Moiri's Mother

We are grateful for what we learn from others,
from our teachers, from our colleagues
- and often enough from our clients.

I am visiting Moiri’s home for the first time. As I wander my way through the narrow passageways between the impoverished homes, I am conscious of “being in a different world”. This is not like any neighbourhood in which I ever lived. I feel out of place – a foreigner invading the territory. I am scared. But this is Moiri’s neighbourhood and I need to be here in order to understand her better and to help her family help her. I breathe deep.

Her mother greets me at the doorway to their home – she has been waiting. Inside I find one room for all five of them, crowded sleeping places pushed up against the wall. The home is immaculate. Everything in its place, the floor recently brushed, possibly for my visit. Moiri’s mother is warm and welcoming. She offers me a chair, and pulls the other one up to our cramped meeting place. We are alone. My back is to the door and I want to move my chair but there is no room.

She asks if I want tea and I respond with a strong “yes”. I need time to gather myself. I am feeling even more anxious and out of place. Moiri’s mother moves to the little warming stove and pours tea from a blackened pot. She is graceful in this small space.

As she serves me the tea I see that the cup is cracked and chipped, stained from years of use. I feel uncomfortable. I need to calm the storm of discomfort raging inside of me.

“Would you like sugar?”

Suddenly I am warmed. I see an evening at the beach where as a child I am on holiday with my family. We have been out swimming and exploring all day and have gathered in our small, snug caravan for our evening meal. My father is fiddling with a gas cooker and a can opener, and my mother says to us “Let’s go and get these dishes clean.”

We run to the water’s edge, dodging in and out of the waves sliding up the beach, and rinse off the knives, forks and spoons and the plastic “picnic" dishes we use on holiday. Tin mugs which have been used to mould sand into crenellations for our sandcastle and held our bait while we fished are sluiced in the seawater rushing past our feet. Ten minutes later, back at the caravan, my mother offers us our tea in these same mugs and asks “Would you like sugar?”

I am back in Moiri’s mother’s cottage and realise suddenly that I am surrounded by the familiar. We are in the middle of a universal rite of hospitality. There is a timeless liturgy in the brewing of tea, the sitting down, the offering of milk and sugar, by which we are bound together long before we even meet. It subsumes all of our differences and anxieties under a greater whole which is our membership of families and of the greater family.

I realise that in my stiff and uncomfortable entry I was focusing on everything else but what I was meant to be doing. Ye gods, I was still calling her in my mind “Moiri’s mother” and had completely passed by the fact that she had greeted me warmly and opened her home to me. She beat me to it: “I’m Colleen,” she said with a smile and extended her hand.

–And I’m Richard,” I replied, though not apologetically now, for I had been put at ease. Colleen had probably experienced similar feelings to mine when I arrived at her door, but she carried it off with more grace than I.

* * *

This was five years ago. It was my introduction to family contacts. Subsequent family visits have all been different. Not everyone opened doors to me and offered me tea! Often my worst expectations were fulfilled and I was met with hostility and suspicion. Sometimes, distressingly with feelings of guilt and shame. But just as often I was met with friendliness and welcome. Of all that Colleen taught me, my greatest lesson was to put my own preconceptions, theories, roles and anxieties at least out of sight, and to concentrate on the people in the play, to meet them as people who are living their lives in their own circumstances.

Of course, a cup of tea always helps.