A Wall and a Baby
These past two years have been a storm. Up has so often looked down, and when you’re that type of dizzy, all you have to hold on to, blindly, is your core.
I got a promotion at work last week. I’d been fighting for it for six years. It didn’t feel like an achievement though, more a relief. The first stability I’d felt in years. It’s why I’m awkward when friends and family enthusiastically congratulate me…I’m still getting used to trusting where I stand.
I received the news while I was in Ireland, for the wedding of a dear friend I’d met in the covid days of Manhattan. I spent a spare day in Belfast, where my buddy and I took a black cab tour of the Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods. The history, walls and wounds that separated them.
The peace accords were in 1998, but they still close seven of the eight gates of the wall at 11pm every night. Our guide, an Irish Catholic born in a neighborhood burned to the ground during the conflicts, told me that 70% of people voted for peace. But there was still that 30%.
Almost 30 years later and they still lock those gates at night.
It reminded me who I am. Yes, I’m of course half Irish, but I mean it a little more deeply than that.
Two days before, at my friend’s wedding, I was seated next to a young mother and her seven-month old son. I’d never met them. The mother was trying to get something out of the baby bag and asked if I’d hold her son. I did.
I watched his eyes lock with curiosity into mine, and I wanted to give his eyes the whole room to absorb. So I stood up with him, pointed his stare out around a room filled with smiles, laughter and joyful tears. I watched his eyes light up.
I’m one of the 70%. As hard as it is sometimes to let go, particularly when it’s injustice, I know who I am.
