When you teach, especially as you age, you begin to view your students as your “extra” children. You have them for a short time, and your job is to get them prepared for the world before they fly the coop. I had only a short time with Asha Weir, but she made a huge impact on me for many reasons. I’m not sure how well I prepared her for the world, but she made me rethink the way that I see life and relationships.
Asha Weir is one of those people who effortlessly made an indelible mark on my soul. When I think of Asha, I liken her to a delicate bird. She was petite yet strong. She was not afraid to be vulnerable, and this, in part, is why she was such a good writer. She would bare her soul through writing. It was her medicine.
Last fall, I had Asha in my ENG 328 Style and Editing class. In this class, I worked closely with my students to help them develop their own unique writing styles. The students wrote many personal essays, and the salient feature of nearly all of Asha’s writing was her deep admiration and love for her mother. In one of the first pieces she wrote for my class about her being a “big sister,” she begins with this caveat: “Mothers are heroes. Nothing said below is an attempt to undermine the world’s hardest job of being a mother. But, I’m saving that story for another day. Let me tell you about being a big sister.” It wasn’t until I went back and looked at her writing that I realized just how much Asha’s mother arose in nearly every piece of writing she submitted.
In fact, it was not just Asha’s own mother who she admired. She had deep respect for all mothers. In one piece she wrote, she reflected on the period in her life where she worked as a part-time nanny for a family in the Pacific Palisades. She described Maud, the French-born mother of two children, as a devoted career mother. “She was a worrier,” she wrote. “I remember one day after I had really gotten close to the two girls, I asked Maud if I could take them out for a girl’s day. It was nothing crazy, I just thought it would be fun to go into Palisades village, grab lunch, shop at Brandy Melville and let them talk about whatever they couldn’t with their mother. Maud must have texted me every ten minutes asking if we were okay. If we had enough money. Where we were. I eventually just shared my location with her to ease her nerves.” She wrote this with great sensitivity and admiration for a woman who found it hard to enjoy the respite of a day without her children because she loved them so desperately. Asha loved Maud — most of all, I think, because she was such a good mother.
In another piece Asha wrote for my class, she described her mother as “the world’s most beautiful, kindest and warmest woman.” It wasn’t long before I could see a theme developing in her writing.
When asked to write about herself in one assignment, Asha described herself as a “people-pleaser,” saying “I’ll do what I have to to make you smile. I like to make sure people don’t leave their time with me feeling anything but content. No negativity. I’ll give you a ride, even if I have no gas and I’m not even going where you are. I won’t ask you to pay me back for your coffee because, hey, it’s just five dollars. I’ll always check in on you, even if you’ve never once asked me how I’m doing. Oh, and I’ll text you back really quickly so you don’t wonder if you’re annoying me the same way I wonder that often. I don’t know if this is really good. It’s really tiring. Sometimes, it’s like pouring from an empty cup. But, on good days, the cup is overflowing, so I have lots to give.”
I learned so much about Asha from her writing. She grew up in Ireland. When she was just ten years old, she moved from Dublin to Pennsylvania when her father landed a new job in America. She had lived a sheltered life until then. She recalled her trepidations. “I pictured what my new school would be like and what I would wear. What would I wear? I had only ever worn a uniform, and I knew American kids got to wear their own clothes to school.” But she didn’t let the details dampen her spirit. “I,” she wrote, “little Asha from Northern Ireland, was going to live in America!” But on her first day, she was prompted by her teacher to introduce herself. “I said my name and where I was from and sat back down next to my new classmates. Then, from across the room, I watched as a hand went up into the air, then slowly pointed down towards me, as Hunter said, “I can’t understand her!” She realized that her accent made her unintelligible to the class, even though they all spoke English. With due haste, she adjusted her speech, writing, “I mimicked the way my classmates spoke, in hopes it would be enough for them to hear me. When I read the last word on the page, I waited to see a hand fly up into the air, and fall back down pointing at me. But, to my surprise, nobody said anything. Relief washed over me.” Asha was a determined child. She would not let setbacks like an Irish accent ruin this new adventure. To hear her speak in her 20s, one would never guess that she was once “little Asha from Northern Ireland, wearing her neat uniform and shiny black shoes.” She wrote fondly about her early, simpler days, “walking down the road to the stables to ride (her) amber gold pony, Beth Anne… eating Cadbury chocolate bars in the back of (her) mother’s car as she drove Michael and me home from school … laughing and yelling loudly on the playground after lunch, not concerned at all about how (she) sounded.”
Asha’s life was revealed in her writing. In one assignment, she wrote about her favorite Taylor Swift song called “Marjorie” which she said “put into words everything I felt about my grandma, or ‘Nanny,’ as I called her. In the past three years, my mom and I have grown so close. We have an unbreakable bond. She often tells me, on the days when the only thing that can heal someone’s pain is a mother’s love, that she thinks my nanny would be so proud of me. I choke up thinking about that because, growing up, I remember the times I had a tantrum when I didn’t want to go to Nanny and Papa’s house. Or, when Nanny would try and teach me a lesson for being a little brat, and again, I’d throw back some sass and attitude at her. But, I also remember the days we would go to the beach — the freezing, north Atlantic ocean would wash over our feet, and I would insist on going in. She always went in with me and played with me even when we were turning blue. She was young, fun, kind, wise, selfless and the embodiment of love.” About Tayor Swift’s song Marjorie, Asha wrote: “My nanny was a remarkably strong and kind woman, and this song takes me away back to my childhood and lets me be in her house. I am running down the halls, watching TV, being pushed on the swing, and I am with my nanny. I know she is still here, always looking out for me.
Asha’s life story concludes with her life at Pepperdine.
Asha’s family was so important to her, and she missed them terribly, being so far away from home. But Pepperdine was another home for Asha. She recalls getting accepted into her “dream school,” Pepperdine. She wrote, “I could not wait to be in California. The promise of blue waves and golden skies got me through the long, hard months at the onset of COVID. The world was healing, though, and I knew I would make it to California in August. But, I was wrong. I got the email saying school would begin online, and I broke down. I needed a break. I had waited long enough. I was ready to go. The months to follow would be just like the ones before. Hours alone in my room on Zoom.” But Asha took charge of her life. “By mid-fall, I grew tired of feeling sorry for myself. I was going to change this. I started working overtime, saving every penny I could. California was calling me. I reached out to the one person I knew who would also be attending Pepperdine, and I took a huge risk in asking her if she wanted to move to Malibu with me. We had no idea if school would be online or in person in the spring; we barely knew each other; we had each only been to California once, and we knew we would have to support ourselves financially. We did it anyway. Somehow, someway, we managed to make it work. We signed the lease on an apartment in Calabasas and were set to head to California on January 1st. When she and her mother arrived at LAX, it was an emotional moment. Asha writes that she immediately started crying and would never forget what her mother said to her: “Go and be great. This is your new beginning.” She concluded this last essay with these words: “I’m writing this not because it was the most painful experience of my life but because so many things happened, and each time, I thought I couldn’t keep going. I saw each event as a setback. I was down and feeling sorry for myself, when all along, even in the midst of the pain I was feeling, these were truly opportunities. I haven’t taken the time to thank myself for persevering, so that is what this is, Asha: a reminder that you have done this, you can do this and you will continue to do this. ‘This’ being life, of course.”
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