Living History by Unknown (the lemonade war series txt) 📗

Teresa revealed her skills as a relentless lobbyist. If she felt the job was lagging, she wrote letters asking me what progress we had made. She sent emissaries to spur me on. She called me from Vietnam, she called me from India, always with the same message: When do I get my center for babies?

It turned out to be harder than I could have imagined to move the D.C. bureaucracy to set up a home for infants who were given up by their mothers for adoption. Not even the White House had an easy time cutting red tape with the housing authorities and human services officials. Finally, in June 1995, the Mother Teresa Home for Infant Children opened in a safe, pleasant neighborhood in Washington, D.C. Mother Teresa flew in from Calcutta, and I met her for the opening ceremonies. Like a happy child, she gripped my arm in her small, strong hand and dragged me upstairs to see the freshly painted nursery and rows of bassinets waiting to be filled with infants. Her enthusiasm was irresistible.

By then I fully understood how this humble nun could move nations to her will.

The extent of her influence was in full display at the arena in Calcutta as Presidents and Prime Ministers knelt before her open casket. I could imagine her looking down at the scene and wondering how she might harness all those assembled to help the poor in all the countries represented that day.

Mother Teresa left a powerful legacy and a well-equipped successor in Sister Nirmala, a fellow Missionary of Charity who had worked with Mother Teresa for years. After the memorial service, Sister Nirmala invited me to visit their Calcutta orphanage and asked me to a private meeting at the Mother House, headquarters of their order. When I arrived, Sister Nirmala led me into a simple whitewashed room, lit only by tiers of flickering devotional candles arranged against the walls. When my eyes adjusted, I saw that Mother Teresa’s closed casket had been brought here to her home, where she would remain forever. The nuns formed a circle around the coffin and stood in quiet prayer, then Sister Nirmala asked me to offer a prayer. I was taken aback and hesitated, feeling inadequate to the occasion. Then I bowed my head and thanked God for the privilege of having known this tiny, forceful, saintly woman during her time here on earth. I had no doubt she would be watching from heaven as each of us in our own way tried to fulfill her admonition to love God and one another.

By mid-September, the occasion I had dreaded for years finally arrived: Chelsea was moving to California to start her freshman year at Stanford. To minimize my own anxiety about this bittersweet life passage, I spent weeks beforehand making lists of all the things she needed to take to school. She and I made shopping trips to Linens ‘n Things and Bed Bath & Beyond, where I bought a DustRuster, a clothes steamer, contact paper for drawers and an array of items that only a mother would think essential to dormitory life.

Our hope was that Chelsea’s arrival on campus in mid-September 1997 would be as low-key as possible. Stanford’s administration was receptive to our concerns for her privacy and had worked out security is sues with the Secret Service that would allow Chelsea as normal a college experience as feasible. Although she would have twenty-fourhour protection, it was to be unobtrusive, both for Chelsea’s sake and the university’s.

The young agents assigned to her detail would look and dress like students, and they would quietly set up residence in a dorm room near Chelsea’s. Stanford, in turn, was happy to limit media access to the campus so that journalists without credentials for specific events could not camp out near Chelsea’s dorm or follow her from class to class.

Chelsea, Bill and I arrived in Palo Alto on a gorgeous autumn day. At Stanford’s request, we had agreed to one photo opportunity our first day on campus to satisfy nearly two hundred journalists from around the world seeking pictures and comments about Chelsea’s arrival. Other than that, she was left alone by the media and began her college career much like the other 1,659 students in the Stanford Class of ‘01.

We made our way to a three-story concrete dormitory that would be Chelsea’s home away from home. The last-minute shopping and packing had left me exhausted, and as is typical of many mothers, I went into overdrive as soon as we got inside the dorm. Chelsea’s room, which she shared with another young woman, was barely big enough to accommodate bunk beds, two desks and a couple of dressers. I was on a mission, rushing around in a vain attempt to organize Chelsea’s belongings, arranging closet space, putting away linens and towels, measuring and cutting up contact paper to fit the drawers, while keeping up a nervous banter with my daughter. “What about storing your cleaning supplies under the bed? Here’s a good place to keep your toiletries. I don’t think you should arrange your desk like that.”

Bill, meanwhile, resembled most of the other fathers, who seemed to go into a slowmotion trance the moment they set foot on campus. Bill had insisted on carrying Chelsea’s luggage himself, and then, armed with a minuscule wrench, he tackled the bunk bed, which Chelsea and her roommate wanted to take apart. After deducing that the bunk first needed to be turned upside down, Bill completed the task and then retreated to the window, where he stood and stared out morosely, looking like a dazed boxer who had just been pummeled in the ring.

My own frantic method of coping with the impending separation from my daughter nearly drove Chelsea crazy, and I was relieved to be reminded that our experience was not unique. At the convocation for students and parents, Blake Harris, the student speaker, hilariously described his own mother a few years earlier: “Parents, you have done