a three-year-old, fighting sleep with all her might and poring over Jane Dyer’s watercolor illustrations, searching for the love – a tiny red heart – cleverly hidden on each page.
Those drawings inspired a growing collection of hearts found in unexpected places over the years. Scatted 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. You know too, that if you’re looking for love, you can always find evidence of it at the airport, where those who stay and those who go are often telling the only truths that matter:
Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often, it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there – fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge – they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you’ll find that love actually is all around.
In the Mexican village I call home, the weather is perfect for the clothesline strung across the backyard. Reminiscent of the rhythms of rural County Derry, it is a place peopled with the kind of characters that fill Seamus Heaney’s poems – men like my father, makers of things.
The other day, the stonemason working on the wall around our house – asked me about the corazón shaped stone in the pile of rocks on our street. Would I like to use it on the new wall? I would.
