Join me as I continue my journey toward being a low-maintenance person:
Take care of yourself as best as you are able. If possible, pay your own way. Live in your own head, but more important, get out of the heads of others. Others want — or don’t — want to do their own thinking.
Offer information as needed and only to those who need it. Listen to yourself. Filter content. Negative talk about others reveals nothing about others but everything about you.
Delete “you should, – ought, – must,” from your vocabulary even if you do think you know better or are more experienced.
Take others at their word unless you have solid reasons not to. Believe people when they tell you who they are. People constantly communicate who they are but if you are already convinced you already know you will miss what they are telling you and only hear and see what fits with your already-made-up-notions. Observe without prejudice.
Chase no one for anything.
Resist the urge to convince others of what you think, believe, support, and desire to defend and know it is impossible to persuade the already convinced.
People are always communicating. There is no such thing as “no communication.” This is a cop-out catchphrase used when a person prefers to avoid or deny what is being communicated.
Gut wrenching for the Smiths from a dozen angles while also displaying a vast array of flowers, tropical, indoor-outdoor whites, greens, shades of purple, yellows, sturdy, strong and luscious, endless developing beauty — reaching for sunlight, proclaiming life and charisma — even within our motherless home.
It’s the early 2000s and Mother’s Day: the boys wake, wander into my room, at least one son is aware of the day given the many things he had to draw, cut, glue and color at school for me, his dad-mom. He’s also performed in “Mother’s Day Bunny ” where I was the only dad in attendance. The school’s admirable efforts to include us, or rather efforts to never exclude us, get a little ridiculous but I play along lest some real mother get whiff that my children be faced with the truth that they don’t know their mothers, a reality from which we, in the privacy of our home, have always openly addressed. Blanket strewn over his shoulders and with an inspiring attempt at positivity, he says, “Happy Mama-Day, Dadda,” and I embrace him and then his brother trailing dutifully behind and I leave it at that.
We meander through the morning, sometimes sluggishly, but with momentary caffeine-stirred urges to “make it memorable for the boys.”
At lunch the restaurant tables are packed with girls-and-boys-with-mothers and flowers and gifts piled high with color and sweetness. Octogenarian mothers swoop in to hug multiple generations vying for hug-inclusion as raucous laughter buzzes through the air.
Friends see us and platitudes flow as they do when people don’t know how to talk about loss or abandonment or death while attempting kindness to quell their glaring uneasiness.
“You’re in a better place.”
“God knew your dad could be both.”
“You know it’s extra special to be ‘chosen,’” a mother says to my son as if she’s the first to offer adoption this spin.
I’m uncertain. Should I laugh, cry or lead the boys out the door and flee the overload of the boys don’t have?
Instead, we’re three-strand strong, and face it as if nothing can touch the Smith-bulwark.
It’s Mother’s Day and about 2015: my first-born off-handedly reports he’s going to make a gift for his mom and, his car loaded with equipment, he leaves. Mid-afternoon he returns, buries himself in his room to emerge hours later with a 4-or-so minute movie that still blows my mind every time I watch it. I don’t know if his mother ever saw her gift on YouTube but within 24 hours he was interviewed on a local news station and his “letter” had traveled the world. I have a hunch his mother did see it but I know she did not respond. A few years later he reached out very directly to her to be firmly and gently rebuffed.
“Adoption is a very powerful tool,” I whispered into his ear as I tried to comfort my distraught son as he sobbed and sobbed.
“Thank you for the choice you made. I didn’t mean to upset you,” he wrote, time-stamped seconds after his biological mother expressed her wish not to hear from him again. The boy was ashen, disoriented, for days.
Yes. Adoption is a powerful tool.
Rest assured, my boys’ mothers, despite their physical absence, have been more than present in our lives. They are not sitting proud at our all-male out-of-the-way Mother’s Day table, but they are ever-present guests as we steel ourselves for life together.
Nate did not learn his gentleness from me. He did not get his unflappable nature from me. I’ve spent much of my life in a hurry, and, apart from when on sports fields or a basketball court, he’s never rushed a moment in his life, not even when chasing the dog. I didn’t teach him to anticipate when I’m not feeling well and to silently — late in the night — enter my bedroom and place ice water next to my bed in the event I may want it.
I like to think we as a family are generally kind people, but, I tell you, Thulani’s natural kindness cannot be taught, tutored or trained.
He was born kind.
Kindness tumbled down through generations of his kin despite the traumas and brutality they knew. Kindness flowed into my boy from unknown generations like the mother’s milk he never tasted.
My sons’ mothers may not be at the table with us on Mother’s Day but I meet them every day in the beauty with which each of the generous women stamped their claim on the lives of our shared, fabulous sons.
Had I an opportunity to reunite with my sons’ mothers I’d say a deep and welled up “thank you” for the gifts of two magnificent humans with whom I’ve shared the last 26 years. I’d say “thank you” for the bravery it took each woman to make her generous choice.
I salute you, your bravery, your untold story, your capacity to engage in enduring, long-distance and painful, love.
Behold — look closely, observe, see, acknowledge, identify — your Mother.
We all have or had one.
No matter what your memory, treasured for its overwhelming sense of love and acceptance and unconditional positive regard, or the sad antithesis of all that is good and associated with good mothers and mothering: behold your mother.
Consider your mother as you would fine and treasured art, a masterpiece and, then, give thanks.
Remember the good times.
Recall the hard times, recall the challenges you gave to your mother and the challenges your mother brought to you.
The woman you called mother brought to the unique relationship with you, experiences and heartbreaks and history of which you, as a child would know nothing.
Yet, you’d know and experience and benefit, and even suffer the impact of it all, all she is, or was.
Behold, living or dead, known or unknown, behold, appreciate your mother.
There is something wildly healthy about doing so be your mother saint or villain, victor or victim, well or unwell.
—
Emotional Wellness and Living An Authentic Life will be my topics at The Westville Bowling Club on May 9, 2024. Please email Shirley@ShirleyWilliams.co.za for details in the event you’d like to attend.
——-
Sunday, May 12, 2024 I shall have the privilege of delivering the Mothers Day sermon at the two morning services (7:30 and 9:15am) at Musgrave Methodist Church on the Berea.
———
Saturday 11th from 9-12 with Terry Angelos at ST. Michael’s in Umhlanga…..
On days when I feel like a local adventure I drive for Uber. I have to believe there is something powerful at play when it comes to coincidences.
This week I picked up a passenger from an obscure petrol station in a busy truck stop. The gentleman headed for the front passenger door, which I have noticed, only South Africans and Australians tend to do. The rider revealed he’s from KZN, specifically Isipingo. I immediately practiced my limited Zulu with him and we are both taken aback by the serendipitous nature of our meeting. On the same day, hours later, another passenger informs me that he goes regularly to visit the elephants at Thula Thula Game Park in KZN — and spends a few days in Umhlanga on the way!
KZN’s own best selling author Terry Angelos and I will have a morning together where we talk about her memoir “White Trash.” We will discuss her powerful work and its themes of redemption and reconciliation. You are welcome to attend. Terry will talk about her book and I hope to show how Terry has unintentionally revealed several fundamental principles of Family Therapy, applicable to all families of all cultures. Join us please for this 3 hour morning session on May 11, 2024. Shirley@ShirleyWilliams.co.za has all the details.
It’s doing what’s good and right to the best of your awareness, as limited as your awareness may be, for the greatest number of people possible in your immediate circle of influence, including those whom you don’t know and even those who may have rejected you or may even hate you.
It’s gathering your strength and harvesting your latent patience and shopping at your store of inner kindness when others test you your many daily contexts, and then being strong and patient and kind even if it feels like you’re surrounded by people who don’t appear to think very much, and, if they do, their thinking appears limited to considering only what pertains to themselves alone.
It’s paying for someone’s groceries or petrol (gas) or electricity, but it’s also stopping to consider why it is that you are able to and trying to understand what circumstances have placed the recipients of your generosity in such vulnerable, often humiliating situations, that they need your help and thinking these things through without resorting to low-hanging stereotypes like “I’ve worked hard and ‘they’ have not.”
It’s seeing people’s faces, acknowledging their unique stories, accepting that all people want to be seen, heard and included, even if their day-to-day behavior suggests volumes of evidence to the contrary.
I have the writer’s permission – for which I am most grateful – to print this letter, one which touched me deeply for the deep losses the woman faced. I am grateful the “adoption process” has undergone many necessary modifications making this scenario extreme and unique. Thank you, dear writer, your letter may assist others to also speak up.
Dear Rod:
I have just read your article about Mothers who gave up their babies for adoption. My heart bleeds for such mothers.
I’m so sorry.
But what about me?
I was adopted. I am also so sad and heartsore that I never was given the opportunity to meet my Mother.
Let me tell you my story…..
I was given away as a two-week-old baby to an old Afrikaans couple. I am 77 years now and have never forgotten the hardships I endured, day after day. She was a disturbed, neurotic woman. Religion was her obsession and he was an alcoholic.
I was beaten relentlessly with a stick, plank or by physical force. Slaps in the face was a common occurrence for any minor misdemeanor or suggestion. Never was I ever told that I was loved. Never was I loved, sympathized with if I was injured as all kids suffer minor accidents. I instead was sworn and cursed at and threatened that I would be given back to the orphanage if I didn’t behave. I was blamed for anything that went wrong even if a light bulb fused. I was not a bad child. I studied hard at school and was well behaved.
Nobody told me that I was adopted whilst I was young and I only got confirmation of that in my late teens, but believe you me, I just knew that I was adopted and always wondered why did my Mother give me away?
I knew there had to be a valid reason.
My adopted Father in a drunken stupor tried to kill me when I was 5 years old. I got a big hiding for that, as if it was my fault.
When I was 16 years old he tried to rape me several times. But I fought back each time. Why I never told any of my teachers I never knew. I thought at that time it was my fault.
I missed my Mother so much and always thought how wonderful it would be to meet her and always dreamt about her coming to fetch me from this hell hole.
But sadly, it never happened.
In my early thirties I could then afford to hire an agency to look for her. The Department of Adoption (or Welfare, I think it was called) gave me her name but was advised that she had passed away in her early forties.
I was devastated and heartsore that I had never looked for her earlier in my life.
I investigated her family and met her brother who told me that she was 16 years old when she was pregnant. Her Mother from a staunch Afrikaans background, forced her to give me up for adoption as it was a skande (SCANDAL) on the family name.
He told me that once a year on my birthday, she would lock herself in her room and just sob and sob.
How sad is that?
I was also given the details of the man who was supposed to be my father. I met him and he clearly remembered my Mother very well and was shocked to hear that she had a baby. We had a blood test done and it was told to us that out of a very low percentage of men in Kwa Zulu Natal who could be my father, he fell within that category.
That was a small bonus for me.
Adoption is a very sad part of life.
Sometimes you are given to wonderful parents and sometimes to terrible parents.
I do believe that for at least 5 years Social workers should stay connected with the adoptee.
To the Mothers who gave up their babies, I feel for you with my whole heart and soul.
I cry for you.
I too would like to attend the lunch and would gladly be a guest speaker to all the Mom’s who gave up their babies.
This is a wonderful service you are offering to the Mothers who gave their babies away. I applaud you.
A few years back my sons and I attended a Birth Mother’s Day Dinner with about 19 brave birth moms, women who’d chosen to place their babies for adoption.
They lit candles.
Some held treasured ear-marked photographs.
There was talk about their love and support of all moms everywhere who have made the powerful choice of adoption.
All were deeply contemplative – for a few, memories from hard choices made 50-plus years ago were revisited.
A few women remained silent, holding tightly to affirmed, supported anonymity.
Mothers who have chosen adoption for their babies are often ignored on Mothers Day.
And, how their hearts must surely ache.
May 12, 2024, several nations, including South Africa, will celebrate Mothers Day and an unseen army of brave women will quietly witness other families rightfully celebrating Mothers Day and find no place at the tables with the children whom they generously offered to families eager to love their babies.
I admit, my awareness of birth mothers is acute.
These women, often shamed, labeled as irresponsible, hard, or uncaring, have radically shifted my life. Each of my boys’ mothers fought untold difficulties – unknown to me – while carrying her child to full term, in full knowledge other options existed.
Despite abandonment, derision from family members, financial difficulties, and who knows what other pressures, each delivered a beautiful baby and made the hard choice to forever enrich my life by allowing me, a single man, to adopt her infant son.
I know you are not forgotten – not on Mothers Day weekend or any other day.
You are so deeply etched into their individual psyches and into our family experience that you are regularly part of our awareness and conversation.
So deep is their desire for you, so deep is the urge for a mother that my boys sometimes called me “mom”.
I have never stopped them. I let it go because I think I know what it’s about.
It’s a primal urge.
It expresses a heartfelt longing.
To stop them, when each was learning to talk, seemed unwise, as if I were stopping something deep, powerful within each.
“Mama” or “mom” and even “mother” seemed to come as easily as rolling over, as cooing, as first steps, and as all those things that come with early development – and so I let it go.
It was as if “mother” and all forms of Her names were buried within each boy to emerge and be attached to the nearest, warmest person no matter what his or her gender.
Yes, the woman waiting your table at your Mothers Day lunch, the teacher whom your child adores, the woman co-worker who goes silent for no identifiable reason or who appears to be sometimes lost in another world when the conversation turns to babies or showers or Mother’s Day, just may be a member of that unseen army of birth-mothers. She may be one of the gracious, brave women who have made Mother’s Day complete for countless women around the world and given a man like me the unique pleasure of sometimes being called “mom.”
I ache for the millions of women whose Mothers Day is tainted with shame, loneliness, disconnection, for having made the tough choice for adoption.
If that’s you or almost you, and are in KZN, and your adoption was recent or decades ago, I have an invitation for you.
Please join me for lunch or an early dinner on May 11, 2024 – yes, the day before Mothers Day is referred to as Birth Mothers Day.
Come alone or bring a friend. I shall speak briefly, simply to thank you and honor your bravery.
Expenses for your lunch will be fully covered – I have already received several financial gifts to cover costs.
The venue will be beautiful and private and safe —- details are unfolding.
Please email Shirley@ShirleyWilliams.co.za so we can get you — and a friend — onto the list and get details to you as they unfold.
Generous readers, restaurateurs, sponsors, gift bag creators, please email Shirley you’d like to pay for a meal or sponsor a table or assist in any manner.
Closing note.
I know this is a tough invitation, Birth Mom.
But, you have already demonstrated your strength.
Join me, please.
[if you’re in the USA and want to give, all gifts are tax deductible— contact me and I’ll guide you through the easy process of giving to OpenHand International, a 501C3 corporation]
Everyone, it appears to me, is looking for someone or for something, some experience to re-live, something to either re-do, or undo, some event in the past, a journey to shed some shame or re-light the limelight.
I see it in my travels, during brief interactions I’ll enjoy with strangers when they may allow themselves unplanned moments to be distracted and untethered from cell phones.
“Retracing my steps,” said a young man at a table in a coffee shop – neither of us in our home countries – when he had no option but to chat. His phone had “died” and he needed the power outlet behind my seat. “Visiting the places I went with my dad before he died.”
My empathy immediately rose: one so young already searching.
“We are going back to the UK to show my son where his grandfather was born,” said a woman a few seats from me on a largely empty plane.
I held back on suggesting the journey was really hers given the child was at least 4-years-old and it was surely not his suggestion that brought them to this brief encounter.
Soon several nations, including South Africa, will celebrate Mothers Day.
In affluent areas restaurants will have table reservations for several generations of mothers. In modest settings a bowl of flowers may be arranged for mom.
As a dad to adopted sons I ache for the millions of women (and who sometimes sit silent at the same tables) whose Mothers Day is tainted with shame, loneliness, disconnection, for having made the tough choice for adoption.
Many women have expressed Mothers Day is not for them, that it’s among the most painful days they endure.
If that’s you or almost you, and are in KZN, and your adoption was recent or decades ago, I have an invitation for you:
Please join me for lunch or an early dinner on May 11, 2024. Come alone of bring a friend. Expenses for your lunch will be fully covered. The venue will be beautiful and private and safe —- details still unfolding.
Please email Shirley@ShirleyWilliams.co.za so we can get you — and a friend — onto the list and get details to you as they unfold.
Happy Birth Mothers Day, brave woman.
Generous readers, restaurateurs, sponsors, gift bag creators, please email Shirley you’d like to pay for a meal or sponsor a table or assist in any manner.
Words (sentiments) I’ve never heard uttered in decades of counseling, marrying, burying, teaching, traveling, hearing confessions, and responding to groups large and small in 50+ nations…..
“I started saving too early. Managing accumulated resources is tough. It’s an uphill battle trying to dig myself out of wealth.”
“I wish I’d held more grudges. My life is meaningless without bitterness and blame.”
“I laughed too much. I’ve been too generous; given too much away. Spent too much time outdoors.”
“I read too many books.”
“I settled too many differences and have given the benefit of the doubt to too many people.”
“When people have betrayed me I used it to learn about love, forgiveness, grace.”
“I spent too much time investing in others.”
“I wish I had more stuff to fill a few more plastic tubs in my storage units.”
“I’m glad I rejected people who disagreed with me, who lived in ways I labeled unbiblical — especially family.”
“Regretfully, my spouse and I kept our marriage vows until death did us part.”
“I discovered google too late in life.”
“People see me as a softie.”
“I spent whole days without using my cellphone.”
“I affirmed my children and told them I loved them much too often. I should have withheld my love and focused more on their faults.”
difficultrelationships.com 