Hope Matters
I know, I know: The last thing the world needs right now is yet another blog. The Digital Age has created a never ending mistral of information that can make people irritable and disoriented if not just plain crazy.
Yet here I am, writer/mother/grandmother, starting a blog!! I’m not crazy though many who know me consider me at least slightly eccentric. I am calling my blog Hope Matters because hope (Emily Dickinson’s “thing with feathers”) is what I started out with when I was born – an actual ‘held back’ birth – in northern Maine in the middle of the 20th Century. It’s what I’ve kept with me in abundance ever since - no matter what hardships and disappointments have come my way.
The last thing I want to do, by throwing more words into the mistral, is make people crazy. I hope only to provoke thought. In my blog, I’ll talk about my own creative life and some of the hardships and disappointments I’ve experienced. How I kept going in their aftermath. I want to figure out, and share with readers, where hope resides for an agnostic septuagenarian whose passions have always been the search for social justice and a love of all forms of creative expression. Which happen to also be the themes of my fiction and essays.
I will ponder the impact of my long marriage to a solitary immigrant from the Fiji Islands, and how his family’s history of loss and migration impacted our own; how our interracial marriage and raising three mixed-race children edged us toward the margins of the middle class; and why, after decades of living apart, we have yet to divorce.
I also plan to pay homage to the fabulous forty-something and fifty-something women who have made the second half of my life so much better. These women, who are also mothers, (breast surgeon, dentist, therapist, pharmacist, web designer, storytelling coach, yoga guru) would not in times past have had the opportunity to develop themselves into the accomplished people they are now, at least not in my generation.
Does anyone dispute that 2021 was an annus horribilus? I think everyone, unless they’ve gone mad from the mistral, could pick events from the past 12 months that shoved them toward despair. But a few things have nourished my hope. Here’s one.
At the end of November, the Irish government pledged $900 million to compensate thousands of unmarried mothers for the abuse they’d suffered in decades past in the country’s ‘mother and baby’ homes!! What a moment!! The jubilation of these women, and an international cohort of adoption reform activists, is still rippling around the globe.
But this unprecedented pledge of financial compensation to birth mothers who lost their babies to adoption or death came only after a years-long investigation by an Irish church/government commission into practices at the so-called ‘homes’ – 18 of them - where tens of thousands of unmarried women were sequestered (imprisoned?) during their pregnancies. The last one didn’t close until the 1990s!
The misogynistic treatment of unmarried mothers by the Irish church/state isn’t news to anyone. It had gone on since the late 18th century. Some of its cruelties had already been shown in popular media – notably, Martin Sixsmith’s excellent 2009 book The Lost Child of Philomena Lee, and the outstanding 2013 film Philomena, based on it.
But the nitty-gritty of those cruelties remained hidden until the 2017 discovery of mass graves on the grounds of a church-run home for unmarried mothers in Tuam (pronounced tomb) County Galway. That home, demolished decades ago and replaced by a housing development, was run by an order of nuns called Bon Secours, French for ‘good help’ - though I and others have called them as the Sisters of No Mercy.
Catherine Corless, a local historian who grew up near the home, examined the death certificates of children who’d died there. Of the many hundreds she looked at, only one had a burial certificate! Where were all those babies buried? A subsequent dig, spearheaded by Corless and using cutting edge technology, revealed scores of little skeletons in an underground tank on the property.
This discovery opened the floodgates to more buried bodies, not a few of them mothers who’d died in childbirth. The resulting government investigation and its 3,000 page report called Ireland’s traditional treatment of these women and their offspring one of ‘harrowing abuse, neglect and callousness in institutions that served as dumping grounds for unmarried mothers and their children.’
The first pay-outs aren’t expected for at least another year and the application process has already been described as flawed and humiliating despite the government’s promise that it wouldn’t traumatize the victims all over again.
Emily Dickinson’s poem:
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.