Mother the World: Can't or Won't

I just spent an awesome day on Friday in Atlanta with Carolyn Twietmeyer and Traci Heim from Project Hopeful and Anna Belle Illien and her staff from Illien adoptions. We basically are finding strength in brainstorming in numbers even when we all had to establish a hand raising system because we tend to interrupt at times (guilty guilty and guilty again…said I)…Anyhow, somewhere early on when Traci and I were gabbing and not caring when we would interrupt eachother I said something that was so dead on to my passion in my MOTHER THE WORLD mission. I have trouble being concise. I can write books that need to be edited down because of too many words ..having enough material has never been a problem…being concise and having an ‘elevator pitch’ has always been a struggle.

So there I was with another MOTHER of the World (Traci) and I said it like this and I had to fight stopping dead in my tracks and holding back tears as it came out. I said “ I have a passion to honor the women who CAN”T mother their children by inspiring the women who WON’T mother to take action.” Please know the context of the statement. We were talking about the huge orphan crisis and how to bring the number of orphans hope and love. Do you remember being reprimanded as a child by the dour school teacher who would look up from their glasses and say “you can’t or won’t?” Some people literally can’t …others just Won’t…because they have been insulated and determined never to look at the fostering situation in America, domestic abuse, HIV, Child trafficking, cultural abuse.

Women who CAN’T in America:
1. Women who are infertile and desire to parent
2. People who can’t due to serious mental or physical disablilities
3. Those addicted to alcohol or drugs

Women who WON’T in America:
1. The women who get pregnant but abort
2. People who believe adoption is not their calling so do nothing
3. People who have no interest in the orphan crisis
4. People who would like to do something but never have due to not being introduced to proper options or ways to take action…

There is a distinct difference though in the mothers that I was talking about when making that statement because I was thinking of the mother of my Ethiopian children. She died and couldn’t mother….

Women who CAN’T in impoverished countries:
1. Women who know they will die due to diseases like AIDS, MALARIA, TB..they know the last possible act of love for their children is to make a life decision for them. Some relinquish them at orphanages due to knowing their pending death is coming.

Imagine desiring to MOTHER with all of your heart and yet knowing you “CAN’T’ because you will soon die because the AIDS MEDS are not coming your way. Or you never even knew about them. All you have known is that women die and there are babies and children without mothers….so, you make a decision for your children out of love….

I will never forget the day in 2007 when I prayed to God to USE me to be the answer to the prayers of a mother somewhere on the planet who could no longer MOTHER because of her pending death…I cried to God to allow me to be her angel and come. Every time I look into the eyes of my 3 Ethiopian children, I see her. Her name was Bayoush. I imagine she was beautiful even though we have no picture. She was young when she died….I think of her often. She is a huge motivation in my starting MOTHER THE WORLD…

My quote or new elevator pitch: “ I have a passion to honor the women who CAN”T mother their children by inspiring the women who WON’T mother to take action.” There are people who won’t do anything and I believe they just need to be educated properly on what they can do…so we need to find them and get to them.

In case you haven’t caught on yet “mother’ is a verb that applies to taking action to love, give, nurture, care for…it doesn’t require giving birth..it can take place in adopting, advocating and volunteering..It does always mean though honoring and respecting life from conception to natural death.

My motivation for MOTHER THE WORLD also comes from once being a woman who was one of the ones who “wouldn’t” mother. The underlying inspiration of MOTHER THE WORLD is really from my own wound from NOT mothering and saying NO to mothering in having an abortion as a teen. I was one of the women who I now say are the ones I am determined to inspire to take action. So, here I am now healed and with a deeper understanding of who I am and of what it means to ‘adopt God’s heart.’ These days the women who CAN’T haunt me …because there are too many of them. And although it is a blessing that I get to honor God by serving them in mothering their children, something is still not right.

One of the things we talked about in this little ‘consortium’ as Anna Belle Illien called us all, was in helping women with HIV/AIDs to live longer lives in places like Ethiopia, India, Guyana by investing in them and offering them hope …obviously offering ways for them to get their meds but also in finding ways for them to have longevity, to dream for a future where they can be the ones to see their kids graduate, get married.

What can the women here who WON’T do? Well I think with the right motivation they will turn into women who WILL make a huge impact in changing the planet by changing the lives of many. First, it would be great to see more people adopt and we are planning on ways to offer education and information to dispel the fears of adoption to many. But it also would be great to have more resources to offer life and sustainability abroad for women like BAYOUSH…imagine if she would have had the right meds and the right resources through micro-financing, business opportunities, education…We can help the women here who WON’T or haven’t taken action to participate in making major changes in the lives of women they will never see. So, I am praying everyone stays tuned as in the next several months we come up with ways to hopefully create options in a world that currently offers so little to the women internationally who CAN’T but would love to MOTHER their children into old age. And if you know of women who WON’T …well we also believe we have ways to inspire and transform them into active humanitarians even without ever leaving their cul de sacs…my plan is to allow them to MOTHER THE WORLD without missing their kids soccer games…but if they are really bold they can travel way outside of their subdivisions and come to some exotic places with us if they’d like to…



So my new elevator pitch is once again this: “ I have a passion to honor the women who CAN”T mother their children by inspiring the women who WON’T mother to take action.”

Mother the World: Can’t or Won’t?