Mom's The Word....

Random thoughts about the workshop are still burbling to the surface, so indulge me, already.

I must be some sort of praise junkie, because I still feel all warm and tingly thinking about our closing dinner last Sunday night. I decided we’d just have a casual ceremony at the Acholi Inn, without a lot of pomp and such. I asked each reporter to stand and share the most important thing they’d gotten from the workshop.

The comments were fairly uniform, but extremely touching. One man said he would go back a totally different kind of reporter, one who approached his work more critically and professionally. Several people said they’d been to more than 30 prior workshops, but this was the first time anyone had expected them to work so hard, to push themselves. One guy said it felt like the first time anybody “cared” whether they got better or not.

There was only one point when I almost lost it. That’s when a young woman named Tracy stood up. Now, I know I’m always waxing poetic about seeing myself in the people of Africa, but Tracy really DOES look like me….at least, the me of 20 years and 40 pounds ago. I used to be that skinny, and so serious, so ramrod straight whenever I had to stand and speak before a group of people.

Tracy started off by saying, “My family wonders why I’m here today.” That’s because she had buried one of her beloved sisters the day before. I’ll never forget the numb, solemn expression on her face when she’d approached me on Thursday and asked if we could talk privately. Then Tracy told me that her sister had died, and asked to be excused so she could accompany the body back home to their village.

All I could do was grab the poor child and hug her. It was heartbreaking watching Tracy struggle to stay composed. I told her not to worry about coming back to the workshop…there’d be many others. She’d said she wanted to try and come back on Sunday, but I told her ONLY if she was up for it. I said she should in NO WAY feel like it was expected of her.

Sure enough, Tracy showed up Sunday morning, stoic, ramrod straight, her oval face just as solemn as ever. She sat quietly in the back row, adding a comment or two, but mostly watching. I learned later that day that her sister had swallowed a handful of pills. She was her husband's second wife, and Wife #1 was making her life miserable. That explained the numbness and shock, the kind of fog Tracy seemed to be in. I could relate. Until the day I die, I will never get over the fact that my own brother David, the Jones family icon, decided to go to sleep one day and never wake up. And I will never get over the guilt that he didn’t think he could turn to his family for help and support, rather than attach a hose to the exhaust pipe of his car and run it through the back seat, with the windows rolled up tightly.

Oh, well. After describing her family’s concerns, Tracy said she told them she had to be at the last day of the training because “this is my life. Let me come and learn from this workshop. I need to be there.”

Witnessing Tracy’s poise, born of numbness and shock, I wanted to weep. But I held it together. And then ANOTHER guy stood up and said I had acted like a mother toward the reporters. I had made the training a safe environment where they could fail and then keep on trying. Verily, the tears were ready to roll, but somehow I STILL kept it together.

So I guess I’m a mom even when I’m not trying to be one. I thought I was being tough, making them do things over and over, nudging them to aim for better than just good. Put bluntly, I thought I was being a hard-charging bitch. But they saw me as a motherly figure.

Okay, God. If this is the only way I get to be a mother, I’ll take it. It feels really, really great.