Mother's Day Thoughts 2017

Mothers Day 2017

Some images .....

• The glow on the face of my neice, cradling the beautiful baby she was told she may never be able to have.
  
• My own mother, in a care home, happily remembering every word of her songs and poems, but with no idea what day it is, or who came to visit her, or if they came at all.
  
• Mothers (like me) torn between their responsibilities for their parents and for their children.
  
• Mothers (like me) who are exceptionally proud of their children's achievements, especially when these are against the odds.
  
• Mothers (like me) still traumatised by events when our lives were disrupted by 'professionals', who thought they knew best, but in reality had failed to understand the complex social, medical or neurological conditions of our families.
  
• Mothers who thought they'd entered into parenting as a couple but who for whatever reason find themselves parenting alone.
  
• Mothers with disabilities and illness, who must watch their children take on the role of young carers.
  
• Mothers of premature babies (like the one featured on tonight's BBC TV "Casualty"), wondering if their tiny infants will live or die.
  
• Mothers who loose babies to miscarriage, still birth or cot death.
  
• Mothers waiting for, or coming to terms with, diagnoses which mean that their children's
  lives will never be easy or straightforward.
  
• Mothers facing difficult decisions about school places or medical treatment for their
  children, often with harassment rather than help from the 'professional' services.
  
• Mothers in unusual or unconventional families and circumstances, who are perfectly
  happy and competent but are frowned upon and criticised by others.
  
• Mothers fighting to be understood in the Child Protection and Family Court system,
  which so often gets things wrong and removes children who (maybe with a little bit of
  support) would be better off at home.
  
• Mothers whose children are forced by the system to live with their (possibly abusive)
  former partners.
  
• Mothers of children in hospital.
  
• Mothers whose children have died before them.
  
• Mothers who are ill and fear for their children's future if their own condition worsens or
  becomes terminal.
  

• A mother who has lost her child to adoption and now must face clearing out the child's room.
  
• A mother who has moved heaven and earth to get appropriate help for her adopted special needs child, but now finds that the Local Authority want to take the child away from her and back into the care system.
  
• A mother tearing her hair out, because her child was wrongfully taken into care at 11 and returned at 16 with a drug habit to feed.
  
• A mother of a teenager who has autistic meltdowns and becomes violent to her.
  
• A grandmother whose daughter's children were lost to state care and adoption, even though she would have been perfectly happy to bring them up (and highly capable of
  doing so).
  
• Mothers in poverty struggling to get by and sometimes (as we saw in I Daniel Blake) being forced to sell their bodies to provide food and shelter for their children.
  
• Mothers simply unable to cope.
  
• The mothers in the many harrowing images on our TV screens for Red Nose Day.
  
• Mothers in Aleppo watching their children die.
  
• Mothers of soldiers of all nationalities, who watch their healthy children go to war and
  see them return with missing body parts or brought back in a coffin.
  
• The mother of someone known to my family, who unbeknown to her and completely
  contrary to her faith, went to join Isis in Syria and was killed in combat in Iraq.
  
• The mother of the guy who drove the car along Westminster bridge on Wednesday,
  killing and injuring as it went and who then killed a policeman before being killed himself,
  wondering how it all went so horribly wrong.
  
• The mother of the children of the Westminster terrorist, who has to help them come to
  terms with what has happened.
  
• Mother church where the whole Mother's Day tradition began.
  
• Mothers receiving cards and gifts and being taken out to lunch.
  
• Mothers of children with smiling faces and not a care in the world.
  
• Mothers with tear stained faces because they are so happy, or because it is all too much
  

to bear.
So much to think about.

Jan Loxley Blount 25:03:17