A Heart, Missing

May 12, 2019November 12, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Memoriam, Muse and Flow, Photography, Poetry, Reflections, Trauma and Development, Writing Tags: Emptiness, Grief, Loss, Miscarriage, Missing, Mother's Day, Mothering, One Word Sunday, Poetry, Pregnancy, Unspoken, Yearning 17 Comments

Photo: Yael Yehuda

There stands the empty crib

The room that will not hear

The sounds of cries or coos or laughter.

There are the walls,

Fresh paint

Fresh pain

For the awaited,

For a broken chapter.

A heart

Missing

Breast and breath

For an eternity of loss,

Till the hereafter.

Note: Dedicated with love to all empty-armed mothers (in all their manifestations and realities and outward presentations), on this Mother’s Day.

For Debbie’s One Word Sunday: Missing

Welcoming Hearts

May 14, 2017Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Current events, Life and love, Reflections, Writing Tags: Guidance, Hospitality, love, Mother's Day, Mothering, parenting, Raising Children, Thankful, The Daily Post 7 Comments

tender hand

For all the mothers, biological and adoptive, temporary or ‘forever,’ immediate and surrogate, spiritual, female and otherwise …

A day of thanks, for open hearts.

A day for those who carry, hold, deliver, care-for;

For those who pat-the-back-of-babies through long nights, who walk a groove into the floors in the new-parent-dance;

For those who wipe the brow of fever, whose arms and hands are never empty, who fill a plate for others before sitting down for theirs;

For those who watch over the children while their parents cannot be there – day in and day out, in emergency, or any needed time;

For those who fret and worry, contemplate and weigh each day, each milestone, each possible advance to a child’s healthy growing;

For those who open every corner of their heart for love far bigger than imagined;

For those who welcome little ones (and sometimes not so little) and parent, guide, teach, hug, steer safe, keep whole, allow, provide;

For those who still raise pieces of themselves even as they are called to raise others;

For those determined to change course from paths that harm, to ones that cradle;

For those who let be known that children matter, who fight to make the world a better place for those unable yet to lead but destined to inherit what we will leave them;

For the hospitality of parenting souls of all kinds;

For the depth of care so many offer;

For the triumphs and the challenges:

Deep thanks.

For The Daily Post

Mothering

May 8, 2016May 8, 2016Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Meditations, Reflections Tags: Gratitude, kindness, Mother Earth, Mother's Day, Mothering, NaamaYehuda, self-care, Thankful 4 Comments

tender care

Thankful

For mothering

In all its forms:

The immediate, the early, the continuous, the delayed;

The biological, the fostered, the adopted, the periodical, the incremental and the unusual;

To mothering by women, by men, by friends and neighbors, co-workers and teachers, siblings and relatives, by the kind smile of a stranger and moments of shared understanding;

To mothering by nature, by pets, by ocean waves, by breath and life’s constant flow and ebb;

To Mother Earth and Mother Moon;

To mothering of self, by self, by growth, by age and lessons learned and known …

To all of this, and more;

Thankful for mothering.

In all its forms.

tenderness

love2 tree

Note: all photos are taken from Pintrest. If you know their original provenance I’ll be happy to add specific credits!

Mother’s Day–A History of Seeking Peace

May 9, 2015May 9, 2015Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Reflections Tags: compassion, healing, History, Julia Ward Howe, Mother's Day, Mothering, Mothers' Peace Day Proclamation, Peace Leave a comment

Peace is in our hands ~ artist Valerie Lorimer

As we celebrate mothers of all forms and being, those carrying and bearing life, laboring to nourish and to nurture, guiding, teaching, holding, comforting, soothing, showing, listening, singing to and being with … Let us also remember where Mother’s Day originally came from and its purpose–a purpose that in its own way represents the yearning and dedication, hope and tenacity of mothering:

“let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace…” (from the proclamation below)

Here is to peace. To no more carnage. To love. To hope. To no more lost children. To counsel of heart and reason. To no more war.

Mothers’ Day Proclamation / Julia Ward Howe (1870)

Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.

“Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, disarm! The sword is not the balance of justice.” Blood does not wipe out dishonor nor violence indicate possession.

As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each learning after his own time, the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.

(Julia Ward Howe, Abolitionist–she also wrote “Battle Hymn of the Republic”)