In Gratitude For My Mom

When I was younger I lived in fear that my mother would die when I turned 17.  As I grew closer to that age I would lay awake at night, the street light casting its shadow on the shag carpet in my bedroom,  terrified, often counting down the months and days we had left. I never went to my mother to tell her how scared I was.  This was the sixties. It was a rare family that talked about feelings and fears. Most of us had parents who grew up in the Depression and survived WWll. Food, shelter and clothing were their top of mind concerns not a young girl's imagination run wild.

But it was not just something my creative mind pulled from nowhere. Like all good fiction it was based on a kernel of fact. My mother had lost her mother when she was 17.  I grew up thinking that everything that happened to her would happen to me at exactly the same time.

Turns out I had my own life to live and part of that has been the gift of still having my mother by my side at 88 and going strong. Like any relationship that lasts this long, we've had our share of ups and downs. Years of only knowing how to speak to each in a high pitched voice filled with impatience and disagreeing on everything from my new hairstyle to why she insists on frozen broccoli when fresh is so easy to come by.

The big turning point happened within the last decade. It seemed to coincide with me learning to like me more. You see it turns out we are similar in many more ways than a strong physical resemblance. The source of our disagreements over the years were those hot buttons we each had, the things each of us did not like in ourselves was even harder to take in when we saw it mirrored back.

Then I  took my very first class at the School of Womanly Arts with another mama I am in gratitude for, Mama Gena. I had little idea what I was signing up for at the time, but I will tell you the last thing I thought it was going to get me was a better relationship with my mother. But it did.

Something happened as  I learned to love me more. I started to look for what was right and not wrong in me. I started to embrace my imperfections  right along side the stuff I was proud of. So when I saw those qualities in my mom I reacted differently. It didn't anger me. It made me smile.  And in turn she discovered more of her own adorableness.

Mom tells me we started out with her teaching me everything and now she learns from me. That is what happens when you are as lucky as I am, to be a fiftysomething woman who still has her mama to hold her hand. Things change. And as she likes to remind me, these days it is her holding my hand.

To you Mom, I am grateful for your laughter, your warmth, your generosity, your sense of style, the way we can laugh and be silly,  teaching me to cook and bake and the importance of family and connection. Most of all I am grateful for your unconditional and never failing love. Happy Mom's Day!

Me and Mom

A Mother's Day Plea

A very dear friend of mine had a desire to be a mother. The more traditional ways of giving birth weren't working. But her desire was so strong that she made the commitment to adopt. That was almost five years ago.

I remember quite clearly the process, the paperwork, fingerprinting, social worker visits and letters of recommendation that she had to endure just to be considered a candidate. It seemed incongruous to me that in a world where in some states you can go into a retail store, buy a gun on a moment's notice and go on a shooting spree,  that wanting to rescue an orphaned child from a life in an institution could be so cumbersome.  But that is the system. And for a mother in search of her child, there is no price to big to pay.

In early 2007 she got word from the orphanage in Guatemala that they had a child for her. A little girl who had been abandoned at birth and had just turned two. I remember the look on her face as she told me, the joy as she discussed the arrangements she had made to go and meet her.  My eyes filled and I could barely talk. I knew in that moment she had found her daughter. She had given birth.

It sounded so easy.  After almost a year of filling out tedious paperwork, waiting anxiously to be approved, in just one month she was a mother with a daughter.

But it wasn't. International adoptions, glamorized by celebrities leave out the reality of the ordinary citizen.

As all this was happening a lot was changing politically in Guatemala.  The year went on. Every time she thought she might get to bring Nicole home, something happened to delay it.  On January 1, 2008 almost a full year later, the Guatemalan government took over a private adoption system and changed the rules.  There were at that time 5000 in process adoptions, all of which were supposed to be grandfathered in.

It still wasn't done. In fact it had gotten harder. It took eleven more months, endless determination, a series of coincidences and  some divine intervention for her to get her daughter out and home to New York. Nicole had just turned four. Almost two full years more of living in an institution when she shouldn't have had to. The picture below shows Nicole still in the orphanage holding a white bowl and a stuffed animal in the other.

Their story is one of the easier and  happier ones.   There are still 900 children living in Guatemalan government run orphanages separated from their parents. 900 children who have met their mothers and fathers, who recognize them as such, parents who love those children as only parents can, who sit and wait and pray to be together. Two of those children are the boys in this photograph, Gerson and Elviz, biological brothers when they were 5 and 3. They are now 7 and 5.

The Guatemala 900 has issued a Mother's Day Plea and invites you to sign this petition that will be presented to the First Ladies of the US and Guatemala to take immediate steps and get these children home. Please take a moment to help and please pass this on so others might as well.

I look at Nicole, who a year and a half later is a happy, well adjusted child living in a warm, safe home with plenty to eat, a mother who could not love  her more if she did give physical birth to her and a wonderful life to look forward to. Those 900 children, girls and boys like Gerson and Elviz  deserve the same.

Online petition - Guatemala 900 Mother's Day Plea