A very good friend of mine is a successful, smart, somewhat scary academic. She has a dream job now, one which she richly deserves, but before getting there she kissed a lot of employment frogs, so to speak. She did this from the vantage of someone who had a perfectly good post in a well-respected university. I used to wonder why she bothered accepting requests to apply for and then turn up at interviews for positions she had little intention of filling, sometimes traversing vast distances at inconvenient times to do so. 'Because,' she told me once, 'a lot can happen when you agree to an interview. I've met people and collaborated with them on some of my most rewarding projects. I've found opportunities for my students. It's like dropping a pebble into a pond; you don't know where the ripples will go.' (Probably physicists will tell me that they can in fact tell where the ripples will go but that would be missing the point.)
A few nights ago another friend, visiting from Durham, where we lived when my children were born (gee, I love writing that: 'where my children were born'. I have children! I bore them! It still amazes me) brought two of her own children to stay with us. When I met these little girls 15 years ago, they were aged 3 years and 1 year. At that time my eldest son was 2 months old, tiny, fragile, adorable, and endlessly precious. I had great difficulty feeding him. (Now he is muscular, sturdy, handsome and still endlessly precious. The only difficulty feeding him is in keeping the fridge stocked.) We were all attending a first birthday party, a party that constituted my launch into the social life of parenting, and set the bar for how I would be a mother.
Magazine articles and child-rearing guides always commiserate with new moms about the isolation they experience becoming parents. I was lucky to live in a small, friendly university town as a new mother, but not many of my academic friends had tiny babies. When my son was only a few weeks old and I was home on maternity leave, I decided to attend one of the mother and baby groups advertised in the local paper, where for the admission price of two pounds, I was offered a seat on a minuscule chair and given a lukewarm cup of tea. I perched there dumbly for a time cuddling my son; I might even have hidden away at one point to shed a few tears over my nursing troubles. But then I was approached by an amazing, dynamic and sociable woman, pregnant and with a toddler of her own, who greeted me, asked for my life story and then my telephone number. I gave them to her, surprised and pathetically willing. She listened, smiled, and left me to chase after her little girl. Finally the children and their mothers gathered in a circle, clapped to 'If You're Happy and You Know It', donned coats (it was May, in the north of England) and said good-byes. I struggled home in the rain with a crying baby and no dinner planned, feeling rather silly. What had been the point of taking a 5-week old infant to a playgroup? He didn’t care about seeing other children, or having a biscuit and a cup of juice. But a day or two later the friendly woman called, asked me to her house, and made me part of her group. The party invitation followed. I met the friend with the two daughters, and her friend, and hers. We gathered regularly. We compiled a cookbook. These friends commissioned a song to be written and recorded for me, about me, for my fortieth birthday, the most creative birthday present I've received since my father quit smoking when I turned twelve.
So, it was a pebble. And this week, watching the two chattering teenagers set off on public transport to survey the lights of Toronto from atop a 550 meter tower thousands of miles away from northern England, I felt a tidal wave of love and wonder rush over me. So this is how life works. Pebbles make ripples. Our children grow up. We move around the globe-- the Pebble Woman now lives in Switzerland-- but we don't have to grow apart.
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