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.
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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.
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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.
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Saturday 11th from 9-12 with Terry Angelos at ST. Michael’s in Umhlanga…..
Instantly, he replied, with a link to nine varieties of venomous snakes inhabiting Namibia. The communication left me with the distinct impression I’d be tripping over nesting pythons, wrestling extended families of puff-adders, fending off multiple varieties of mambas at every turn.
Ours was the only flight coming into Hosea Kutako International Airport, Windhoek, for a few hours. The immigration officials appeared rather pleased to stamp the Boeing 737-load of us in. I was more than pleased to be admitted after the 20 minute walk from the parked Airlink aircraft to the airport buildings. The African sun blazes, I tell you.
Airlink, I understand is a rather new South African carrier, an airline I have found to be friendly and efficient. It’s interesting that even on the quick domestic hauls — at least the flights I’ve enjoyed— Airlink finds it possible and profitable to serve all passengers delightfully boxed meals in recently sealed time-stamped containers each with fresh fruit and an “African dessert.” The part I most enjoy is washing it down with a traditionally served hot cup of tea – while there remains a selection of wines freely available.
Namibia, formerly South West Africa until 1990, is large, mostly desert, and Windhoek, one of the major cities is a two hour flight almost directly north South Africa’s “Mother City,” Cape Town. My immediate impression: Windhoek is as vibrant and modern as any large metropolitan city anywhere in the west, while rural Namibia is as rural as I have known on this fabulous continent.
The “Foundations of Counseling Ministries” students and facilitating staff whom I am teaching for the week make a full classroom of 20 hailing from 7 nations: Kenya, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Netherlands, Switzerland, South Africa, and Tanzania. Each student is in a different part of his or her journey towards a degree from The University of The Nations.
Next week I will be back in South Africa and in my home town. I will attend the wedding of my great niece and speak at a few public gatherings, one of which will be a live, three hour discussion with Terry Angelos, the best selling author of “White Trash” subtitled “My Year As a High Class Call Girl.” The memoir is as graphic and tough to read as it is redemptive and full of hope and joy.
If you follow my “On The Road” series of columns, you may have noticed that this time I have not written about the long flight from Newark to Cape Town or the inconveniences that come with international travel.
Here’s why: the teacher for the week in a parallel class offered on this Namibian rural campus, which is 840 acres of sprawling bush with a settlement of houses and classrooms sitting somewhere in the middle, arrived between 2 and 3am on Monday after a 9 hour public bus ride — think Greyhound — from a town in northern Namibia.
Bishop Leonard was up and teaching within a few hours.
I am over complaining about the inconveniences of Boeing and Airbus travel, thank you, Bishop Leonard.
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]
When weekday mornings roll around the validity of whatever form of worship we participate in on the weekend is tested.
Synagogue, temple, church, wide-open spaces; conservative, modern, orthodox, mainline, fire and brimstone, or new age, our religious and faith traditions are tested for the rest of the week.
We can sing and dance all we desire and then nullify its validity with gossip and cheating.
Piousness is easy to fake.
It’s tax returns that challenge our respect for what’s good and right and wholesome.
Are you kind, merciful, generous and forgiving?
I’d suggest these are pivotal values in all faith and religious traditions.
Does your weekend faith tradition translate into open and honest trading and communicating with those who are “outside” your religious family? Are you open and kind and forgiving to your blood relatives?
Again, pivotal concepts in all traditions.
Be assured, I ask myself these questions, very regularly. There are times I wish I was a little more ready to let myself off the hook.
Hypocrisy doesn’t sit easily with me — especially when it is I who is the hypocrite.
Thank you to the people who have already responded to my request for help with the Birth Mothers Acknowledgement Dinner. Please email Shirley@ShirleyWilliams.co.za for more information.
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.”
When receiving texts — except texts of a purely perfunctory nature — do you read between, behind the lines?
We offer affirming eye contact during face-to-face conversations.
Timing, tone, cadence, clarify meaning in voice calls.
Are we listening to texts?
You may engage with the person who responds to texts as if anxiously awaiting, even aching for human contact. Prior knowledge may inform your understanding of your quick-to-reply friend.
I find it helpful, early in any text exchange, to declare my level of availability. I am unlikely to ignore a verbal approach and I try to acknowledge texts.
Apparent indifference can be cruel.
Respond in kind: words for words, sentences for sentences, emojis for emojis. One who composes a paragraph deserves a like-response. A thumbs up emoji or hand clapping butterflies may come off as dismissive when a friend just spilled his guts.
Grammar rules and sound spelling seem widely ignored with texting. While pedantic perfectionism may reek pretentiousness, effort reveals respect.
Avoid alarm —- can’t wait to tell you something terribly important to you and your future when we meet next month — is hardly fair.
Read between and behind the lines.
Friends might be telling you something of crucial importance (to them) and selected you to be their audience.
Arrived in the USA late last evening from Malaysia.
Leadership will always be strongest, most effective when the leader sees and regards herself or himself as a servant to those in her or his care.
This is not for effect or for greater impact, it is simply how authentic leadership works.
If you are the leader then you will be a servant who seeks to serve those whom she or he leads. You will do so with all your heart, mind, soul and you will love those in your care. You will love them to such a degree that they will end up even unknowingly tapping into the very best of who they are because that’s how people behave when they are loved.
If you think of yourself as elevated, deserving of being served by others, afforded status by your role, you are not a leader no matter what you think you are. What you are is one who is capitalizing on those whom you are really called to serve.
Your leadership function must benefit others, not you.
When you are the true leader there is nothing you will not do within the bounds of law and the boundaries of sound ethics to enhance the lives of those whom you lead.
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