A Day for Surrogate Mothers

Text and photos by Caridad

HAVANA TIMES, May 9 — I’ve often wondered why there isn’t a day for grandmothers. Why isn’t there the same saying for mothers that popularly exists about fathers: “a father is anyone, but there’s only one mother”?

Couldn’t we turn the tables or at least dedicate a day to all women that have been mothers without being the person who gave birth to their “children”?

Many would say that celebrating Mother’s Day includes grandmothers, since these, above all are mothers as well. But we know that millions of children around the world have been brought up by an elderly woman while the biological mother faces the exhausting routine of economically maintaining the family.

Other women will never know the painful act of giving birth. For different reasons they adopted children who they love like their own, sometimes even without legal guardianship over them.

They conform to providing them with their necessities, educating them and pampering them. Even though they don’t expect to be called mom, aunts, friends, neighbors, grandmothers, cousins offer love, time, energy to a boy or girl that, for one reason or another doesn’t receive the same from the person that brought them into the world, or if they do, have the good fortune to have two mothers… or even three.

Hats off to all those women that give their love, because of them the world is a little more beautiful.

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