Mother’s Day at the Library

by Bill Peak

When I was in my twenties, I worked for several years in Northern Virginia running group homes for emotionally disturbed adolescent males. These were sad kids. Almost without exception, their entire lives had been characterized by abuse from the one quarter they had instinctively turned to for love and protection: their parents.

The results were predictable. They were miserably unhappy children, and they tended to take their misery out on themselves and anyone or anything else that came into their orbit. We seemed to be forever spackling walls someone had put a fist through. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when hiring the counselors who would look after our residents, I often found myself unconsciously leaning toward applicants who looked as if they wouldn’t be physically intimidated by these kids, many of whom had built themselves up to the size of varsity linemen.

The organization I was working for was a non-profit. We always needed more help than we could afford, so we tried to recruit volunteers to bulk out our workforce. Needless to say, finding people willing to work for free caring for boys with a penchant for abusive language and behavior was not easy. Sometimes we were reduced to taking on “volunteers” who had been court-ordered to perform community service. The results were not always the best.

But we did occasionally have a perfectly upright citizen volunteer too. One of these I’ll never forget was a short, middle-aged mother of three, the youngest of whom had just left home for college. I was leery at first of sending her into one of our group homes but, as I said, we were desperate.

As it turned out, my fears were unjustified. She wasn’t just good with the kids, she was amazing. Something about her carriage, something about her tone of voice—caring and commanding at the same time—had those boys jumping to her tune.

One hot summer day, I remember, I visited the home to find her supervising two adolescents as they weeded the hedge out front. I was astonished. It was hard enough to get these kids to perform their assigned chores inside the house; short of cutting the grass, they never did any yardwork.

But when I asked how they’d come to be out there weeding, her response was perfectly offhand. “Oh,” she said, “these two looked as if they might have gotten into a little joy-juice when they were out last night. Nothing better for a teenager’s hangover than pulling weeds in the sun.”

I would love to have seen myself at that moment. I’m sure my jaw dropped. Desperate to find out the woman’s secret, I asked how she managed to get our residents to obey her so easily. Now she was nonplussed. “I don’t know,” she said uncertainly. “I guess it’s just that I’m a mother. I mean, I’ve been doing this stuff for years now.”

I’ve been doing this stuff for years now. Childless myself, it wasn’t till I came to work at the Talbot County Free Library that I got to watch this simple truth in action, the incremental increase in a mother’s maternal wisdom as, day by day, month by month, year by year, she nurtures her children from infancy to adulthood.

We often see them at the very start of the journey, the young mother cradling her baby as she negotiates some simple library task: using one of our computers to send an email to her mother, making copies on our copier, searching the how-to books in non-fiction. The look is always the same. The infant’s tiny, blueberry eyes grown large as they try to focus on the object of their affection; the mother, in turn, having trouble keeping her mind on her library task, turning from it again and again to regard the miracle swaddled in her arms.

When the two finally approach the desk, all the mothers and would-be mothers (and occasionally a would-be father as well) have to gather round to ooh and ah over the newborn.

Next comes the toddler stage, when the little ones careen from mother’s knees to bookshelf to toy-box and back again in the children’s section. Inevitably, at some point, the child runs up against something that sends it teetering off balance and, just as inevitably, Mom catches him or her before they fall.

After a few more years have passed and mother has judged them old enough for their first library card, we welcome them at the desk. This is always something of an occasion. The child’s eyes wide once more, the mother watchful, instructing, making sure son or daughter appreciates the immensity of the responsibility they’re taking on. And then, as there will be throughout their childhood, there’s the obligatory, “Say thank you.”

During the elementary school years we get to see the children discover chapter books, and then maybe something a tad more ambitious: Mary Norton’s The Borrowers or E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. It is at this age that, from time to time, they may get a little too rambunctious to fit their mother’s notion of propriety. It is then that we see the mothers acquire the command presence I so admired in that volunteer at the group home, a single word—“Enough!”—sufficient to bring them to curb.

After elementary school, we generally see mother and child together only when the latter’s grades haven’t quite come up to snuff. Then determined mother and reluctant teen trudge in to spend a few hours in close company investigating the mysteries of geometry or, maybe, the French subjunctive.

In all these settings mothers prove themselves worthy of the role they have carried down through the ages: shepherds of the future. And so it is that, on this Mother’s Day, another shepherd of the future, our Talbot County Free Library, salutes them.