Although Meghan had a best friend, Nikki Priddy, with whom she had been schooled since the age of two, and they would obviously have lunch together some of the time, her statements indicate that she felt that her racial identity was a problem with which she was finding it difficult to deal. However, rather than feeling sorry for herself, or becoming embittered by her circumstances, she was already positive and self-confident enough to find resourceful solutions which kept her occupied and gained her the approbation of her teachers. The message one receives is that this early solution to the problem of isolation helped her develop a self-reliance and independence that not only provided her with positive feedback, but also hid her isolation behind a facade of affability.
These were traits that would serve Meghan well in adulthood. Outstanding success in adulthood might initially be a question of luck, but maintaining it and capitalising upon it to the extent that she has, are a matter of grit, endurance, determination, and discipline. These are all qualities that are enhanced when adults have surmounted early hardship or deprivation, and Meghan’s revelations of her early struggles reveal that she did indeed suffer from a sense of alienation as a result of her bi-racialism. Circumstance forced her into being something of a lone wolf, and lone wolves make the best hunters.
Although Meghan’s identity struggles were not obvious to anyone when she was growing up, already her determination was. According to Maria Pollia, who taught her Theology in her junior year, she was ‘a focused young woman who challenged herself to reflect on the toughest texts.’ She did not shy away from challenges, but embraced them, and sometimes even sought them out. A case in point was Meghan’s willingness to volunteer after her teacher had mentioned in class that she worked with homeless people. When she informed Pollia that she too had worked with them, and wanted to do so again, she sent her to the skid row kitchen where she herself worked.
‘My parents came from little, so they made a choice to give a lot: buying turkeys for homeless shelters at Thanksgiving, delivering meals to people in hospices, giving spare change to those asking for it,’ Meghan would later explain. Though her introduction to charity work, like Diana Princess of Wales’s, initially came from observing her parents endowing those less fortunate than themselves, it was really through their schools that both women converted an initial introduction into an established practice.
Meghan now spent a year and a half working on skid row, and Pollia said, ‘The people that I knew at the kitchen would tell me what a natural she was. Skid row is a very scary place. Once she got over that and she was talking to people, she knew everybody’s names.’
For all the care she showed to strangers, Meghan had trouble behaving similarly towards her father. Nikki Priddy remembered that ‘as Meg got older she had to parent Tom a little more and she couldn’t do that.’ Despite the diplomatic tightrope she walked as she carried messages back and forth between her civil parents, Meghan had always been the one both parents had taken care of, and she did not take well to having those roles reversed. Her refusal to do for her father what she was doing for strangers gives an invaluable insight into her character, and shows that even at an early age she knew where she wanted to establish boundaries. Soup kitchens are very much one thing or another. There are no shades of grey. You are either poor and needy or you are helping the poor and needy. The lines of demarcation could not be clearer. Within those parameters, the lonely, sensitive, giving, loving, and emotionally needy have scope to achieve all the human connectedness they yearn for as they are bountiful to strangers. Because the contact between giver and recipient is essentially impersonal in terms of identity while being intensely personal within the moment, the atmosphere is often far more highly charged than it would be in more ordinary circumstances. This is gratifying for both the giver and recipient, and explains why so many people who feel alienated work with the less fortunate. There is little doubt that this dynamic was at play with Meghan. Thereafter, a girl whose identity had caused her both pain and confusion, would seek out those who might seem underprivileged but were, to her, sources of warmth, meaning and human connectedness. And they came without the risks and pitfalls involved with companionship with her peers. Giving to strangers was one thing. Giving to loved ones who she felt should be giving to her was something else.
Pollia remembered how Meghan took to working on skid row with such alacrity that she would update her on the specifics of what Betty was up to and whether Ralph still had his dog or Fred his fish. She had discovered a great way to rise above the barriers of isolation in which the grey areas of her racial identity had bogged her down. Meanwhile, Meghan was learning one of life’s most profound lessons: goodness really can be its own reward, and its benefits were both practical and emotional. But, to achieve them, you had to be proactive.
And proactive Meghan certainly was. By this time, she was well on the road to becoming the activist she would later grow into being. Although she now credits Pollia with having provided her with encouragement and inspiration, the most cursory of examinations reveals that her father in fact played at least as fundamental a role. As she herself used to admit, Tom Sr instilled the belief in her that she could achieve anything she wanted, as long as she strove for it. Intensely hard-working, courageous in standing up for what he believed in, and forthright,
