Musem Of Motherhood ~ Share your stories here. Honoring mothers in perpetuity

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Maddie on September 21, 2009 at 10:33 AM said:

i was 15 when my mother died. all my life she had been an alcoholic, a user, and even a prostitute, but all that time she was messing up, i saw what a wonderful mom she could really be. i found that out 6 months before my 15th birthday, she had cirrhosis. then one night she got really sick and we took her to hte doctor and she had brain, lung, and liver cancer. for a short time i saw what having a real mother was like. Thankfully in the time my mother was sick she got saved and truly became the mom i always wanted. i am nearly 18 now, and it seems like she went home just yesturday. rest in peace Brenda Kay Murphy. 9/27/1955- 4/24/2007

Yalda on August 15, 2009 at 01:47 PM said:

“But I’ll be so old when I get my PhD.” I whined to my professor. “Either way you’re going to age: you choose -- get older with a PhD or without!” she replied. She had a point. Time wasn’t going to stop; I could spend the next six years keeping myself busy by focusing the bulk of my energy on my two children, or I could work towards a degree in a field that was fascinating to me. Granted, I was worried about being older than the other students, but I was more anxious about losing time with my children. Yet I also knew that as my kids grew up, I risked experiencing empty nest with a vengeance, lost without any sense of my own direction beyond being a mother. Many women of my generation experience this very same dilemma. Some of us stepped off a successful career track to stay at home with our children, and after the children started school, we began to grapple with the question of how to, or more importantly, whether or not we wanted to get back on. Women who had children before they established a career also face this dilemma. We all wonder what we are qualified for after spending five to ten years “just” being a mother. This quandary might seem like a luxury, especially when compared to the struggle of women who must work and raise children at the same time in order to make ends meet. I, and other women who face this issue, are extremely lucky that we have a choice. But sometimes too many choices can bring paralysis and indecision. None of the options seem viable: go back to a career of a 60+hours a week and rarely see your children, stay at home full time and never feel the reward of career satisfaction, or try to find something new that would allow you to spend time with your children and exercise your brain -- if you could only figure out what that was. We’re modern women who stopped our careers to tend to another part of ourselves, motherhood. We are supposed to be able have it all, so why are so many of us so frustrated? I never imagined that full time mothering would feel this way. When I became pregnant, I decided to stop working so that I could experience motherhood without interruption; truth be told, I couldn’t wait to leave my job. I had a fantasy that being a mother would be blissful and relaxing in contrast to my stress filled life as a movie executive. I soon realized that although motherhood was indeed blissful, it was also exhausting and at times emotionally draining. Moreover, even though I loved being with my children, I hated not working. But I was determined to stick it out until my second child was in pre-school. A bit bored, I took a class in psychology, with no goal other than exploring an interest. I quickly realized I loved the subject and investigated the process of going back to school, even though I was unsure if I would ever actually follow through with it. As I immersed myself in a university environment, I realized many things. First, my life experience was valuable and allowed me to contribute a perspective to the classroom that is often lacking. Indeed, in the field I am entering, developmental psychology, the fact that I have two children allows me to offer real life experience beyond the theoretical discussions. Second, I hope to work well beyond the traditional retirement age, and an academic career could afford me this option; experience is valued in this field, unlike in my old field where youth and short attention spans are considered major assets. Third, because I’m older and have already had a career, I know the pluses and minuses of the working world and have a deeper knowledge of who I am and what I am interested in. While many younger students go through a period of instability – struggling to define themselves, build families and succeed in their jobs; sometimes the career they spend their twenties building does not sustain them through their thirties and forties. I am arguably more committed to my career path. My friends have been fascinated with this journey and in some cases, inspired to explore careers that they may never have considered when they were younger. With a deeper self knowledge and significant multi-tasking capabilities honed from years of managing their families, older women offer unique expertise and experience. The adage that it’s never too late may actually be true. So yes, I will be old when I finish school, but it’s worth the extra time it’s taken to get here. Indeed, all of my prior experiences will help me succeed in this new path. I am ready, committed and excited to be a student again.

Museum Of Motherhood Exhibits In Seneca Falls, NY on July 8, 2009 at 01:53 AM said:

This summer, through August in Seneca Falls, New York USA, 'Moms Of Rock' graces windows and storefronts as we raise awareness about the museum and begin fundraising and a drive for a physical structure in earnest.

Jacqueline Dwyer on May 11, 2009 at 10:50 AM said:

I am a mother now always and forever. Before having children I was like a magnet to them, where ever I was they would be there wanting my motherly attention, love, voice and service. When I had children I knew that I did not want anyone's values instilled in them so I made the sensible decision to stay home and took care of my children according to the values I have and how I wanted them to grow and be in this fabulous world. Yesterday was Mothers' Day as they called it but I celebrate my day everyday because everyday is my day my understanding is that I must be celebrated everyday good or bad. I want to see governments of the world start looking at making and creating policies and laws giving women the right to pensions if they were stay at home mothers. We have may research indicating that mothers' who stay at home with their children give them the best possible start in life. Mothers' who work try really hard but have a harder time giving their children that wonderful first start. We have to be the change we honestly want to see in the world and starts with our children, who are rasing them when we are out working, what they are learning, what they are eating, how active they are, and how healthy they are psychologically and spiritually. Celebrate women because we are all mother.

Diane Lang on May 10, 2009 at 02:16 PM said:

HELP WANTED: MOM

Must have a beautiful smile, warm eyes and a big heart. Highly motivated and energetic individual with the ability to multi-task, negotiate, manage time and schedule. Must be organized, delegate responsibility, self-starter and manage a budget for the household. Patience is a must. Must work well under pressure. Must be responsible, caring, disciplined and have good managerial skills. Listening and interpersonal skills a plus. Must have reliable car. Position requires long hours, overtime and weekends. No sick or vacation time. Pay is low, appreciation is rare, but you will learn a lot from this position and feel a sense of personal accomplishment.

Always remember, Salary.com states that moms, if paid are worth $134,121 annually.

Moms rule!!

Joy G. Rose Sr. on May 7, 2009 at 03:02 PM said:

Somewhere up in heaven a lovely soprano is singing the aria from Lucia di Lammermoor as she does her chores polishing halos.

She floats around making everyone giggle as she occasionly stops, hitches up her robe and dances a wild rendition of the "Charleston".

In the evening rapt little children gather 'round to hear her wicked stories of goblins and ghosties and the antics of a naughty girl called Imogene Feather.

And, by the way, memories of earthly pleasures come to most men up there whenever they see this extremely beautiful woman swinging on the pearly gates.

Her name is Florence Hartpence Greist

Nancy Rose Ludowise on May 3, 2009 at 03:04 PM said:

My mother loved me without question...and I always knew that. Her name was Bertha Genevieve, and she was beautiful. She married my dad and lived on food the church members shared from their farms. She felt her only job was to take care of my father, brother, sister, and me. She was an incredibly strong woman at a time when most of that had to be suppressed in the shadow of my father, a very public man. I hope I got all of her sharing and caring traits. I've tried even though I am a feminist and liberal and intellectual...she once declared she didn't know where we (her children) got all of our queer ideas. But I knew I could be ME and still love and share...because she made me feel like I was special and wonderful. My mother was key in loving her children and grandchildren and a foster daughter from Palestine. She cooked for us, made our clothes, bought us special out of budget things for special days. She had to stop going to college after three years because there was no more tuition money, and she always regretted that. She insisted that I, the youngest daughter, have the best education possible. On exam days, she cooked my favorite of the breakfast things she cooked each day. She wasn't perfect...but as a mother, she was. She's been gone for 11 years, but I still think of her every day. I cook some of the same foods...cinnamon sticky rolls with pecans...and try to pass the love she gave me on to my children, my grandchildren, my nieces and nephews, and the students I teach. Bertha Genevieve Rose is the wind below my wings. She is my hero.

Page Lambert on May 1, 2009 at 06:23 PM said:

I just wrote a book review on my blog of Susan Tweit's new memoir, Walking Nature Homesome. I chose to write only about the brief section where Susan writes about her mother, which is a bit like describing a single sea shell when the entire ocean stretches before you. I urge you to journey on your own into the tide-deep waters of this poignant memoir. You will find an intimate world inhabited by much more than a single shell.

To my eyes, writes Susan, my mom is beautiful, with large blue eyes, a cap of wavy silver hair framing her tan face, and a ready, charming smile. The notes in her health log, though, reveal the pain of swollen and distorted joints, the debilitating curve in her spine, the digits frozen or twisted into unnatural angles, her stick-thin arms and legs. Both our mothers suffer(ed) from debilitating and chronic disease. Susan's mother, married to a scientist with a doctorate in organic chemistry and still alive, has great faith in western medicine. My mother, married for twenty-five years to a visionary but complicated man who founded the financial planning profession, followed dual paths of healing while she was alive. Susan's mother wrote of the disappointment when each drug, so promising at the start, became less and less effective; of days when her body felt like a battleground.

I remember standing in front of the bathroom mirror with my mother after her fifth surgery, this time for breast cancer. The lymph pump was still connected to the red, swollen tissue in the caverns where her right breast and lymph glands had been. She smiled, rather wistfully, as she stared at her battered body. But as always, she was pragmatic and positive. Much to her doctors’ amazement, she rallied again and again, and continued to take mega doses of IP-6.

Before arthritis, Susan writes, my mother wore three rings: her engagement diamond, a slender gold wedding band, and an antique Italian cameo passed down from her mother’s aunt. When Mom’s finger joints became so swollen that her rings had to be cut and bridged, she gave the cameo to me.

One afternoon, I was trimming her nails… As I cradled her cold and bloodless hands gingerly in mine, I was struck by the juxtaposition of our fingers, hers swollen, crooked, and painful, mine still slender and relatively straight… I felt the stiffness in my joints and fear stabbed by gut: I saw my mother’s hands in mine. And I swore that I would not allow my body to become a battlefield.

Take it back, this living will that condemns us both.

That line is from a poem of mine, written when my mother was still alive. I understand Susan’s fear. It is mine, too. And my sister’s. Must we inherit your diseases? we asked silently, even as we knelt to rub peppermint oil on her swollen knees.

But Susan’s book is not about fear. It is about channeling fear back into the river bed where the waters of life flow. Like the waters that flow through the industrialized banks of Ditch Creek in Salida, Colorado, which Susan and her husband Richard live. Susan has transformed her fear into fertile soil, fertile enough to grow strawberries and eggplant and sugar snap peas and summer squash, enough to feed them for months, enough to share with neighbors.

Are we are our mothers’ daughters? If we are, then we must remember to claim all of them, not just their frailties and illnesses. Susan inherited “luminous fibers” from her mother, who was born and raised near San Francisco Bay. For some people, Susan quotes Barry Lopez in her book, what they are is not finished at the skin, but continues with the reach of the senses out into the land….Such people are connected to the land as if by luminous fibers….

Susan’s mother had a feel for sea cliff, wave form, and beach sand” that “was honed on the central California coast, her affinity for desert shaped by visits to her grandparents in Tucson…. My mother was raised by a deaf mother in the Mohave Desert, and as a young woman moved to Berkeley, California, where she met my father. They later moved to Colorado, where I was born, and where Susan lives.

My mother grew to love the mountains of Colorado. She chose to live the last twenty years of her life in these mountains. And now I live here too, in the same home where she died. I sleep in the same bedroom where I last held her in my arms as she grasped my hands. I look out at the same gangly Ponderosa pines and at the occasional deer walking the same backyard trail. Susan watches a muskrat burrowing along the creek and a red fox hunting amidst the Indian ricegrass.

To find yourself engaged in a beautiful book written by a kindred spirit is one of life’s greatest gifts, especially a book with as many layers as Walking Nature Home. Susan Tweit has written a glorious love story, writes Kathleen Dean Moore, to her Rocky Mountain sage meadows, to her husband Richard, to her own unreliable body. I read this book long into the night, lifted by the beauty of the story….

To read more about mother/daughter health connections, read Mother-Daughter Wisdom: Creating a Legacy of Physical and Emotional Health by Christiane Northrup, M.D.

To read the complete blog post, please go to www.pagelambert.blogspot.com. To learn more about Susan, please go to www.susanjtweit.com.

Joy Rose - May 2009 on May 1, 2009 at 04:55 PM said:

Celebration Of All Women

You stand in a long unbroken chain of women who have gone before; Who have lived courageously, struggled mightily and celebrated each birth, family member, partner, community and country. You are heroes mothers, sisters, grandmothers, daughters, aunts, cousins, acquaintances and friends. Stand up. Stand up now. Claim your voices. Let the song of joy dance in your breast while Spirit animates your limbs. You have birthed a future generation, pioneered social movements, tended to the sick, empowered children and now your day has come. To violence demand~ Respect. To oppression of any kind, of any person, anywhere demand ~ Respect. Adamantly agree to denounce abuse of any kind - Insisting on complete Respect. Show your power by claiming absolute freedom to speak loudly, move wildly and strive passionately. Be accountable to yourselves for whatever you know your deepest desire to be. Admit honestly to your heart’s content. Disregard any myth or stereotype that diminishes your true essence, while honoring the holy temple of your body. Eat wholesomely. Evolve consciously. Live dynamically. Celebrate conspicuously. Oh wonderful, awesome women.

By Joy Rose

Rhetty Friesen on March 10, 2009 at 11:34 AM said:

My story www.myspace.com/rhetty2006. Searching for Scott, a Mothers Loss

Catherine Ma on March 9, 2009 at 02:49 PM said:

When I first became pregnant and found out I was carrying a daughter, I was scared because I didn't want to experience the same relationship as I had with my own mother. Looking back at my childhood, I see that my mother bullied me a lot which is why I am so defensive as an adult. There was little nurturing. I mostly remember her telling me how selfish I was as a child.

I do understand that my mother had her own issues growing up and seemed to have passed them on to me but as I became a mother in my own right, I learned that I didn't have to be the mother I grew up with. I had the freedom to carve my own niche in how I was to mother my own daughter. I'm beginning to see how my mother has given me a gift - the gift of what not to do as a mother. I also see that all the times she drilled into my head how selfish I was, would later turn out to be the conviction I needed in order to follow what I knew was right for me. It made me trust my own instincts more which has never led me astray. I still stumble along my journey as a mother but I realize that I am able to write my own story as a mother and my past does not dictate how I mother my own children.

A close friend of mine told me that I should thank my mother for making me the person that I am today. The first time I heard her say that, I really thought she was insane to thank a mother for being a "bad" mother but in hindsight, she was absolutely correct. So I thank my mother for all that she had done in making me the person that I am today!

Justice, Ioanna MARI on March 6, 2009 at 08:12 AM said:

Woman, the Mother of Mankind: pedagogue of the Whole Humanity by “World Organization of Prenatal Education Associations” President: Justice Ioanna Mari, Greece e-mail: prenatalgr@hotmail.com

The recent international science gives to women, future mothers, this important role, a real vocation towards Humanity. Indeed Medicine, Biology, Psychology stresses the relevance of natural prenatal education:

It’s during the prenatal period, in the roots of the child’s life, the nine months of intra-uterine life, that nature has given mothers the great possibility of providing optimal conditions for the healthy and harmonious development of both the body and psyche of their child. The solid foundation offered during this fundamental period provides the person during the rest of their life with a healthy, peaceful, creative character and personality, a basis for life. Like this, new generations will form an ecumenical humanity of peace and creativity.

The tool for this accomplishment is the future Mother’s daily life.

When future mothers with the support of fathers and the whole society live their daily lives in the best possible health with a positive and calm disposition, loving and welcoming their child in harmony with their own culture, they offer the best natural prenatal education to their future child. Future parents, and especially mothers, have a responsibility to offer their child their healthy life and nutrition, but most of all, their unconditional love and tenderness, total acceptance and their elevated (avoiding negative thoughts and feelings) inspired (admiring beauty in nature and art) everyday life. This everyday life participates in the development of the structure of the body and soul: physically (by the blood of the mother), hormonally (by her hormones), but also genetically, since sensations, mentality, thoughts and feelings are recorded in cellular memory and programming.

There isn’t a more important priority for a healthy, happy and peaceful humanity than the loving, calm and optimistic disposition of future mothers.

“Love is the form of stimulation most conducive to a harmonious synaptogenesis (the formation of the synapses of his brain) leading to the formation of a higher quality being” (Professor J.P. Relier)

The French gynecologist/obstetrician and researcher in primal health Dr Michel Odent states:

“Our health is to a great extent shaped in the womb”.

Really, prenatal education is the most fundamental prevention of all disabilities.

Bruce Lipton, Ph. D. American cellular biologist, genetician demonstrates that:

“The activation of gene programs is controlled by the atmosphere of the environment.

Future parents are the true “genetic engineers”. It is urgent that they are informed”.

Every mother, every father, every individual, every country wish for healthy and balanced children. However, very few know that they can effectively favor the arrival of such children into the world. These children will become citizens, who will bring to the society peace and conciliation, resolution of conflicts, with new ways based on love and wisdom.

All the women of the world must know their vocation nature has given to them: to participate to this great humanitarian work.

Lori Greenstone on March 4, 2009 at 10:24 AM said:

My mother is manic/depressive and refuses to take medication so it has always been a difficult relationship, one that had me rejecting the role of mother. Unplanned, but with a wonderful man, I got pregnant at 21. I wanted to give the baby up for adoption and finish college, but my husband begged and cried to keep our baby. Twenty seven years later, when this daughter was unsuccessfully trying to get pregnant, and I was applying to grad school, I became pregnant. It is not anything I would ever plan, but this child is one of the best things that has ever happened to me, one of the six best things. Our children are ages 27, 24, 15, 12, 9, and 21 mos. I am a grandmother now (my daughter and I were pregnant together), in grad school at the university where my 24 year old son is an undergrad, have highschool age and junior high age sons, a daughter in elementary school (but all study at home) and a toddler/baby, so I have the interesting purview of experiencing all phases of motherhood simultaneously. It is awesome. Thanks for your work of elevating the status of an overlooked, extremely important profession- mothering.

Kimberley Clayton Blaine, The Go-To Mom on February 20, 2009 at 06:40 PM said:

Every woman has a personal story - and no one knows her personal story until she tells it.

Women need women. Little girls need to be taught to celebrate the successes of other girls while still embracing their differences. If women support other women, and I mean confident women, then our daughters will learn that there is no place for clique-ish, catty behavior and that others who exceed far beyond us shall be applauded. This stance starts in the home and is taught by mothers.

Flavia Testa-Lytle on January 7, 2009 at 06:07 AM said:

Motherhood is a constant reminder of all that is right in the world and beyond. From the connections that create life and bring us here, to the journey, the joys and pains and misunderstandings and misfortunes, the highs and the lows that come with the title. We are all children of mothers and when we look at this relationship it has a history older than time itself that we all share. Magnificent!

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