Here’s a clip from yesterday’s radio interview, which was a wonderful, in-depth hour conversation. (This is just a seven minute section.)
“Oprah Radio host Dr. Laura Berman talks with Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, author of Hiroshima in the Morning, about her unconventional mothering style. Plus, they discuss how modern women are redefining their roles as mothers.”
Listen here.
Live, and in-person are two different things, and April 5th is my mother’s birthday.
LIVE is the Dr. Laura Berman radio show on the OWN network, beginning at 6 pm.
IN-PERSON in New York City is the Huffington Post’s ‘Moment I Knew’ Meetup, hosted by Melissa Francis, CNBC anchor and “Divorce Wars” correspondent Where: Macao Trading Co., 311 Church St. (between Walker St. & Lispenard St.), New York, 10013 When: April 5th, 7 to 10 p.m. Cost: Free! Important: Please RSVP to [email protected] with the subject line “Moment I Knew Meetup RSVP NYC”
FREE food & drink for the first hour of the event!
Mobile Libris will be on-site, selling books by all author-performers.
For anyone who missed the Heart of a Woman radio show and couldn’t get it through the link I posted before, here is a better link.
It’s an hour long discussion of everything which some people have been wishing for with the narrow focus on motherhood issues in some of the recent press.
It was a pleasure to talk about motherhood, care-taking and women’s choices on Gayle King’s show today on OWN radio. We didn’t stop chatting for a moment, even through the commercials!
From my article today on Salon:
“The question I am always asked is, “How could you leave your children?” How could you be the mother who walks away? As if my children were embedded inside me, even years after birth, and had to be surgically removed? As if I abandoned them on a desert island, amid flaming airplane debris and got into the lifeboat alone?”
Read the whole essay here.
The two things that everyone wants to hear:
You are safe.
I see you.
It comes up in the context of children, in an article on The Huffington Post by Judith Acosta about verbal healing, but it’s what we all want, even when we have grown beyond those fragile, trusting years, even after we have been disappointed in friends, rejected in love, worn out by work, surprised and confused. It is why we marry, why we create community and organize religion. Why we buy things we think we will possess forever; why we think we can own anything.
And it is why, I suspect, we believe the fear-mongers when they say: “You are just like us” (I see you); “Trust us to keep the bad/different guys away from you” (You are safe).
My most vivid memories of my mother, even now that I am one, are of her assuring me that whatever the latest dishonorable, stupid thing I did was, it would pass. I would not have to carry it forever. Stealing candy from a store when I was in grade school. I remember the panic, the sinking in my stomach that I could never make this right, that I could never be worthy of my parents’ love.
You are safe, she said. I see you.
And though that was close to forty years ago, I can still feel that gift she gave me. I can still feel her climbing into my bed to hold me and wipe my mistakes and inadequacies away. To thank her, I often try to give that same sense of safety and being seen to everyone I meet, even if just in a smile. Thank you, Mom.
Can you still feel your mother?