Mother’s Day is always a sentimental time for me.  I was fortunate to have a mother who tried her best to love me “extra” since Dad died when I was six.  I think she did a good job. 

I thought of my mother’s sacrifice and commitment when I read a story in the book, The Wisdom of the Psyche, by Professor Ann Belford.  She tells the story of the Harlem woman discovered by the press who for forty years has been taking into her home the infants of drug-addicted prostitutes and raising them as her own.  She is now in her eighties and very well known in Harlem. 

Incredible to the mind, women come and leave their babies on her doorstep.  The babies they bring are addicted.  She does not treat them with drugs, which is the usual medical way with children.  She said in one interview: “I love them back into being.”

That means holding the infants and walking up and down with them, singing and talking to them as they suffer withdrawal from the drugs.  If the babies recover, and the mothers have kicked their own habits, she gives the babies back to their mothers. 

As if that wasn’t enough, she has added to her family babies afflicted with AIDS. Love loves and that is what Mom’s do best.  

Thanks be to God and the mothers he inspires.