Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter



CAT Tracks for May 10, 2009
CHICK FLICK

Uh, actually a "chick book"...

Gentlemen...skip this edition...go visit your mama...see if she'll watch some sports with you.

Let her know you're coming and she'll probably bake some cookies for you...fix your favorite meal...anything for her baby!


This is NOT your regular CAT Tracks...it's a Mother's Day special. The style of this posting will be familiar to readers of julieanewell.com...where "Ronnie" gets in touch with his feminine side...


Okay, Ladies (and sensitive gentlemen)...

Just finished reading a book of a timely topic...motherhood.

No...I'm not THAT sensitive. I'm a reader of murder mysteries...preferably serial killer books of the "Silence of the Lambs" genre. Most mothers in my books wind up dead or grieving...killed or left with shattered lives by some very bad muthas.

This book - "Look Again" by Lisa Scottoline - was supposed to be in that vein.

Oops...

Turns out the "star of the book" is a reporter (single female) who covers a story of a sick child in a hospital, falls in love at first sight, finds out that the child's mother is anxious to give the child up for adoption, and adopts him. A year later, our new mother received a "missing child" notice in her mail, a child who had been kidnapped, a child whose computer-aged likeness is the spitting image of her son. The mother tries to put it out of her mind, but her reporter's curiosity gets the best of her. Against her father's and her lawyer's advice, she launches her own secret investigation. Thanks to a fellow cut-throat reporter, her quest becomes known to the real parents. After surviving a bloody show-down in her kitchen with the kidnapper and the child's real birth mother, life as she knows it ends when authorities literally rip her adopted son from arms in the hospital.

In honor of Mother's Day, I felt the following pages captured the bond of motherhood...from the mother's viewpoint, no matter how she arrived at that point:

With feelings that strong, is it any wonder that daughters and sons should spare at least one day a year honoring the person who gave them birth.


And, as an added bonus, there was even a "shout out" for stepmothers/stepdaughters.

The "star of the book" had lost her mother to cancer and was none to happy when her father announced that he was to take a bride, a woman named Barbara. (Her father, in fact, was in Italy getting married when all heck broke loose back home.)

During the "happy ending" epilogue, our star makes the following observation about her new stepmother:

    "...She had come to love Barbara, who wisely hadn't tried to replace her mother, because no one could. But somewhere along the line, she had opened her mind to the possibility that if you could love a child no matter how he came to you, then you could also love a mother, no matter how she came to you."


Okay, with that, I'm outta here.

Gotta go visit my 93-year-old mother...