All It Takes Is A Little Love

Abby was a tiny little girl when she was born prematurely along with a twin brother. She was so small that I was afraid to hold her but she demonstrated her mettle from the beginning of her life. When it came time for her to crawl she was unable to do so. A physical therapist worked with her and commented that she had never before seen a baby work so hard to gain her ability to move around. Soon Abby was crawling away just like her brother but then her doctor determined that she also needed glasses. There she was only a few month old wearing spectacles and looking rather adorable in them. Once again she was willing to do exercises to help improve her vision and by the time she was in school she no longer needed them. 

Abby was an outstanding student who took her lessons quite seriously. At the same time she tackled water to swim like a fish and joined a swim team. She was still so small for her age that her coach often paired her with younger children but even that did not set her back. Eventually she decided to try other things, like acting at which she was a natural. She got work on two television programs and even served as a voice for the San Antonio Spurs in an ad. She was busy finding her way in the world and soon turned to raising animals and riding horses. Through the FFA program at her high school she won trophies in public speaking and raised three goats. She worked for veterinarians in the summer and became certified to be an assistant, finally realizing that her future lay in becoming a lawyer. 

She ended up being fifth in her high school class and applied to Cornell University and Bowdoin College. She was accepted by both but felt that Bowdoin College was the place she needed to be. With multiple scholarships and grants the price of her education fell below the cost of a state school and so she spent four years charming the professors at Bowdoin the way she had impressed adults for her entire life. 

Abby graduated from Bowdoin College this month with many honors. She was among a select group of students inducted into the coveted Phi Beta Kappa honors society. She graduated with A’s in every course and the designation of Magna Cum Laude. She was one of a handful of Government and Legal Studies students who completed an Honors project that required her to research a certain area and present her findings in a one hundred page document. Finally she was acknowledged as the top student in the Government and Legal studies program for her work in American politics. Her professors raved about her intellect and dedication to her studies. All of them saw her as one of the most outstanding students that they have ever taught. 

Each summer Abby also worked at internships with a defense lawyer, the District Attorney’s office in Seattle and at the Brennan Center for Justice where she wrote a paper on voter repression that was published in their newsletter. Now she has begun a job in New York City with a law firm where she will work for the next two years before applying to law school.  

I am not at all surprised that my granddaughter Abigail Martin has done so well. I have watched her overcome one challenge after another with dogged determination. I have witnessed her putting in the hard work of being the best version of herself. She is a mighty woman with the kindest heart I have ever witnessed. Her real goal is to help those who find injustice rather than the encouragement that she has always had. She will be an advocate for the underserved.

As a grandmother I cannot praise her enough. She carries the determination of her great grandmothers who were not taken as seriously as they should have been in another era when women were mostly valued for their mothering and housekeeping. She will fulfill the dreams of her grandmother whose own life was sidelined by a life filled with tragedies that set her on a different pathway. She is the pride of her mother and father who gave her the freedom and opportunities to be herself. We all know that she has only just begun and that the best is still to come. 

Abby is my hero. She is a brave wonder woman who on her own found a job in NYC and then locked in an apartment with two others. She drove from her graduation to her new home with a car loaded with her belongings and didn’t bat an eye at the prospect of navigating the traffic in the big city. Her courage is inspiring and her unwillingness to be held back is wonderful to see. I wish her well in the journey that lies ahead and have confidence that the little baby who refused to be immobile will conquer whatever comes her way. 

When my grandson Ian was a toddler he became enchanted with the world around him. He liked to run his hand across the soft grass and study the way water reacted to the flick of his hand. Most of all he enjoyed hearing his mother read to him and his vocabulary grew as he learned new words about the earth and the planets in our universe. While still sitting in a highchair he was able to name all of the planets and even talk about their moons. He was a curious little boy who thought of his Uncle Mike, an engineer who worked at a NASA contractor, as his hero. 

As Ian became older his fascination with mathematics and science only grew. He accompanied his Uncle Mike on a trip to the Texas Star party where he viewed the nighttime sky from powerful telescopes and learned how to track stars and planets from experts who had come from across the globe. He was the youngest person at the event and the adults who shared his interest in viewing the heavens encouraged him to keep gazing at the stars and learning more and more about them. 

Ian worked hard in high school hoping to qualify for a spot at a good college where he might major in aerospace engineering. Placing third in a class of many hundreds of students brought him offers from Rice University, Georgia Tech, University of Notre Dame and other outstanding cradles of learning. Ultimately he chose Notre Dame for its best overall program in aerospace engineering and its generous scholarships. He had chosen well because Notre Dame nurtured his interests just as his parents and his uncle had once done. 

Ian thrived at Notre Dame both academically and socially. He met many people whose interests coincided with his own. Best of all his professors realized his potential in the world of aerospace. For two summers he had internships with the Notre Dame Jet Propulsion lab and caught the eyes of mentors from NASA who help guide him into the future. One of them used his connections with multiple universities to help Ian find a PhD program that would sponsor his further education. 

Ian graduated from Notre Dame with a new confidence in himself that was very much encouraged by the professors and students that he met along the way. Ultimately Ohio State University recruited him for a five year program that will ultimately result in a PhD. There he will continue to grow and to learn with a fellowship that provides him with tuition and a salary. 

Ian chose well when he decided to attend Notre Dame. They helped him to grow in wisdom and age and grace. They nurtured his best qualities and helped him to realize that he was never alone. He formed friendships with students and professors that will no doubt last a lifetime. The school took in a boy and formed him into a mature young man who has clearly charted the life ahead of him. 

I always knew that the little boy who sat in his highchair talking about space and the planets and stars that make up the heavens was quite special and he has proven himself to be more than worthy of my estimations of him. Even better is the fact that Ian is a truly good person who loves the people around him deeply. He once rescued one of his roommates who was struggling with a sense of hopelessness. He tutored members of the Notre Dame football team when they encountered difficulties with math. He was the glue among the many personalities in his group of friends. He helped his younger brother adjust to college life when he later joined Ian at Notre Dame. Ian’s calmness and genuine love for the people around him never went unnoticed. Even the parents of his friends shared stories of the times that he kept their children from falling apart. 

Ian Martin will begin the next phase of his journey in Columbus Ohio this summer. He is looking forward to the future which will no doubt lead him back to the stars. His intellect, confidence and loving nature will most certainly take him wherever he ultimately chooses to be. As a grandmother I am so proud of all of the hard work that Ian has done but even more joyful that he is a truly loving and thoughtful person. I wish him the best and look forward to following his journey. The little boy who dreamed big dreams is on his way to making an impact on the world. 

Of late I have been binge watching programing that focuses on the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. This was an era of “barons” of industry and women used as cheap labor with few rights. In those times a female teacher had to be single and willing to live near the school where she taught in a dormitory where her behavior was carefully watched. Shop girls, seamstresses and those who worked in factories more often than not endured the same kinds of demands and restrictions on their lives. All women, including those who were aristocratic and wealthy, were thought to be the property of their husbands. Only the most defiant women were able to break the chains of their heavily dominated lives.

The truth is that women have always been equal to men but only rarely did they enjoy the same level kind of freedom. Society taught them to be subservient and to accept their roles as wives and mothers. Their place was in the home and without reliable birth control methods they often endured unbelievable numbers of pregnancies. My own maternal grandmother had ten children, one after another, sometimes only nine or ten months after a previous pregnancy. Her body was subjected to a hormonal storm that ultimately lead to a breakdown after her youngest child, my mother, was born. After that her children noted that their mother and father no longer slept in the same room. Such was a common situation for women of the time. 

Throughout history women were taught that childbearing was their duty whether they wanted children or not. We tend to think that they mostly agreed with this idea but surely there have always been women who balked at the idea that they were little more than breeders of the human race. Books written in the Victorian era over and over again focus on the tragedies forced on women by domineering men who lacked understanding of their feelings. 

When I was a child in the nineteen fifties and sixties women used many methods for curtailing pregnancies which were often unreliable. By the age of thirty my mother had already had three children. I have often wondered how many more siblings I would have had if my father had not died and she had not remained single. So many of my friends were from large families of six or more children. I remember the whispers of women who came to my mother in tears because they went from one pregnancy to another just as my grandmother had done. 

Then came the miracle of the birth control pill. It literally created a revolution in which women were able to decide when and if they were going to have children. Suddenly women were enrolling in college in vast numbers and vying for managerial positions at work. Families generally became smaller and more manageable and somehow these changes were more positive than naysayers had predicted. Allowing families to have more say in how large they would become brought higher standards of living for virtually everyone. 

The beauty of what happened is that each woman gets a say in how often or whether she will bear children. Some still choose life as a wife and mother as their vocation and nothing is wrong with that. Some focus on careers that take them to the top levels of businesses and schools. Women have demonstrated their mettle over and over again in places that were once denied to them. We have only recently watched a woman astronaut flying to the moon and women hold important positions in government and boardrooms. 

My choice was to have a family of two. I stayed home with my girls until the youngest was in the fourth grade. It was then that I launched my own career in earnest. Each of my daughters have been free to make their own choices. One followed my lead by working for a time, then staying home with her four children until they were older. After that she resumed her career as an accountant. My youngest worked for a time as a nurse but her children had health issues that demanded that she be at home with them. She gave them the care that they needed and never returned to work. Now my granddaughter is determined to shoot for the moon. Her goals are high and we will not discourage her. Whether or not she decides to have a family along with her career is up to her. I can’t think of anything better that providing women with the kind of equality they men have always enjoyed. 

We live in a time when some are trying to force our society to move backwards. They preach a gospel of women as wives and mothers who stay at home with however many children may come. That is fine for those who want such things but it should never again be forced on any woman. We have moved past such ignorance and it would be shameful to go back to a time when women had no control over the direction of their lives. Our progress is far too wonderful to throw to the winds. Women have arrived and must be allowed to stay wherever they want to be. 

I often look back on my life and realize that I missed so many cues that would have alerted me to my mother’s mental illness before it became so extreme. Sadly I was still quite childlike when she experienced her first breakdown. I had no experience or knowledge about symptoms of a troubled mind. I was a twenty year old living in a safe bubble of joy that my mother had created for me and my brothers. It is only now that I am able to look back and see the signs that all was not well with my mom. 

When my father died I mostly felt sorrow for myself and my brothers. I was eight years old and hardly experienced with trauma. My parents had created an idyllic life for me and my siblings. I was too focused on myself to even notice that there was an air of tension in our family. All I knew is that after a gypsy-like journey to California and back again we seemed to finally have a plan for the future. My father had a job that he liked and we were on the verge of settling down in a new home. It never occurred to me that my parents were still incredibly young at the ages of thirty and thirty-three. These many years later I can recall how my own life was still unveiling when I entered my thirties. 

There were many hints that my father’s death occurred when my mother had meager funds to carry on with her life. My parents had believed that they had many years to build up their savings and with my father’s job it would have been a rather easy task to complete. The timing of his death was unfortunate on many levels given that he had not been with his company long enough to even qualify for life insurance. So here was my incredibly young mother facing life without him at the age of thirty, a horror that had never crossed her mind. With three young children and no permanent home or job for herself she must have been filled with anxiety which she hid from me and my brothers so that we would not worry. 

Things seemed to work out thanks to the efforts of my Uncle Jack, a wheeler dealer who found her a car for the price that the insurance company had paid out for the wrecked one. Then he discovered an affordable house in a neighborhood that would prove to be idyllic for all of us. When the seller of the home learned of my mother’s situation he even lowered the price. With the help of family members and additional income from Social Security Insurance we seemed to sail through the tragedy mostly unscathed. It was not until later that I began to understand how frightened my mother must still have been. There was so much day to day uncertainty that she endured in a time when women were not particularly treated fairly in the economic market. 

Things rolled along after a time. Our home was perfect for us because it was within walking distance of our school and our church where all of us found comfort and happiness. Soon my mother was tagged to be a teacher at the school and she was also a regular attendee at church events, even holding office in the Women’s Club. The ugly car that replaced the fancy one that my father drove lasted until I was in college. With my mother’s talents for stretching a budget me and my brothers were fooled into believing that life was a lark. We hardly noticed how pressures began to pile up on our mother. 

She decided to earn a college degree by attending classes after work and in the summers. She would study deep into the early hours of the morning, existing on very few hours of sleep. She began going out with friends and even dating men. In the meantime I was moving forward with my own life, going to college and falling in love with the man who would become my husband. I hardly gave much thought to my mother even when she began to ply me with conversations that seemed uncharacteristic of her. She sounded afraid much of the time and often came to what seemed to me to be silly conclusions about her relationships with others. Her fastidious care for our home became lackluster and sometimes when she spoke her eyes would be darting as though she was unable to keep up with a normal conversation. She began to sleep most of the day and her appearance was unkempt. She lived in darkened rooms and showed little interest in the world around her. 

I was a newly wed focused on my little world. I brushed off any concerns that I had about my mother until the evidence piled so high that I was no longer able to find logical excuses for the dramatic changes in her behavior. I had to take a crash course in how to help an individual experiencing a mental crisis. I learned on the fly and thankfully I was able to get my mother the help that she needed before too much damage was done to her brain. 

I write about these things because over and over again I learn about families who are faced with a beloved member who becomes so mentally ill that they embark on dangerous activities that sometimes lead to desperate and horrific consequences. I fully understand how easy is to be oblivious to the signs that someone is suffering and crying for help. It is especially difficult to accept such signs when the person has led an amazing life as my mother did before she became ill. Denial leaves families wondering how things became so wrong. 

Each time I hear of a young person striking out in violence I find myself wondering if members of the family missed all of the cues that much was amiss. As a teacher I often encountered students on the verge of ruining their lives because of mental problems that had never been addressed. I know all too well that even when we get our loved ones the help that they need there will be relapses and maybe even a lifetime of struggle. Mental illness is not something that can be avoided by a vaccine or cured by a single treatment. It requires vigilance on the part of every person who loves those who are afflicted. 

Mental illness can be controlled but it more often than not becomes a lifetime challenge for the afflicted and those around him/her. Just as a diabetic cannot pretend that it is okay to stop the medications or rules of diet, so does mental illness require a long term commitment  for everyone involved. We can’t just leave it to the persons who are ill to do take care of themselves. 

My mother lived on to enjoy a mostly normal life. Her sweetness and optimism were signs of good health. When those things were not present we always knew that it was time to intercede. Our efforts were always rewarded. The fight for her sanity that we forged year after year was worth all of our efforts. Most of our memories are now of a loving and courageous woman. 

I taught fourth grade students for a brief moment in time. I loved the principal of the school and she did many things to help me grow as an educator. I had friends at the school and I was lauded for doing a good job with the children but it was not a good fit for me in spite of all of the positives. The basic problems was that nine and ten year children tend to tattle and bicker with one another. Most of such behavior was benign and I was even quite good at tamping such situations down, but after a few years I grew weary of having to constantly put out petty fires. At one point I mentally considered making it a punishable offense to tattle which of course was only a pipe dream rather than a real possibility. Instead I moved on to work with older students who not only did not tend to tattle but worked actively not to let me or any other adults know about their private spats. 

It is a childish and immature behavior to constantly accuse others for our shortcomings or to bully other people into bowing to our needs. Sadly there are adults who never seem to outgrow the immature need to portray themselves as martyrs who are constantly harassed by terrible people rather than owning up to their own failures. The blame game in adults too often begets violent abuse that is both psychological and physical. Such people can attempt to lay so much guilt on someone that the accused actually begin to believe that they are the tormentors rather than innocents locked in a toxic relationship. 

I still saw a few instances of teenagers who had never matured enough to outgrow their childhood tendencies to blame everyone but themselves for their mistakes. All too often such individuals were violent with their words and ways that they treated the people around them. Sometimes they frightened their own parents or abused their fellow students. They were difficult, often arrogant and difficult to control. As a teacher I would hear about such bullies from frightened students or parents who outlined stories of the cruelty that they imposed on souls that they believed were weak. Most of the time it became obvious that their bravado was actually hiding their own low self esteem by masquerading as being strong and confident . Sadly their horrid behaviors did grave damage to their targets. 

Of course I mostly wanted to protect the innocents who were being frightened by a protagonist, but at the same time I understood that the seemingly evil students needed help as well. All too often their behavior was briefly punished and then mostly ignored when they obviously needed deep counseling. Without an intervention I knew that they would simply continue to wreak havoc on others and ultimately on themselves. 

I can’t say that I ever discovered how to successfully change a person who was so broken. Perhaps there is some truth to the idea of a bad seed, someone born so psychologically damaged that nothing will help them. Instead I think to this day that there has to be a way to positively change even the most egregious behavior if it is caught early enough to keep it from becoming a lifetime habit. 

When I was teaching in that fourth grade setting I had a set of identical twins in my classroom but they were anything but the same. They came the closest to being a real life Cain and Abel that I have ever witnessed. One was shy, hard working, polite and genuinely kind. The other seemed like a young sociopath. He beat up not just other students but his own brother. He stole, lied and was easily angered. His own mother was so afraid of him that she left home one night and never returned. She left a note begging her family not to try to find her because she could no longer take the pressure of dealing with her frightening son. 

I suppose that with such situations there has to be a dire collision of nature and nurture creating an individual whose behavior is vile. I don’t know what the father was like but the mother was frightened and weak. I have no idea about all that was actually happening in that family but I learned years later that the violent son eventually crossed a line with the law was doing time in prison. I was not surprised but it still bothered me that he was not given therapy while he was still young in an effort to change the trajectory of his life. 

We have so much to do when it comes to discovering how to fix a broken soul. If we never make an effort to help such souls to be better we will have to deal with the kind of bullies who grow up to be criminals or maybe even tyrants who manage to take control of nations. We see these difficult individuals when they are young and all too often look the other way or wash our hands in frustration allowing them to just move them along. Somehow I believe was can do better.