Motherhood March 2014

Mother's Day 2014.
The only birth records naming me as a mother date from 1982, a few weeks shy of my forty-first birthday, but this this e-mail gives credence to the belief of many that I became a mother in 1969 at the age of twenty-seven and continued to collect and raise children, on an annual basis, for forty more years.

Dear Carol,
    In reality, of course  we are more like the best of friends - but I wanted to also wish you a Happy Mother's Day  . . .there are many different aspects to being a mother - but when it comes to your relationship with your students, you have truly mothered us!  I have never had a more loving, supportive, nurturing and guiding mentor in my life - and for that you have my love and my infinite appreciation and gratitude.  

Pet

Thus, my daughter's siblings number well into the hundreds, the number of close friends listed on my Facebook page.

This blog is dedicated and written to my many "children." Those first students arrived on the college campus during the academic year of Kent State, the event that shook them into awareness and activism. My eclectic family survived the defeat in Vietnam, learned to distrust our nation's leaders during Watergate, saw the end of The Berlin Wall, supported each other throughout 9/11, and realized, as we  shared funeral grief and sewed tributary AIDS quilt squares, that race and religion were not the only causes of prejudice.

Now we stay in touch via Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, the Internet, email and sometimes we actually pick up the phone and have a heart felt talk.

This blog is attributed to "Noel Battles" a name I was forced to create to keep most of the men on our faculty at peace with the fact that I always did my "strong woman number" with humor and as a result most often "succeeded...without really trying."

Stay tuned for Blog 2- the creation of Noel Battles.