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“Brokenhearted On Mother’s Day”: This Isn’t A Nice World For Some Children — Or Their Mothers

Eight-year-old Martin “Marty” Cobb of Virginia won’t be with his mother on Mother’s Day.

On May Day, Marty was playing with his 12-year-old sister near their home in South Richmond when a 16-year-old boy appeared. According to media accounts, the teenager attempted to assault Marty’s big sister. When Marty tried to protect her, the teenager allegedly hit the little boy in the head with a rock, killing him. Marty, said to be small for his age, is being praised by his relatives and neighbors for standing up to the older boy. “He’s a hero,” his mother said.

An ocean separates Marty’s family from 300 girls at the Chibok Government Girls Secondary School in northeastern Nigeria. As with Marty and his sister, though, the girls were where they belonged when unrestrained horror entered their lives.

The girls were preparing to take final exams three weeks ago when armed men in uniforms burst into their dormitory.

A local official had received a warning that 20 pickup trucks and more than 30 motorcycles carrying men with weapons were headed to town, and he alerted the 15 soldiers guarding the school. But the soldiers, like Marty, were outmatched. They ran out of ammunition and couldn’t fend off the assault.

About 250 girls were abducted, driven away into the woods. Forty or 50 more reportedly escaped.

You have to think of the mothers.

All of those empty arms. All of those broken hearts. The misery, the sorrow, the desolation.

Who was it that separated Marty from his mom?

The 16-year-old charged in Marty’s death also was charged in an attack on a 3-year-old boy in 2010, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

According to court documents obtained by the newspaper from the victim’s family, the teen, who was 12 at the time, hit the 3-year-old in the head with the back side of a hammer. The little boy had been lured into a home with the promise of a hot dog, a family member told the newspaper, and then was choked and struck. The boy underwent an emergency operation in which a metal plate was placed in his skull, reported the Times-Dispatch. A law enforcement source, the newspaper said, confirmed the details.

The older child was scheduled to receive mental health treatment in connection with that incident.

One of Marty’s neighbors told the newspaper that the teenager’s mother had tried to get help for her troubled son but had a hard time doing so. The neighbor said the teenager’s mother has apologized to Marty’s family.

A juvenile-court judge has ordered the 16-year-old to remain in custody and set another hearing for May 20.

And so it goes on the streets of South Richmond this Mother’s Day.

It goes even worse in northern Nigeria.

The kidnappers operate under the name Boko Haram, which means, roughly, “Western education is sinful.” Given that belief, it follows that the Chibok Government Girls Secondary School is a sinful place and that the students studying inside are sinners. So simple, so sinister, so stupid.

So Boko Haram took the girls captive and set fire to their school dorm. Boko Haram’s leader, Abubaker Shekau, called the girls “slaves” and threatened to sell them in a marriage market.

As we celebrate Mother’s Day on these shores, think of the parents of the kidnapped girls who pooled their money, bought fuel for their vehicles and launched a search of their own for their daughters.

Put yourself in their place as they learn from villagers that some of the kidnapped girls have been forced into “marriage” with their kidnappers or have been sold for a bride price of $12.

“She is my first-born, the best,” one anguished mother told the Associated Press. “What am I to do as a mother?”

This isn’t a nice world for some children — or their mothers. And most, like the mom in South Richmond and mothers of the missing Nigerian girls, don’t have the luxury of falling to pieces. They can’t just drop back, go out like a light. They have other children to raise; they have to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads. For them it’s all in, waging everything.

Oh, how we honor motherhood.

 

By: Colbert I. King, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 9, 2014

May 11, 2014 Posted by | Mothers Day | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“The Affordable Care Act”: A Mother’s Day Gift For Moms Throughout The United States

People always say good health is the greatest gift, so let’s make health a priority this Mother’s Day. Now that I am a mother myself, I am even more appreciative that I have health insurance that covers the care I need. All moms deserve the kind of quality, affordable care that I was lucky enough to receive while pregnant and postpartum, and Obamacare is working to make that dream a reality.

While pregnant, what did I need the most—that is, besides a foot massage? Maternity care, of course. My prenatal visits reassured me that my pregnancy was progressing as it should and my insurance allowed me to use the provider of my choosing, labor in the setting I wanted, and get the emergency care I ultimately needed. Unfortunately, only 12 percent of plans in the individual health insurance market currently offer maternity coverage. Thankfully, starting in 2014, Obamacare will require all new health plans to cover maternity care as the essential health service that it is.

Needing an emergency C-section was the first sign that I was no longer calling the shots. It’s fine if my son has his own plans, but not the insurance industry. Insurers currently can deny women coverage for specific health services or entire plans due to gender-related “pre-existing conditions” such as Cesarean sections, breast cancer, domestic violence, and sexual assault. The idea that my surgery could disqualify me from obtaining coverage on the open insurance market is both absurd and deeply offensive. But this discriminatory practice becomes illegal under Obamacare in 2014.

After my son was born, my pediatrician’s office began to feel like a second home with the amount of time I had to spend there his first year. I am lucky enough to have a low co-pay that I can afford, but for far too many families those co-pays are not just a minor inconvenience. Obamacare ensures that families can afford to bring their children in for vaccinations and other routine visits by eliminating cost sharing, such as co-pays or deductibles, for well-baby and well-child care.

Whoever said breastfeeding comes naturally? Like so many of my peers, I was surprised to encounter all sorts of difficulties with nursing. I relied heavily on my local breastfeeding center to help me diagnose and address the problems I had, an expensive but incredibly helpful service. Had I not been able to afford those hefty out-of-pocket fees, there is no way I could have continued nursing my son, providing him with valuable antibodies and nutrients and strengthening the mother-child bond. The good news is that this August, nursing mothers in new health insurance plans will receive no-cost coverage for lactation supports that include counseling and equipment.

Nursing moms who return to work also will benefit, as I did, from the requirement that large employers provide breaks and a private space for expressing breast milk. I was very thankful for this provision, especially when I heard the horror stories of women who were forced to pump in a bathroom stall or in their cars—or those who were fired for requesting pumping breaks. With such obstacles in place, it is no wonder that only 36 percent of U.S. infants are breastfed past six months, even though the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends nursing through the first year. Obamacare should help that rate finally improve.

Despite these amazing benefits and more, the health reform law is under siege. It risks being overturned by the Supreme Court or repealed by conservative politicians. This Mother’s Day, let’s give moms a gift that is truly important and will really last. Let’s do everything we can to make sure Obamacare is fully implemented and remains the law of the land.

 

By: Jessica Arons, Center For American Progress, May 11, 2012

May 13, 2012 Posted by | Health Care, Mothers Day | , , , , , | Leave a comment

“No Guilt On Mother’s Day”: President Obama Is His Mother’s Son

Barack Obama’s mother died on Nov. 7, 1995, a few weeks before her 53rd birthday. She was less than two years older than the president is now. Her death from uterine cancer came between two key events in her son’s life. Four months earlier “Dreams From My Father” had been published; it seemed destined to drown unnoticed in the deep ocean of books. One year later Obama won his first election, to the Illinois state Senate, the initial stop on his swift journey to the White House that, along the way, brought a mass audience to that forgotten memoir, which in its best-selling revival defined his political image and provided him with lifelong financial security.

The title of the book was at once understandable and misleading. Obama barely knew his father except in dreams, or nightmares. He spent time with the old man only once, when he was 10, for an unsatisfying month. It is harsh to say but nonetheless likely that Barack Obama II was lucky never to have lived with Barack Obama Sr., an abusive alcoholic. By far the most influential figures in Obama’s early life were his mother and grandmother. He has some of the demeanor of his grandmother and the will and much of the outlook of his mother. “Dreams From My Mother” better evokes his life’s story.

She was a woman of many names. Born Stanley Ann Dunham, she assumed, as most people did, that her unusual first name was imposed by her father. An uncle tells a different story, attributing the choice to Madelyn Dunham, Stanley Ann’s mother, who as a small-town Kansas girl yearned to emulate Bette Davis, the sophisticated actress she saw on the big screen at the air-conditioned Augusta Theater. While Madelyn was pregnant, Davis was starring in a movie in which she played a female character named Stanley. (As it happened, no two people could have been less alike than Madelyn’s daughter and this film character, who was cruel, cunning and racist.) Stanley Ann became Stannie Ann in grade school, Stanley in high school and, finally, Ann in adulthood. Her last name changed as often, from Dunham to Obama to Soetoro to a final spelling of Sutoro.

By any name, she was a searcher. She married a Kenyan and an Indonesian (both marriages collapsed; the first quickly, the second slowly) and spent most of her adult life overseas. She was constantly on the move. She earned a doctorate in anthropology and had an anthropologist’s nature as a participant observer, a character trait shared by her son. She was fascinated by other cultures and ways of living. A polyglot, she could speak Bahasa Indonesia fluently and had a working knowledge of Urdu, Hindi, Javanese, French and Latin. There was never a foreign film she did not want to see, a batik dress she did not want to wear, a mythology she did not wish to understand. In Indonesia, where she spent most of her adult life, she became obsessed with the work of rural blacksmiths, who were said to forge human souls. She devoted herself later to helping Javanese women maintain their handicraft livelihoods in a male-dominated society that practiced what she called “the gentle oppression” of women. She would wake up before dawn every morning and, in notebooks with the black-and-white speckled covers, record her travels, her encounters and her hopes for people, including her only son.

Barack Obama’s relationship with his mother was complicated. She called him Barry or Bar (sounds like bear). She pushed him to be serious and to look at people with empathy. He always felt protective of her, according to his memoir. He describes a scene in which she told him that she intended to marry Lolo Soetoro and that, after the marriage, they would all live in Indonesia. As Obama recalls it, he turned to her and asked, “But do you love him?” — a question that made her chin tremble. It was, at the least, precocious. At the time he was only only 31 / 2. But it was also in keeping with one of the themes that weaves through his dealings with his mother over the years — that she was naive and idealistic, sometimes too good for her own good. In the journal that his New York girlfriend, Genevieve Cook, kept during their time together in the early 1980s, Cook wrote, “Told me the other night of having pushed his mother away over past 2 years in an effort to extract himself from the role of supporting man in her life — she feels rejected and has withdrawn somewhat.”

Ann once joked that she had children with a Kenyan and an Indonesian so that the kids would not have light skin and get sunburns. She herself looked like a Kansas schoolmarm, she noted, which made it easy for her to sail through Customs during her foreign comings and goings. Barry, the hapa Kenyan, and his little sister Maya, the hapa Indonesian, could never say the same. The mother and her two children struggled to find their identities, but in very different ways. Ann found hers through her work and travels, a lifestyle that, among other things, meant she and her son were apart for most of his adolescence, he in Honolulu with his grandparents, she in Indonesia. The search for identity was more psychological for her children, something that Maya said her mother must have understood but never fully acknowledged. In her career, Ann was idealistic but not naive. If she at times came across as naive to her children, it was in the role of a mother not wanting her children to suffer.

“She made sure that laughter was the prevailing form of communication and that nothing ever became acrimonious and that everything was pretty and everything was sacred,” Maya told me during an interview. “Maybe she didn’t want us to suffer with identity. She wanted us to think of it as a gift. The fact that we were multilayered and multidimensional and multiracial — it meant that she was perhaps unprepared when we did struggle with issues of identity. She was not really able to help us grapple with that in any nuanced way. Perhaps she felt that if she did acknowledge the difficulty of it, she would feel guilty.”

No guilt on Mother’s Day. Barack Obama’s mother, by any name, did not live to see her son’s rise, but she shaped the essence of this president.

By: David Maraniss, The Washington Post Opinions, May 11, 2012

May 13, 2012 Posted by | Mothers Day | , , , , , | Leave a comment