How “other” mothers live.

Do you think about how the “other half” of mothers live? Not that other half…the wealthy-with-a-nanny-kind-of-mother. I am talking about the “other” mothers living around the world who are living in poverty, despair, daily fear, and anguish.

I do. I think about “other” moms around the world a lot.

Today, the other mother will watch her child suffer and will be powerless to stop it. Does she pray at night for the suffering to stop?

Are her prayers answered?

Today, the other mother, living in Somalia, makes the choice of leaving one of her weakest children behind to die because she has to keep walking to save her other five children from starvation. What hope does she have for her child’s future?

Today, literally thousands of children are dying daily in Somalia of hunger and their Mother’s can’t feed them. Food donated to aid organizations are being stolen and sold on the black market; never making it to these children.

Today, the other mother has a 3-year-old son who is working hard labor in a granite quarry in Nepal. Does she wish her son could “just be a kid”?

Today, the other mother lives in a home that is a shack in Kentucky. Her children sleep with blankets stacked high on the bed because they only have one wood stove to heat the whole house during the winter. Does she wish for her daughter to go to college?

Today, the other mother has a 9 year-old son who is an ex-child solider in the Ivory Coast. Is she proud of her child or does she cry herself to sleep at night?

Today, the other mother comforts a daughter who is gang raped as initiation into a street gang in Denver. Does she wish for her daughter to find a “good man”, get married and have a family of her own?

Today, the other mother, just a child herself, is raped by her father. Now pregnant, she is banished from her village, her family. She is lives on the streets. Desperate, she gives herself a botched abortion, then commits suicide.

Today, the other mother will be lured into selling her daughter for a better life in American. But what she may not know is she has sold her daughter as a sex slave to be raped and abused daily by her “owner”. She is powerless to do anything about it.

Today, the other mother is trapped in an abusive marriage. She is either physically or mentally abused, or both. Her children are beaten and/or molested by their father. She thinks she has no way out.

Today, the other mother is so desperate for a better life for her children she is willing to risk her and her child’s life being stuffed in the cargo hull of a boat just for the chance to get into this great country. Or, she pays her life savings to a man to sneak her across the border in a U-Haul truck, only to be caught by INS and sent back to her home country.

Why am I so lucky? Blessed? These mothers around the world aren’t so different from me.

There is no such thing as “other mothers”. We are all mothers. We have the same hopes, the same wishes, the same dreams, the same prayers. I think their prayers may be more desperate than mine, but they are still the same.

Ultimately we want the same things for our children.

We want our children to be safe. We want our children to grow up strong. We want our children to grow up, period. We want our children to be happy and healthy.

We blessed mothers must look out and help the other mothers. It’s not their problem, it’s our problem. Because mothers need to stuck together.

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Lord, I pray for the other mother today. You have blessed me so, Lord, I ask that you bless and protect and guide her in time of need today. Shelter her, Lord. Walk with her today because she needs you so. In God’s name I pray. Amen.