Tears for this lonely story

There was once a woman who first felt the flicker of your life...

Who held that child, bursting with life and possibility, swelling with vitality, a flame
 inside her

Who named you. Who either thrilled to your presence or cried and died with the heaviness of responsibility and her own life altered, cut off or ripped from her

Who wondered what had become of you- who felt the empty carapace of her body once you had been stolen, or lost

Or who struggled to nurture the child to health and knowledge, thrilled to your triumphs and cried to herself with your failures

We, mothers, know this heaviness. For all mothers know this mass. For as surely as you now walk alone, once you were as inseparable from us as part of our own being- and neither could live with the other torn from them.

Because this burden we each know, we are responsible for all the children of every mother. Because if we do not repect the life that has been borne by another mother, then we forget our own that we have ourselves borne.