Mothers

I know a mother who kept her baby girl. Everyone told her to 'put her with her own kind' ... her response was always the same, 'but that's where she already is.' She spent her life fighting for her daughter's right to adulthood and then she had to, with great difficulty, let her child go into that adulthood. She watched her make good decision and bad ones too. But she knew that in order to gain her daughter's trust she had to give hers first.

I know a mother who lost her husband when she refused to let him throw her boy out into the streets. She believed that her child was sinful, that his gay nature was a punishment, that the heart he loved with was defective. But she believed even more that a mother loves her child, that a mother doesn't throw a 16 year old boy out into the street. She never reconciled with her husband and due to his pressure, she was expelled from her church. She attended her son's wedding, the only one of the family that did so.

I know a mother who adopted a child with a serious illness. She was warned about the emotional cost of loving a child that will die early in childhood, she was warned about getting too involved, she was warned away from the child and the commitment and coming hurt. She simply said, 'a baby needs to be loved, needs to have a home, I am prepared to live and love until there is loss.' Her baby lived years and years past expectations.

I know a mother who was brought up in an abusive home. I know the years she put into therapy, her battle against the rages that would over take her, the violence of her temper that would take away her sense of proportion. I know what a big decision it was for her to have a child. She worried that she would do what was done to her, she worried that she would visit terror on the child. Every day she fought for control, every day. Her daughter remarks, now that she is a mother herself, that she doesn't know how her mother brought her up without ever once raising her voice.


Happy Mother's Day