November is about…
November is adoption awareness month. Sharon shared an excellent post on acknowledging birth mothers, the miracle of adoption as well as its grief.
Only by acknowledging the full spectrum of emotions that encompass the complexities of adoption can we fully embrace our children & support them emotionally as they travel through their journey of life, find their identity and make peace with a decision that was made for them.
Melanie wrote how she explained adoption to her kids in From Another Mommy’s Tummy:
I gave her a very simple explanation of adoption, telling her that some mommies can’t grow babies in their own tummies and other mommies can grow babies but can’t look after them. I said that the mommies who can’t look after their babies give them to the mommies who want babies but can’t grow them.
November 17 was World Prematurity Day and I managed to rope in my walking buddy, Catherine, to write on my blog about her experience of having her baby in hospital for two months. I think she has a lot of useful advice to share. She wrote a very touching letter:
Dear Mommy of a preemie baby
You are about to go through a really rough time: your baby has come early, and he/she is now in ICU under the care of the nurses and paediatricians. He is getting the best care possible, you know that, but you want him home – you miss him, and things feel unfair, you feel unlucky. You have to spend separate time expressing milk and bonding with your baby, while normal moms of full-term babies would use their breastfeeding time as bonding time. You, on the other hand, have to schedule in MORE time and do these activities separately – expressing milk, and also going into the NICU to spend time with your baby. Never mind the time you have to set aside to travel back and forth between hospital and home.
November was also Movember, for testicular cancer. I wrote about it here.
Although we don’t celebrate Thanksgiving in South Africa, I loved this post from Claire Winston about being grateful, Join the #GratefulMama Campaign!
On a basic level, when I am feeling grateful, good, joyous, and harmonious, more good happens around me, AND I am more likely to notice the good. Also, though, if something ‘less good’ does occur, I am better equipped to handle the situation. It suddenly becomes no more than a speck on the windscreen of a truly blessed life.
Laura wrote a gratitude post here: Perspective:
None of these moments make my issues go away. They don’t pay the bills or buy the Christmas presents or sort out stationery packs. What they do though, is remind me how much I have to be grateful for and even when I have a little my family and I have much more than so many people.
Feel good post:
Amy writes how satisfying it was to visit the hospital she was born in and hand out maternity packs in When You Realise Your Purpose -at age 28.
Then I realized that I need to keep on keeping on with my packs. To some mums they don’t mean much, but to some mums, they mean the WORLD! I may have been that lady’s only visitor in hospital, after she gave birth to her first, sick child. What an overwhelming experience for her.
Feel Good & SA:
Belinda reminds us to focus on the good in SA by telling us a story of how a group of people helped a women jump a queue at Woolworths to catch her bus. Small moments:
South Africans are many things at their worst. But we are warm, friendly and empathetic at our best. So much is made out in the media about all the bad stuff people do, the corruption, the violence, the hate – and for good reason I suppose because we have so much to fix. But we don’t share all the good stories, the small moments. We don’t share all the stories about the hard working honest people of this country who just want to live together, who are all just trying to make better lives for themselves, in the best way they know how. Call me naive but perhaps if we all shared these moments and told these stories more often, we could start focusing more on the good.
Metaphors:
Melanie continues her princess series with Pocohontas: Princess Lessons: The Hard Path.
Pocahontas doesn’t get her happily-ever-after. She chooses the path of love and finds that it leads to more hard decisions. She shows us that the right path is not necessarily the easiest path, and that ‘different’ does not mean ‘bad’. Pocahontas shows us that sacrifice requires courage and that sometimes you just have to let love go.
The Reluctant Mom writes Maybe Princes Shouldn’t Kiss Dead Girls in the Forest… Just Saying
She is at pains to remind her daughter that she doesn’t need rescuing and some of the princes in these stories don’t seem like a great match. Looking at Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty (kissing dead girls) and Cinderella (he needed the shoe to fit because he couldn’t remember what she looked like).
Happily ever after is a challenge. At best choose a prince who can do facial recognition, does not want to kiss every dead girl he rides past, and most importantly appears to have some sort of an income where he is not dependent on his parents.
Tribute to a lost child:
Heather writes on what would have been her daughter’s birthday Happy Birthday Jamie on how her other son plays with her in dreams: Your brother talks about you sometimes. We’ve told him about you and sometimes he will tell me that you visited him in a dream. He says you play together nicely and have fun with each other. He says you have long brown hair and brown eyes. It makes me wish that I could plug into his dreams to get to know you and spend time with you too. I would really have loved that.
Parenting:
Do we share too much of the perfect pictures and not enough of real life ponders Belinda On Being Real. We sometimes get so caught up in capturing moments that we forget to be in them.
We also need to build their self esteem, says Kathryn: The Essential Elements of Good Self Esteem:
Your child’s self-esteem will be determined by the conditional acceptance that she receives from others – and the unconditional acceptance that she receives from you, the parent! What this means is that whether you’re a parent or not you you have an opportunity to influence the self-esteem of the kids you come into contact with. You have an opportunity to be a young girl’s biggest fan!
Namreen writes something that I have been aware of lately: that we are so in a rush to get things done that we forget to appreciate the moment. She fears we are grooming our children for the same fate.
Life passes us by so quickly. The pace we are living at is so fast, that entire days are lost in worldly endeavours. Moments quickly become memories. Seconds completely escape our attention. By living for our tomorrows, we are missing out on our today’s. Sometimes we need to slow down a little in order to absorb our surroundings. So quickly our landscapes change without us having appreciated the beauty of things while they were in our midst. The truth is that none of these things we are chasing will ever amount to contentment or happiness. In the end, although our mortal roles requires attention and a certain amount of dedication, I think it’s important not to lose ourselves in them and rather find a healthy balance between fulfilling these human desires and nurturing our soul.
Namreen also wrote about a friend who has both a biological child and a step son, and in a touching post about beauty, she says:
I am a Mom. A biological Mom. But it is more the fact that I love someone else’s child as my own, that makes me beautiful. The unconditional bond I have developed with this amazing little boy, brings out whatever beauty I hold within me. So, in a nutshell, it is HE who makes me feel beautiful and who makes me see that even though I feel like complete crap most days, what he sees is someone with “shiny hair” and who “doesn’t wear a lot of make-up like Lady Gaga”.Being a Step-Mom, a totally committed and dedicated Step-Mom… That is what makes ME (yes me) beautiful.
Cindy finds a unique way to capture the memories in her dining room table: A Prized Possession
Slowly but surely, being used as a counter top took it’s toll on the poor table, but not before we found a cool new use for it. No longer would it be the table with the burn mark on it, it would now be the “memory table”, so that we could look back and go, “Hey, remember when you were such a chop and you burnt the table? Ha ha).
I loved this post from Laura: How to Tame a Toddler in 3 easy steps
Tantrums are not easy. They can be disruptive and exhausting. They are also very different from child to child. Some kids respond to a time out, some to a star chart, others to a warning. There is no one fit solution, the only thing you can do is “just keep swimming” and remind yourself that tomorrow will be better (and that there is wine in the fridge).
Nicky talks about the challenges of raising an expat child in Dubai:
So while we are here we want him to make the best of everything that is offered to him and to remember the time spent here as fondly as possible without forgetting who he is and where his heritage lies. I want to be able to one day say, I gave my child everything that I could and hope he is richer for it.
Jozi writes about leaving her child (in view) for two minutes to go to the ATM. The Day I was called an unfit mother:
Blogging:
Cindy has a great interview with brands on what they want from bloggers here.
Melanie writes about cyberstalking, unfortunately from bitter experience in Uninvited.
Poetry:
Ursula put together an amazing collection of poems documenting her journey through an abusive relationship. It was really tough for me to choose something here; this a talented poet we are really privileged to have in our midst.
but this is no place for logic
and reason’s the realm of fools
The door is locked
There’s no way out
She’s dizzy and dazed trying to figure this out
The fruit of the vine, is the best escape
She’s slowly slipping away
Diving into red river
Releasing her feet of clay
Body becomes a vacant shell
Her mind now a shadow, at play
on the wall
Aiming at drowning
but dreaming of living
*****
If anyone was in any doubt at all that us SA Mom bloggers are a talented group of writers, all they need to do is start reading our blogs!
There will be no round up for December but I would like to do something special for all of you.
There will be a SA Mom Blog Writer’s Award this month. Start thinking about your best post for the year and I will put up a linky next week. I will choose the finalists and us as bloggers will vote for our favourite post for the year. There will be a prize too. Stay tuned!
In the meantime, please link up your favourite November posts and comment on at least three other ones.
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