A while back, folded in the inside pocket of a jacket I rarely wear any more, I came across a couple of sheets of paper covered in my pencilled scrawl.
Some considerable time before, I’d been looking at the film Whale Rider with my year 8 class at the time. In one of the most moving scenes in the film, the central character, a young girl named Paikea gives a speech in honour of her grandfather at a public speaking competition, beginning: “This speech is a token of my deep love and respect…”. I asked my students to write a similar speech, and got some wonderful pieces of oratory from many of them. As they were working I wrote my own speech, too. I thought it only fair that if I were asking them to pour their heart and soul into their writing, as Paikea had done in the film, that I should be prepared to do likewise.
Here, for mothers’ day, is the speech that I wrote some seven years or so ago.
This speech is a token of my deep love and respect for Jean Muriel Heald: my mother, and the mother of my six brothers and sisters.
It will be four years this September since she died, but she is every bit as real to me now as she was when I lay my head on her chest with her cancer-ravaged arms around me, her youngest child, and I sobbed my goodbyes to her for the last time.
My mum was proud of me, and loved me, from before I was even born, and I knew that pride and love throughout my life. So did my brothers and sisters; we knew it, and are privileged to share it still, along with the thousands of children that passed through the playgroup she ran, each one of them loved too (she ran that playgroup for love and never made much real money from it). Many of those children, now grown up, came to her funeral or sent tributes. A few of them were not fortunate enough to know much love at home, and so my mum became for them the model of love that she is for us, her own children.
My mum was proud of me for my vocation, for my becoming a teacher, and I look to her for inspiration, as she was my first teacher. If I can pass on even the tiniest fraction of what I learned from my mum, and that she in turn learned at the knee of my granny that I never knew except through mum’s words, and whose wedding ring I now wear, and my grandad who is a shady memory of a kindly man sitting me on his knee, giving me sweets from his bottom drawer; if I can pass on a fraction of that ancient river of love to some of my students, then my life will have been worth something.
It is not so easy to pass on love to adolescent children for whom that word is so easily turned into a joke rather than a precious treasure to be nurtured at all costs. But if I am going to be true to the legacy passed on from my mum, it is my duty to try, even when I fall short, even when I fail, even when the love and care and concern I want to show is rejected or mocked or ignored.
And I will hold to those moments that allow me to think that sometimes my mum’s dedication has, however imperfectly, flowed through me. As she treasured every card and gift from her own children and those in her care, I will treasure those far more rare tokens that come to me. The pen bought by the A-level group delivered by the student who came to the staff room to say, “Sir, you’re a better teacher than you think you are.” The card from the student who said, “Thank you for believing in me when no-one else would.” Even, the smiles in the corridor, and the “thank you sir”s by the classroom door. For each of these is a reflection of the love we are all capable of, and which I learned first from Jean Muriel Heald, who died on September 22nd 2002, and whose love – to me – can never die.
(inertiapreneur 