SUPERMOMS – FOSTER MOMS

I am reposting this writing this morning because it will soon be Mother’s Day and I want to celebrate again the Foster Moms, Adoptive Moms and all the Moms of the world today.

 

A few years ago, Mother’s Day found me temporarily raising my one year old granddaughter.  My friends and family were very quick to tell me what a wonderful person I was to take on this responsibility.  But aside from the very real physical hardship of raising a one year old (try getting up off the floor at 65), I really felt nothing but love and a kind of awe that I had been given this opportunity to mother another member of my family.  But as any Grandmother can attest, you fall in love with your grandchildren as easily as you fell in love with your own children.  So, really I was living a lie.  I wasn’t this super wonderful person taking on this responsibility – I was just a grandmother loving a granddaughter.

My granddaughter has been adopted bymy son and daughter-in-law.  And I want to dedicate this blog to my daughter-in-law and all the other mothers in the world who love with their whole hearts a child who has come to them another way.

These women are true heroes.  They open their hearts and give much needed love and guidance to a child who they did not carry under their hearts.  These wonderful women don’t shrink from giving this love and taking on all the hard work of raising a child while living with the possibility that the child may end up being taken away from them.  To paraphrase Brian Andreas – they wake up every morning and love the child all over again.  And getting up every morning and loving all over again is really the definitive explanation of what a mother does.  She slays the dragon of the everyday hard work of raising a child and wakes up every morning and loves the child all over again.

Happy Mother’s day to you beautiful heroes.  Like spring, you give the gift of renewed hope and beauty to this world.

Sending my love to all mothers,

Bernadette

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THOUGHTS ON THURSDAY

I seem to be stuck on Mother’s Day this month and the yin and yang of it.  Judith Voirst is one of my favorite writers.  What follows is an open letter she wrote to her son and was published by the New York Times in 2005.

A Letter to My Sons About Mother’s Day

By JUDITH VIORST, MAY 8, 2005

Unlike King Lear I am well aware

That extravagant expressions of affection

Do not necessarily mean that our children adore us,

Or that their failure to write or phone or do lots of lovely things for us

Means that they don’t.

I am, in addition, well aware

That most of the wise, mature, sensible women I know

Have nothing but disdain for Mother’s Day,

Which they rightfully declare to be a crass, commercial way

Of getting guilty children to spend money.

Furthermore, I am hoping that I

Will turn into one of those wise, mature, sensible women

Long before this current decade is through.

But meanwhile, if you know what’s good for you,

Send flowers.

52 WEEKS OF THANKFULNESS – WEEK 32

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BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE IN THE WORLD.

I invite you to come and join me on this pilgrimage to change the world through thankfulness.  Perhaps if enough of us join together we can change the negative climate that exists and is overtaking our planet. Together we can move our fellow citizens of to a better, higher and finer place.

This week finds me thinking about my youngest son, Stephen.  All of my sons hold their own special place in my heart and Stephen’s place is the baby.  Obviously, from what I just said he is my youngest child.  From the very start Steve’s easy smile and sweet temperament made him very easy to be loved by me and by everyone else who met him.  With Steve I marked all the endings of a mother’s journey – no more sweet baby smell, no more walks in a stroller, no more short pants, no more preschool art projects, no more Santa Claus, etc and etc.  And I marked all the last beginnings – first grade, little league, singing in a choir, first dance, middle school, driver’s license, high school graduation.  I am thankful that Steve and I shared all those fleeting, enchanting moments.  And I am very thankful to have the opportunity to visit Steve this week.  I have missed him.

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