By Ray Ross
When I was five, my mother took in our first Catholic Charities baby. The way the program worked was that an unwed mother who had given birth would turn the baby over to Catholic Charities and, in turn, Catholic Charities would place the baby in a Catholic family for up to a year.
During the year the birth mother would try to get on her feet and decide whether she wanted to keep the baby or give the baby up for adoption.
About once every other month, the birth mother would come to our apartment and spend time with the baby. This was always very traumatic for my mother, because the birth mother would enviably cry and then my mother would start crying. This would happen when the mother would first arrive and then again just before she left.
The babies would come into our home when my mother wasn’t very pregnant or taking care of her own newborn (I’m the oldest of five).
For my mother’s efforts she received $10 per week. My mother was a saint, getting up at all hours of the night, feeding, changing, bathing, clothes washing and everything that goes into caring for a newborn.
When I was eleven, the last Catholic Charities baby came into our family. By this time, I was old enough to help. The baby’s name was Catherine, and I helped with the feeding, rocking, walking and playing, I also was tasked with hanging newly washed diapers on a very long set of clothes lines. We had one of those old fashion clothes washers when every washed item had to be wrung through a set of rollers at the top of the machine. (We forget how much work it was for a mother back in the day to do the laundry.)
During the winter the cloth diapers froze on the clothesline. Each diaper would freeze stiff. Taking them in was like harvesting frozen cardboard rectangles.
At any rate I fell in love with Catherine, and then one day her mother came and off she went to live with her mother. This left a hole in our family that was filled some months later with the birth of my youngest brother.
In this month when we celebrate Mother’s Day, I honor my mother for her selfless love, and tireless caring and nurturing of these babies and for the wonderful example she set for her own children.