It’s not who you know, but the connections made

Since May 1988, when I was four months pregnant with my first child, I have had the profound privilege of writing nearly 400 essays about family life for scattered newspapers around the country.

I have succumbed to occasional bouts of activism, supporting a mother’s choice to breastfeed in public and denouncing junk food in school lunchrooms. I have chided educators for starting middle school too early in the morning and upheld a woman’s choice to embrace motherhood above all else.

More than anything, this column has provided a space for exploring the personal — from potty training to adolescent funks, from Ninja Turtles to Instant Messenger, from tests for pregnancy to tests for a drivers’ permit, from screaming at Daddy not to throw the baby up in the air to marveling at Daddy’s skills as he taught that grown baby to sail.

I have learned a lot as I have written about life with children, a boy who turns 16 next month, a girl, 12, and another son, who is every bit of 7 years old. I have laughed. I have cried. Oh, how I have cried.

Thank God, I haven’t been alone.

There were moments during these 16 years when I didn’t think I could write another word. Then I’d open my mailbox or pull up my e-mail. And there would be a letter from a stay at home mother of three, writing in between changing diapers and wiping up juice spills to say, yes, she agrees with my recent column, that mothers must occasionally put themselves first.

There was the 73-year-old grandmother who e-mailed to say she agreed with my intent to have a simple summer focused on children. It’s true, she said, knowing all too well: Barefoot children won’t be around forever.

There have been countless other mothers and grandmothers, fathers and grandfathers from all over the country over the years and, once, even, a teenaged boy, who wrote with advice about how I could have handled my unruly children on a shopping trip.

There were, of course, Faye’s letters.

Faye Morgan, of Columbia, S.C., began to send letters in her signature curly cursive in the early 1990s when not too many people had e-mail. Faye also sent me trinkets.

Journalists aren’t supposed to accept gifts from readers, as gifts have the potential to taint a writer’s objectivity. But I was writing about family, and these were simple, homemade things Faye made herself — a cardboard jewelry box adorned with silk sunflowers, a tiny topiary and stationery calligraphied, “Debra-Lynn.”

I knew Faye would be terribly offended if I didn’t accept her gifts. And so I always accepted each of them, including a crocheted blue and pink blanket she surprised me with in 1997, when she heard I was pregnant for the third time.

Sadly, although I kept in touch with Faye by snail mail and eventually e-mail, although I called her once on the phone when I heard she was sick, I never got to thank Faye in person for the heart connection she sparked between us.

Faye died last year of breast cancer.

I knew within hours of her death because strangely, uncharacteristically, I woke in the middle of the night that night to check my e-mail. I didn’t even know her husband, Dwight, was aware of our friendship. But Faye had apparently instructed him to e-mail me as soon as she died.

I once heard it said that we are put on this Earth to help each other. The good life is the relational life.

No one knows this any better than a mother.

For daring to make connections in a world that is often too busy, or too afraid, to be intimate, especially with strangers. For stories, tears and laughter shared. For support, spoken and unspoken. For helping redefine community.

To mothers, everywhere, who dare to take the time to affirm and support another: There is no greater good.