Hope

The six dimensions and two spheres of hope, as defined by Dufault and Martocchio, This image comes from Sage.

In early spring of 2017, the writing centre where I work at the University of Alberta hosted a weekend retreat for graduate students. We’d hosted these events in the past, but my supervisor, Stephen, had never done what he did this time: he went out of his way to introduce me to a student, Dorit.

Dorit was around my age, an Israeli occupational therapist whose PhD research was based in large part on interviews with mothers of adult children with mental illness. At the time, neither Stephen nor I had any inkling that in less than a year, I would be the mother of an adult child with mental illness. He introduced me to Dorit because he thought we’d get along.

A few weeks after the retreat, Dorit emailed and asked me to edit her thesis. Rather than follow the usual protocol — submit her document, have me edit it and then return it to her and meet for a one-hour consult — she wanted to work with me as I edited. It would be far more involved and much slower, but we both knew that she would learn more that way. And because her thesis was so interesting, I was willing to dive in.

Dorit had been drawn to study mental illness because she’d grown up with a mother who was severely depressed. That alone gave us a lot to talk about, as did the fact that her thesis was about people, not concrete, mining, poultry, and the Western Canada sedimentary basin, the subject matter of most of the theses, dissertations, and journal articles I copy-edited as part of my job.

That work was rewarding because I’ve always enjoyed helping people improve their writing, but the subject matter wasn’t exactly scintillating. Dorit’s thesis was different from just about anything I’d read during the six years I’d worked at the writing center. She’d spent months back home in Israel, interviewing four mothers of mentally ill adult children, two Israelis who lived in Jerusalem, two Palestinians in East Jerusalem.

The Israeli women had much more freedom than the Palestinians, whose comings and goings were controlled and restricted by Israeli soldiers and border guards. What the women had in common was that their lives were impacted by the unpredictability and insecurity of caring for an adult child with mental illness.

In 2015, when Dorit conducted her interviews, an Intifada triggered by conflicts about access to the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City had introduced yet another level of instability into the daily lives of everyone in Jerusalem. The violence meant even more constraints and restrictions for the Palestinian mothers. That was the context in which Dorit met with the women to learn about the role that hope played in their lives. One of her big takeaways, she told me early on, was that hope is constantly in motion.

“Whenever I asked the mothers to tell me a story of hope, they always began with a story about hopelessness,” she explained. “You can’t have hope without hopelessness—hope goes back and forth, like waves on a beach. The waves go out, but they have to come back in. That’s how it works with hope.”

I had never considered hope as a process. To me, it was a touchstone, something I depended on to get me through tough times (I hope I’ll pass that test. I hope I’ll get that job). Some of my hopes were profound (I hope my friend will figure out how to improve her marriage or get out of it). Others tended toward the mundane (I hope those shoes I like will be on sale). But my hope didn’t move like waves. It was like sand, static and still. Or at least, that’s how I’d perceived it until Noah landed in 12A.