Tag: Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day Vigil against Child Separation

Addressing the policy of inhumane treatment of children

Mother's Day Vigil

Citizen activists bring attention to the human rights abuses of detained children and separated families.

Mothers and local activist groups will stand in solidarity with actions across the country planned for Mother’s Day. We call on our government to end the traumatizing policies of separating and detaining children. We call upon our fellow citizens to stand with us in our objection and call to action. This will be a peaceful family-friendly event.

What: Mother’s Day Vigil to Stand Against Child Separation and Detention
Who: Capital District Border Watch, Progressive Schenectady, and Bethlehem Indivisible
Where: Albany NY, Corner of Madison Ave and New Scotland Ave.
When: Sunday May 12, 2019, 11:00am to 1:00pm
Why: The policy of inhumane treatment of children and the erosion of human rights and international refugee protocol

Mother’s Day is NOT a day for melancholy, is it?

She says goodbye to the seniors, which is difficult for her each year.

Since my mother died in February 2011, with me by her side in a Charlotte, NC hospital, there are periods that are harder than others throughout the year. November, her birth month, and February can sometimes be rough.

Mother’s Day is a mixed bag, emotionally. After all, I can celebrate my wife as the mother of our daughter, and my mother-in-law as the mother of my wife, and all those women, living and dead, who have been like a mother to me over the year.

This May, I attended a production of The Music Man at a high school about an hour south of Albany. My wife’s niece, and therefore my niece, was in the production, as she has for the previous five years, going back to 6th grade. It was quite good.

If you go on Sunday matinee, after the performance, the director thanks various folks individually. Then she says goodbye to the seniors, which is difficult for her each year, as they literally leave their shoes on stage.

One of the seniors, the one who played the mayor’s wife, really bonded with the director. Each of them had lost their mothers, I don’t know when, but recently enough that the sentiment felt really raw.

And damned if seeing them mourning their mothers on stage kicked up similar feelings for me.

Then there was that woman who got partially sucked out of a Southwest Airlines plane and soon died. At least two of the news networks reported on her husband telling her parents of their daughter’s death. But then he had to figure out how to tell their two children that their mom was not coming home. I had no reaction… ah, who am I kidding?

So this Mother’s Day is a tad more melancholy for me, for these reasons, or maybe something else, or for no discernable cause at all. Of course, I know that even if your mom’s alive, one can dread the commemoration.

The Tulip Festival and politics

In November, New York State is going to vote on whether there shall be a constitutional convention.

There has been an annual Tulip Festival in Albany on Mother’s Day weekend for decades in Washington Park in Albany. If I go these days, it’s always been on Saturday, because Sunday involved us driving to somewhere south of here to have dinner with my various in-laws.

But THIS year, my parents-in-law were in Florida that weekend, and since the Saturday weather was pretty rotten, we went after church. We listened to some music; Radio Disney’s version of White Room was OK instrumentally, but not so much with the teenage female vocalist. We ate some food, went to some vendors.

How the city gardener gets the various plants to usually come up at just the right time is impressive. My buddy Chuck Miller took some nifty photos of the flowers here and subsequently.

My favorite part is going to the activist ghetto, where the school district, some religious organizations, environmentalists, and more are set up. In November, New York State is going to vote on whether there shall be a constitutional convention. The NY Civil Liberties Union and others, such as the ad hoc No New York Convention.org against it, noting that the LAST time this was held, about 50 years ago, most of the people selected as delegates were sitting politicians. Plus the ideas they came up with were voted down by the voters.


We saw this scene after the Tulip Festival on the way back to the car, in a window on State Street in Albany, the photo taken by the Daughter. It made us wonder about the back story. Who put up the sign first, and was the second sign in response? Are these adjoining apartments, or posters in the same one?

Which reminded me: My friend Sarah and her husband Darin were recently interviewed as part of series on married couples with divergent political views. The producer was particularly interested in the incident in which she unfriended him on Facebook. “Better that way,” she says, and that is certainly true. Oddly, I’m still FB friends with him, but I usually stick with comments about minor league baseball player Tim Tebow.

Mother’s Day 2017

Mom in her red wig period.

HA! I was looking at my May posts I completed, and I assumed I’d written a Mother’s Day something about my mom. But I was misremembering. I had written about my sister Marcia for her birthday this week, and that post is largely ABOUT my mom.

So I decided the heck with it and picked some photos off Marcia’s Facebook, most of which I don’t believe I’ve posted before.


Here’s my mom with HER mother, Gertrude Williams, and my sisters Leslie and Marcia, in her red wig period.


My mother with her mother’s people, the Yates, including Gert (2nd left), her aunts Charlotte and Deana. I have no idea what she’s looking at. This is in Binghamton, NY.


Mom with our family friend Betty, probably at the latter’s home near Binghamton.


I could ask someone who Sammy is, but this predates my father being on the scene.


Mom with her middle granddaughter, Alex, Marcia’s daughter, in Charlotte, NC.


Mom with her eldest Yates cousin, Raymond.


Mom with her eldest child, in Binghamton.


Mom with her eldest child, in Charlotte.

I will say that, unlike THIS mom, my mom hardly ever swore, and not just in front of her kids.

Mother’s Day 2016

mom_meI was watching Anderson Cooper and his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, talk about the book they wrote together.

In the interview, Cooper said that he “realized there were many things that neither of them actually knew about the other. We decided, on her 91st birthday, to change the conversation that we have and the way we talk to each other.”

“According to Vanderbilt, it was all done by email.”

“‘I think we’re both at a place where both of us didn’t want to leave anything unsaid,’ Cooper added.”

It struck me, HARD, that there are plenty of things that I never asked my mom, because… well, I don’t know, actually. Maybe it’s because she often spoke as though she were reading from the same script.

I’d ask her how she was doing, and invariably she’d say “busy but good.” Busy with what? Sometimes I’d get an answer, but more often than not, a response that really didn’t answer the question.

If I could ask her now, on this Mother’s Day 2016, I think I’d want to know:

*How were you punished as a child? Did they use corporal punishment?

She was an only child, surrounded by her mother, aunt, grandmother, and sometimes, an uncle, so she didn’t get away with much.

She didn’t like to give corporal punishment, that’s for sure. She was pressured by my father, who, especially when he was working nights at IBM, didn’t always want to be the disciplinarian hours after the fact.

One time, she actually struck me on the butt. But you can tell her heart wasn’t in it.

*How is it that you never learned to cook?

Your mother and aunt could cook.

*Were my sisters and I breastfed?

I suspect not, because the convention at the period was to use the bottle. And she could be very conventional.

*Did you think my father was faithful to you? Or did you have reason to believe he was not?

Then I’d get some names to fill in some genealogy holes. I’d ask her some questions about her theology, something beyond the perfunctory responses she often gave me.

Of course, that window of opportunity is more than five years past.

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