18. If this isn’t nice, what is?

For Mother’s Day our family received the perfect gift. Our daughter Maeve, with the help of her husband Bo, gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. I think we’re evolutionarily disposed to think our children — and grandchildren — are the most amazing little beings to touch down on earth, but this one really is. I swear. His parents are totally in love and both have taken to this parenting thing like ducks to water, with a great deal of love and devotion.

The stories about this little one have barely begun. So I’m going to give you, instead, the piece I wrote when Maeve and Bo got married. That weekend her dads and I sent her off to a future with her true love and his family in Kentucky. This boy is the gift we all received in return.

April 26, 2018

In Irish mythology there are many powerful women, but the beautiful Queen Médbh of Connaught was the original badass. Stories about Médbh involve either war, sex, or murder…often all three.  When my brother Kevin learned what we had named our baby, he said, You do realize, Kate, that Queen Médbh was not a nice person? I did. But I wanted to imbue my tiny, fragile, premature daughter with the strength and determination to take on the world. I wanted her to be fearless. I wanted her to raise an army, if that was needed.

Then I learned that I had been blessed with a gentle soul who had a couple of things to teach me. She loved her family and her friends beyond words. Well, I say that, but when she said her prayers at night, she had to ask for God’s blessing on each and every one of them by name: her sister, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors, teachers, and friends… and her friends’ siblings, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends. You see how this could easily last 30 to 40 minutes. And it only increased when John and I married, and she had a new set of relatives that Maeve immediately and completely took into her heart. I felt like such a bad mother when I would say to her, Come on, Maeve, wrap it up. Enough with the prayers!

When she was studying for her first communion in second grade, I got a call from Maeve’s Sunday school teacher, Sister Mary Marta. She wanted to come by and talk to me before the big day. I assumed this was a perfunctory visit that all first communicants got. But when the day came, sister sat down in our living room in her white and blue robes, looking like the emissary of Mother Teresa that she was. She said, I think Maeve has a calling to become a nun. I looked at her for several seconds, trying to think of something to say, other than the gigantic No! that was begging to be freed from my lips. Eventually, I just smiled and said, We’ll see.

Last October, my husband spent some time at a party talking about how “perfect” Maeve was. I watched her friends in the center of the room smile and roll their eyes, and I thought of the empty handle of vodka I found stashed in the back of her closet after she left for college. When Maeve came home for Thanksgiving, I asked her about it. She said, Mom, I knew I had to put it in the recycling bin, but I thought you’d see it there. And I didn’t want to throw it away. Well, Maeve, I’m glad you got the recycling message. Recycling is good.

At the University of Texas, Maeve joined her grandmother’s sorority, and immediately had a cadre of best friends, girls not only from Texas, but from places like Alabama, Virginia, California and, of course, Kentucky. One of the sweetest of these was Mary Jane, who, for this weekend, we’ll call the original MJ (the other MJ is our flower girl). It wasn’t long before MJ had introduced Maeve to her brother Bo.

When Bo first came to Washington, I overheard them talking in the next room about where to have dinner: Where do you wanna go? I don’t know… wherever you want. What kind of food do you want? I don’t know. What kind do you want? I thought, This relationship is going nowhere. They’ll both starve before the weekend’s out.

But they survived…and they made a few decisions. Together. And as it turns out, even in making decisions, they are kind and gentle with each other. Studies show that the characteristic most prevalent in a lasting marriage is kindness, and that they have. 

When Bo came to Washington to speak with us before asking for Maeve’s hand in marriage, we went out to lunch, all of Maeve’s parents and Bo, poor guy. We looked at him anxiously as he said his piece and then the table fell silent. John spoke up first, then Jeff and Debbie. Maeve’s dad and stepdad expressed their great happiness and told Bo they looked forward to welcoming him into the family. Everyone turned to me. That internal scream started to rise in me again — that four-pound preemie couldn’t possibly be old enough for this yet! But I toughened up and realized this was a much better option than the convent. After all, Bo would probably let me visit, and there might be someone small to hold in my lap, besides their dog Olive, at some point. When I was able to think clearly, I had to admit that Maeve had found her match.

There were three characteristics Queen Médbh required of her second husband Ailill. She told her father, the high king of Ireland, that her husband should be without fear, without meanness, and without jealousy. I would say that Bo has exhibited the first criterion of fearlessness by asking Médbh to marry him — since any marriage requires a leap of faith. As for the second, I don’t think Bo has a mean bone in his body. I believe him to be, truly, a man of heart and integrity, which is a testament to the way Becky and Greg have raised him. And jealousy, well, I think their loving-kindness will preclude any jealousy.

In closing, I’d like to tell you something Kurt Vonnegut’s uncle once said to him. One of the things his Uncle Alex found objectionable about human beings was that they so rarely noticed it when times were sweet. Vonnegut wrote, We could be drinking lemonade in the shade of an apple tree in the summertime, and Uncle Alex would interrupt the conversation to say, “If this isn’t nice, what is?”

So, I hope that you will do the same for the rest of your lives. When things are going sweetly and peacefully, pause for a moment, and then say out loud, If this isn’t nice, what is?