So once again it’s time to celebrate mothers. There are so many kinds of mothers…

There is the mother, who at the tender age of 16, has the wisdom to know that she is not ready to be a parent, so she makes an adoption plan for her unborn child.

There is the mother who burns her child in hot water, leaves his burns untreated, and, after two weeks of listening to him scream and cry, snaps and beats him into unconciousness. She serves a few months in jail, while he serves life without parole in the prison of paralysis and blindness.

There is the mother whose heroin addiction causes her child to be born with a severe birth defect.

There is the mother who pickles her baby’s brain in alcohol, neglects her infant, and then abandons her in the entryway of an apartment building, leaving permanent emotional scars.

There is the mother who cannot live with the stigma of a biracial child in a racist society, so she makes things easy on herself by getting rid of him, never giving a second thought to the devastation that 14 years in an orphanage will have on his soul or how that little boy rocks himself to sleep every night in his bed.

There are the two mothers who leave their disabled children in post offices or police stations in the middle of the night and then disappear…their children will never know their real names or even what day they were born.

There is the mother who walks out of the maternity hospital, leaving her disabled newborn behind to begin a lifetime in bleak institutions for “invalids.”

There is the mother who gives her second child up for adoption, knowing that she will probably never finish college if she has to raise two children.

There is the mother who is so out of touch with reality that she thinks she’s Tina Turner and doesn’t even know she’s pregnant…she willingly signs away her parental rights, saying, “I sho’ don’t need no baby.”

And there is the mother who gives these children a home, a family, a chance for an education and a normal life. She isn't perfect, but she does her best and it is good enough. But most of the children can’t forgive her her own mistakes…or those of those other mothers. For a long, long time she is devastated by their rejection. But finally she puts it behind her. She focuses her attention and energy on her work, the beauty in her life, her own elderly mother, and most of all the sons who were able to absorb her love and then reflect it back to her.

Happy Mother’s Day!