Kathleen, Queen of the Desert

Originally published in LLL US Western Division’s Connections #70, March/April 1997

On our recent family trip to England, I was enthusiastic about visiting the town of St. Ives. I wanted to walk down the path to the little village just like the man in the Mother Goose nursery rhyme. I had also read that St. Ives was an artists’ colony. As we rattled through the hedge-lined motorway to the northwest coast of Cornwall, I envisioned myself poling around the quaint little village shops and tiny art galleries.

Nothing could have prepared me for the congested resort town of St. Ives. Rows of grey granite apartment buildings with sober slate roofs sloped down to a wide, boulder-strewn beach, muddy from the recent ebb of the tide. The nursery rhyme didn’t say anything about a beach! Stiff from the drive and grumpy from the shock, I shouldered my day pack and headed down the hill with my husband and sons. This wasn’t what I expected!

We bring many things to experiences—some expressed, some hidden deep in our childhoods, schooling, and culture. I try to think about that with each Series Meeting, each phone call, each visit to a mother’s kitchen table for tea.

My vision of a little town where I could meet “a man with seven wives, seven sacks, seven cats, seven kits” turned out to be a popular, crowded English beach resort with Walls ice cream stands, New Age gem and mineral shops, and big, loud shuttle buses carrying vacationers up the step hills back to their tour coaches. And I had to look hard for those art galleries.

Mothering, La Leche League leadership, or an LLL administrative position may not always be what we expected, and we may face many hard realities as we make our personal journeys. How many make that journey? As in the nursery rhyme, the answer is just one—one of us helping one mother at a time.

The St. Ives riddle:
As I was going to St. Ives,
I met a man with seven wives.
Every wife had seven sacks,
Every sack had seven cats, Every cat had seven kits:
Kits, cats, sacks, and wives,
How many were going to St. Ives?