Life is a Race, a race for the care, a race for the cure.

February 14, 2012 By 8 Comments

By Pat Jackson-Colando, author of “A Kiss and a Hug” in Wisdom Has a Voice: Every Daughter’s Memories of Mother

In 1992 I participated in the initial Race for the Cure in Orange County, California. It was the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Susan G. Komen Foundation and little more than a year since the Komen Foundation ventured to California on the feet of a female runner, Dava Gerard, who was also a breast surgeon. As a community service activist, I participated in early start-up meetings in 1991 – until my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Within days of my request in August 1991, the Komen Foundation had an informational packet in the mail to every member of my family. The organization informed – and nudged – my frightened siblings and father to converge around Mother with a plan and to squelch their self-serving fears. It defused their frenzied, flailing panic. I was privileged to have a surrogate better than me to bolster my family from the perimeter, since I lived far away in southern California. With several visits – and gifts and calls and cards in between – I helped to carry Mother, as she had faithfully carried all of us through every cycle of our lives. Instrumental to move the family team beyond worry, I gave her a mantra: “I will be well” and we worked it together.

I employed the mantra to wield myself through my breast cancer journey fourteen years later. My mother served as loyal guide, willing her child to be a thriver, as she had faithfully done during my previous life trials. I survived six months of active treatment – and my head had sprouted golden spikes of new hair – when she died in June 2006, after a series of disabling, demeaning strokes.

Blessedly, I was able to travel to visit her and help in meaningful ways before she died. Blessedly, her passage occurred the day after I looked her in the eye to assure her that I was well. The hug with which she enfolded me thoroughly communicated her love and joy. It was, perhaps, assurance that her work on earth was accomplished because her smile as she looked beyond me to the corner of the room was radiant. Later my pastor told me that during deathbed visits he’d often witnessed that act and that he was sure the people saw Jesus.

Pat Jackson-Colando

Mother was the hub of our family’s lives, modeling a contented assurance, sealed with unbidden intermittent hugs and kisses, as my memoir showed. I have utilized the book that Kate Farrell so graciously edited to raise money for the Susan G. Komen Foundation, in a series of speeches to local groups in October, which was Breast Cancer Awareness Month. More fundraising events, featuring sale of the book, are planned around Mother’s Day 2012 to raise funds for the Hope and Wellness Center, which focuses its counseling efforts support women as cancer survivors.

I am proud to provide a means to solutions, to amass care and caring to broader levels to serve our local area’s women for the Komen Foundation, which provides free and/or low cost medical and psychological service to women with breast cancer and to their families.

Family meant everything to my mother and my mother meant everything to me. Thank you for helping me on this step of the journey. Wisdom has a Voice and so do I, in tribute to my mother.

By Pat Jackson-Colando, author of “A Kiss and a Hug” in Wisdom Has a Voice: Every Daughter’s Memories of Mother

 

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Like Mother, Like Daughter

January 29, 2012 By 9 Comments

By Nancy LaTurner, author of “Motherless Child” in Wisdom Has a Voice: Every Daughter’s Memories of Mother

Katrina Norfleet’s earlier blog post “Uncovering what’s Universal,” (November 7, 2011) struck a harmonious chord in me. The mother-daughter-mother triangle rings true in my life too. My mother always encouraged me to pursue my dreams and I’ve carried that legacy on with my own children.

In fact, when I signed up for my first writing class I did it for my daughter’s sake. I intended to learn enough to help my daughter achieve her writing goals, not mine. I had no writing goals — I was not a writer.

The listing in the university course catalog said it all, “How to write and publish a children’s picture book.” I imagined that I would go to class, take extensive notes, and relay the information to my daughter, who liked the idea of writing children’s books but didn’t want to leave her newborn son to attend lectures. We agreed that she, always the writer in our family, would do the homework assignments.

Fired up with enthusiasm, I marched into the classroom, claimed a seat in the front row, and poised my pen over the first page of a fresh new notebook. The instructor, Elsie Karr Kreischer, an older woman with an impressive list of published children’s books to her credit, introduced herself and immediately turned my world upside down.

I stared like a robot at the blank paper in front of me as I heard the words, “writing prompt,” “thirty minutes to write,” and “read your work aloud.” My feet shifted forward, ready to carry me out of the classroom in disgrace.

Perhaps I felt too exposed in the spotlight of that front row seat to get up and leave. Or maybe dread had actually paralyzed me. Whatever the reason, I remained in my place and courageously scribbled along with the other fourteen students for a very long thirty minutes.

That life-changing moment altered my reality. Over the next several weeks I learned that I was a writer too. With Elsie Karr Kreischer’s encouragement I submitted stories and essays to contests and responded to calls for submissions, winning awards in both the SouthWest Writers and the Writer’s Digest annual contests as well as publication in the Albuquerque Almanac and the SouthWest Sage.

Over the next several months, I took classes from Eileen Stanton, popular newspaper humorist and radio talk show host; and from Robert Gish, prolific author of fiction, memoir, and literary biographies. As I flexed my new writing muscles, I realized that I wanted to write a book — not a children’s book, but a memoir book.

Using National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) as a springboard, I launched myself into a daily writing habit and finished the first draft of my book in the following two months. Several revisions later, I emerged from my spare bedroom writing space with a final manuscript.

The call for submissions for the Wisdom Has a Voice anthology came with perfect timing. What a marvelous home that anthology would be, I thought, for the chapter I wrote about losing my mother.

And what a wonderful honor to have my piece selected! With the sensitive and gentle guidance of editor Kate Farrell, I moved beyond mere excerpt and combined two chapters of my memoir into an adaptation that afforded even more opportunity to explore and reflect upon my mother’s influence in my life.

When I read the contributions of the other authors, I felt another surge of pride to be among this particular group of women, each with a different story to tell but all united in our belief in the timeless power of the relationship between mothers and daughters.

Like Mother, Like Daughter

I’m glad to say that shortly after Wisdom Has a Voice: Every Daughter’s Memories of Mother came out, I published my memoir, Voluntary Nomads: A Mother’s Memories of Foreign Service Family Life, and soon after that my daughter finished her first novel, Stars in Sticks.

Our experience feels like living proof of a universal truth: as our mothers pass away and we grow into the mother role, we must strive to continue our maternal legacy and, at the same time, provide even more powerful examples of womanhood that will enrich our children’s lives. Like mother, like daughter, again and stronger.

 

By Nancy LaTurner, author of “Motherless Child” in Wisdom Has a Voice: Every Daughter’s Memories of Mother

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Motherhood – The Hardest Job

January 16, 2012 By 15 Comments

By Mariana Swann, author of “Finding You Again in Bolivia” in Wisdom Has a Voice: Every Daughter’s Memories of Mother

In January last year, while shopping at my local supermarket in Wokingham, England, I saw a tiny little advert on a writing magazine asking for contributions to an anthology of stories about mothers and daughters. I was immediately interested, as I had already written (and translated from Spanish) the piece that appears in “our” book. In October the previous year, 2010, I had visited my country of birth, Bolivia.

While walking around the streets of La Paz, I felt that my mother’s spirit accompanied me everywhere I went. It was seven years since her death, and I missed her terribly. She had been a loving mother and a strong and vivacious woman. Of course, she was not perfect, but I had loved her totally despite our occasional disagreements.

After visiting her house, I starting writing her a letter, remembering some of the things we did together and some of the many things I learned from her. That letter became the essay that was published in the Wisdom Has a Voice anthology.

Being a mother: the most difficult job I have ever had. Now, where did I last see that manual on How to Be a Perfect Parent? I must have lost it the day after my first child was born, and I’ve committed several parenting crimes ever since. I’ve failed at being an excellent mother. Society expects a lot of mothers. We want them to have a PhD in Excellent Parenting; we want them to be perfect all the time and in every situation—to satisfy their children’s every need.

So many misery memoirs have been published that sometimes it seems that the most common type of mother is a cruel and damaging one. But I knew there were also good mothers out there and I wanted to pay homage to them.

Since I started walking in my mother’s shoes I’ve come to understand her better. Remembering her life always fills me with compassion as well as joy.

Mariana Swann

I am so glad I was given the opportunity to take part in this collection of “mother-and-daughter” stories, and of singing the praises of my flawed yet good and wise mother.

By Mariana Swann, author of “Finding You Again in Bolivia” in Wisdom Has a Voice: Every Daughter’s Memories of Mother.

 

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Keepsake Memoir about Mother: Online Class

December 28, 2011 By 1 Comment

Story Circle NetworkStory Circle Network

This January I am thrilled to teach an online course as faculty of Story Circle Network. SCN has been a pioneer women’s literary network for 15 years. Based in Austin, Texas, it now has an international outreach.

In brief, the Story Circle Network offers the only life-writing program designed exclusively for women. Since 1997, this nonprofit organization has provided learning/writing opportunities in memoir, reminiscence, journaling, poetry, family stories, kitchen table stories, writing-as-healing, writing for personal growth and spiritual development, poetry, blogging, and other areas.

My online class is a mini-course.

Class Title: Keepsake Memoir about Mother

Instructor: Kate Farrell

Class Term: January 9-January 30, 2012

Remembering Mother

Synopsis: The New Year is a good time to remember and celebrate our mothers, our beginnings! What better way to preserve her legacy than with a well-written keepsake memoir? You will weave together a life experience and its meaning into an enduring work.

Class Description: “Keepsake Memoir about Mother” is a three-week course to recall and write a key memory about mother (or mother figure) that is both a compelling story and a powerful message, one that reflects a continuing legacy.

At the end of the course, students will be able to recall an authentic key memory of mother and tell it using a basic story structure, distill the meaning of the memory, and relate its personal truth to combine experience and meaning into a keepsake memoir of mother.

Weekly lessons and prompts will be provided via Yahoo Group site. Students will read assigned material and complete the exercises using templates as suggestions and will upload their written work into files for instructor’s feedback.

To sign up for this and other classes SCN is currently offering, click here!

 

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Christmas Story: Sunbonnet Sue

December 22, 2011 By 5 Comments

By Sara Etgen-Baker

She lowered her reading glasses down to the tip of her nose peering at me with her warm, brown eyes. “Why’s my little Miss Sunshine so down tonight?”

Indeed I was moody after Christmas clinging to my grandmother’s side and dogging her every step as she puttered around her house.

“My new dolly is lonely and cold,” I muttered.

“Oh, I can see that,” she lovingly empathized. “Maybe she needs a blanket and some hot cocoa.”

“Uh, huh,” I nodded.

“Well, if you’ll fetch your doll teacups, I’ll make some homemade hot cocoa for you and your doll. How does that sound?”

I complied—quickly returning to her kitchen where she gingerly filled each teacup with steaming, rich hot cocoa. As we drank the hot cocoa, my grandmother then turned to my mother and me proclaiming, “Let’s make a doll quilt; we’ll have our own quilting bee—the three of us—like in the old farm days.  What do you think about that?”

With that, we scurried to my grandmother’s sewing room where she retrieved the Sunbonnet Sue pattern and a box of scrap material from her closet shelf; she carefully pinned different parts of the pattern to material. Then, she wrapped her hands over mine initially guiding them through the thick fabric. “This is how you cut out the fabric using the pattern. Now, here’s the scissors; you’re on your own…get started little lady!”

Sunbonnet Sue

I was absolutely delighted to be a part of their inner quilting circle and felt so grown up. My moodiness quickly vanished as I carefully cut out six bonnets, six skirts, six arms, and six feet and proudly handed them to her. Then, my grandmother propped me up on a stool so I could watch her and my mother sew the pieces together. Her sewing machine hummed and slowly sang me to sleep.

When I awoke the next morning, I found my doll lying next to me wrapped in a cherished memory—a Sunbonnet Sue quilt of pinks, yellows, reds, and calicos. Despite her death a few months later, both my doll and I remained covered and warmed by her bright quilt.

Now I am beginning to understand just why I’ve kept my grandmother’s Sunbonnet Sue doll quilt all these years—each time I touch the delicate stitching and embroidery work, I marvel at her patience and talent. I recognize, too, that the quilt she gave me that Christmas was more than just a doll quilt. She gave me encouragement and showed me how a little enthusiasm can chase away the blues.

Even now, 50 plus years later, I imagine my grandmother’s eyes watching me and feel her spirit guiding me. Sometimes when the house is silent, I even hear her voice—golden threads of wisdom and inspiration—and am reminded that my life is like a quilt—bits and pieces, joys and sorrows, stitched together with love.

Sara Etgen-Baker

By Sara Etgen-Baker, Author, “Journey with Mother” in Wisdom Has a Voice: Every Daughter’s Memories of Mother

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Winter Holidays with Mother

December 20, 2011 By 4 Comments

Whenever I think of the holidays, I remember the cookies my mother baked weeks ahead, German springerle anise cookies. These she rolled out with a special rolling pin carved in rectangular images (a tradition centuries old, I later learned). We were never allowed to eat or even sample them as they were stored away in tin canisters, usually in old coffee cans and wrapped in dish towels. Her other favorite was pfeffernusse, rolled into balls and also stored, their spicey dough sometimes spiked with rum or brandy. There they all were: canned and aging cookies, placed high on shelves, verboten until Christmas Day.

To my mother, the aging process made the cookies special and deepened their flavor, a throw back to the Old Country and times past. It was something she revered and had learned from her mother born in Germany before any of the world wars.

Holidays with Mother

Holidays with Mother

To me, it seemed cold and lifeless: cookies stored in tin cans so long that they were no longer really part of the holiday by the time we unwrapped them from their cloth covers. I simply could not bridge the cultural gap between us or understand customs no one else practiced in our South Texas town. If only I could have appreciated her effort.

It’s taken a lifetime for me to accept my mother’s struggles as a first generation immigrant. Such struggles were not acknowledged in 1950′s post-war America. The push for social conformity and disregard for cultural differences did have some benefits. And no one really wanted to be associated with German culture in those days. But yet there it was, in those tin cans, waiting to be appreciated and enjoyed in the simple holiday traditions that transcend wars.

If my mother were alive today, I would thank her for those aged and flavorful cookies, crunchy though they might have been. I do not want the recipe nor do I have the urge to buy a quaint rolling pin and throw down the dough on a flour dusted table and carefully roll out flawless images. I can not walk exactly in her footsteps.

What I appreciate in my mother now is the deep imprint of culture. Without external prompting, she brought skill and precision to holiday baking traditions that were fulfilling to her.

I can bring that same dedication to my own life’s work, my inner urgings, the priorities of my own making. I can understand that some things take time to age and cannot be appreciated without time and patience. With care, with love the time to savor will come.

Happy Holidays!

 


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Writing My Godmother

November 29, 2011 By 10 Comments

By Tiah Marie Beautement, Author, “Birds of Promise: A Letter to My Godmother” in Wisdom Has a Voice: Every Daughter’s Memories of Mother

I began 1998 in Professor Rosemary Graham’s class, The Art of the Personal Essay, which was based around an anthology of the same name. Sounded rather boring, people writing dreary “Dear Diaries” about their memories. I yearned to take a course in creative writing, to learn how to spin a tale that would captivate.

Dear Dr. Graham, Mea Culpa.

The art of writing about one’s life is to take a moment, or many, and create a story that stretches beyond your own experience. Like business economics: finding the micro and applying it to the macro. Richard Rodriguez accomplishes this in his essay “Late Victorians,” which takes the architecture of San Francisco and weaves in gay history, religion, family, and AIDS.  An essay about houses becomes both personal yet profound.

Yet this art also bends the truth, with its careful editing and splicing of life. Human beings are complex creatures who can be painted as saints or as demons depending on how the writer angles the lens. Nor can it be helped that the writer speaks from her own camera, leaving the majority of perspectives out. So as I sat down to tackle my first draft for Wisdom has a Voice I found myself contemplating a long stretch of years. It was difficult to decide which threads to unpick in order to reweave into a story that both made sense and yet fit the theme. For the cold hard fact remains that I was writing about a woman who never had children for a motherhood anthology.

But that was my point.

Society is supposedly advancing, yet women who remain unmarried and childless are judged harshly. Nor is society kind to the memory of those who die by their own hand. Both of these scenarios often accompany the mindset of two words: selfish, failure. However, the woman I knew and loved was anything but selfish nor was she a failure.

Tiah Marie Beautement

My aunt and godmother was a flawed person, but also possessed a very large heart while living a life I have been privileged to admire. A role model who was plagued with a disease, a disease so often misunderstood. But even when one tries to understand paranoia and depression, it cannot be denied the hurt her death caused has yet to vanish.

People often yearn for easy answers, a place to point the blame. The essay would have been easier to write if my aunt had harboured blatant desires of her own children. Her death would have been simple to compartmentalise. Instead, like most instances of real life, my aunt’s own does not fit neatly into a preconceived box. In the end, all I could hope to achieve was to chip away at societal judgement while capturing a few verbal photographs of a whole human being.

By Tiah Marie Beautement, Author, “Birds of Promise: A Letter to My Godmother” in Wisdom Has a Voice: Every Daughter’s Memories of Mother

 

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Writing From a Place of Sadness

November 18, 2011 By 18 Comments

by Barbara Toboni, Author, “A Moon Song,” in Wisdom Has a Voice: Every Daughter’s Memories of Mother

I knew that writing my story, “A Moon Song,” for the anthology would be a challenge. How could I honor the memory of my mother without feeling the sadness of losing her again? As a professional singer my mother traveled often while I grew up, and as a child I struggled with missing her. I began my memoir with a scene that tells what that pain felt like. Why did she decide to leave her young family?

As I wrote I began to see it was not only my struggle, but hers too. In the 60’s most women stayed home to raise their children. I wanted that kind of a mother desperately for a time. I believe my mother tried to fit into that mold, but it didn’t sustain her for long. My mother had a wonderful gift to share, her voice, but it was difficult for her to explain her absences to a young child. Adding a scene about gazing at the same moon, how mother and daughter connected while she was away, provided not only insight, but gave my story a symbol.

I delighted in hearing my mother sing. I wanted to share happy moments too, to balance the sadness of our separations. I found them by remembering how she shared her passion with my older sister and me, how we helped her rehearse the lyrics to her songs, and danced around the house with her. I loved remembering my mother in that way.

Barbara Toboni

Finding the connection between my mother’s wisdom and what it brought to my life was also challenging. I reflected on my own life as a young mother. What had I learned about raising children?  When my oldest son was a baby I tried being the mother I wanted as a child. The one that stayed close to home, cooked and cleaned and went for play dates with other moms, but I longed for something more. I imagined my mother feeling that same way.

Mother tried to set aside her own dream of having a singing career for the good of her children. But was that good for us? She wasn’t happy. It wasn’t until she started to realize her dream that she felt whole. Didn’t that make her a better mother in the end?

In my process I compared my life to hers and realized that for a time I was headed down the same blue road. My mother taught me that it was okay to pursue my dreams.

Sadly, Mother died at the age of 48 from Lou Gehrig’s disease. I avoided writing about her for a long time because I wanted to avoid the pain. There was also the risk of sounding like a victim.

In the end I’m glad I took the risk. How can I be a victim if I am only searching for my mother’s truth?

by Barbara Toboni, Author, “A Moon Song,” in Wisdom Has a Voice: Every Daughter’s Memories of Mother

 

 

 

 

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Uncovering What’s Universal

November 7, 2011 By 11 Comments

by Katrina Norfleet, Author, “My Hero,” in the anthology Wisdom Has a Voice: Every Daughter’s Memories of Mother

I am a writer paid to develop content that informs and persuades on a daily basis. I have published creative nonfiction work and created a blog intended to encourage and inspire. However, I had never attempted to write a memoir piece until I saw the call for submission for the Wisdom Has a Voice anthology—less than a week before the deadline.

I let the events I wanted to record and share rerun in my memory for a few days before sitting at my laptop to tell the story through written words. It is a story of two closely related incidences that I remember with vividness, which my mother and I have never discussed since they happened about 30 years ago.

In the memoir, the second incidence is the one I use to create the conflict and becomes the climax of the story. I’m a 19-year-old who comes home from college the summer after her freshman year and “has words” with her mother. The argument in itself was a first. Talking back to your mother was an uncommon occurrence during my generation and in my African American culture. If you’ve ever heard the Bill Cosby joke, “I brought you in the world and I’ll take you out,” then you understand the African American parents’ childrearing motto of my generation.

Mother, Maya, and Katrina

The memory of that argument had stayed with me with great clarity through the years and I wanted to figure out why I have always thought of this as a defining moment in our mother-daughter relationship.

I’d never taken a class or workshop on memoir writing so I took to the Internet and tried to piece together a sense of the genre from various blogs and writing sites. There were many useful tips to help get me started, but there was one in particular that confirmed I was on the right track. It was an excerpt from William Zinsser’s chapter, “How to Write a Memoir,” from his book, On Writing Well.

It read: Look for small self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you still remember them it’s because they contain a universal truth that your readers will recognize from their own life.

The trickiest piece for me became how to uncover that universal truth or that “nugget” that would connect with the reader. In my mind it has always seemed the incident was about the subject matter or a coming- of-age experience for me, a good-girl who until that moment had yet to demonstrate rebelliousness.

That’s what I thought until I started writing the memoir. I didn’t realize how little I identify with that college girl and how much the woman I am right now relates with what my mother must have been feeling at that time in our lives. I’m the single mother of two—a son already in college and a daughter, Maya, who is a high school senior with plans to attend college away from home. As I prepare for this new normal, I often catch myself wondering if my single-parent mother was experiencing the same mix of emotions when I was a senior about to go away to school and she was preparing to send off the last of her children—a daughter at that.

In retelling the events of time period I was able to squeeze my size eight and a half (sometimes nine) into my mother’s size seven shoes. Three decades and a full-life experience later, I could write that moment from the point of view of the teenage daughter I once was and the mother I am today—one well acquainted with the mothering emotion and the fear that manifested itself into the quarrel that day all those years ago. It became clearer, as I wrote about my mother from this vantage point, that a loss of mothering takes place when you are forced to accept and ultimately encourage your daughter to become more separate from you. Loss takes place for the mother and the young adult, whether you are ready for it or not.

I found the nugget.

What a twist of fate that I unearthed this “aha! moment” by journeying back to that that place in history through memoir writing, just as I am becoming my mother and my daughter is becoming me.

by Katrina Norfleet, Author, “My Hero”

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Beginnings Are Not Easy

October 25, 2011 By 11 Comments

by Deborah Jones-Norberto, Author, “Three Mothers” in the anthology Wisdom Has a Voice: Every Daughter’s Memories of Mother

While in college, I had a wonderful English professor who had been published several times over. She was fond of saying that she “hated to write, but loved having written.” Although somewhat grammatically incorrect, I have always identified with that statement. I hate to write—well, more specifically, I hate starting to write.

When I first saw a small post in the Tiny-Lightsonline newsletter about an upcoming anthology and the search for submissions, I was excited and terrified at the same time. It seemed a daunting task to me. I read about Kate Farrell’s Wisdom project and was moved by her idea to produce a “multi-media project to gather and produce every daughter’s memories of mother.” Her desire to chronicle the “wisdom learned” from our mothers was an amazing catalyst to me.

Deborah Jones-Norberto

Deborah Jones-Norberto

However, as I said above, I hate “starting” to write. Don’t get me wrong—I write all the time—but beginnings have always stymied me. Thankfully, once I get going, the words seem to spill forth like an unleashed torrent. I’m not always eloquent or grammatically correct myself, but the very essence of my soul can pour out– I have to leash it in on most occasions.

So, on a snowy February morning, one week before the deadline for submissions, I sat and frantically began to write. I began to tell the story of my mothers and my unique family background. I wasn’t sure where it would go or if I could really tell the story of my heart properly. I just had to trust that whatever was coming forth would be worthy of reading.

Over the years, I had realized the wealth of knowledge I gleaned from my short time with my own mother and the myriad ways I have tried to distribute it to my own children. It was time to share the journey I took to get to where I am today. In short, it lit a fire under me and compelled me to get going!

Writing about one’s self is never an easy task. I’m always reading in the media about memoirs and this person’s story and that person’s story—some famous and others not. Some critics are not so kind to those who produce memoir, but as I read between the lines, I think that for whatever reason, they are just not there personally yet. The critic as a person is not ready or willing to reveal a truth about themselves, so it’s easy to pan those who are. Again, I stress, it’s not an easy task.

As I’ve read over the other memoirs that are in Kate’s anthology, I’m constantly moved by the differences and similarities that exist within it. We all have been born from a mother; we all have had an experience with them or without them. We all have a story to tell. There is not a single mother-daughter relationship that doesn’t resonate within us. I once read or heard a quote that said, “even those of us who hate our mothers, love our mothers.” Isn’t that so true?

I’m forever grateful for Kate and the other editors to be willing to accept not only mine, but the other stories of life with “Mother.” Kate’s willingness and guidance to lead us all on this storytelling journey has been nothing short of amazing and cathartic. Whether female or male, mother or father, daughter or son, we all should look towards these relationships, as they are the very foundation from which we are wrought. I can only hope that the storytelling has only begun and the sharing of lives and souls can continue to unwind and fulfill us all.

~Deborah Jones-Norberto, Author, “Three Mothers”

 

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