Shon Ewens stops in the middle of telling me about a troubling change she’s noticed among brand-new mothers in Sarasota, because she has to deliver an I-mean-business command to her own three children: “Get. The. Cat. Down. Now, please.”
I don’t ask what the cat is up to, because Ewens has enough going on in her household. Aside from her adjunct gig as resident chief of home learning and nonstop family meals, she’s made radical adjustments to her regular job as executive director for the Healthy Start Coalition of Sarasota County.
For one thing, her garage is full of diapers, wipes and food. With help from her husband and kids, she’s turned their residence into a distribution center supplying some 485 Healthy Start clients with what they need to get their fledgling, often vulnerable families from one day to the next. The moms stop by and retrieve packages with their names attached, assembled using child labor, from a 6-foot-long table in her driveway.
She’s probably breaking some agency rules, she admits — and I’m thinking maybe a few local zoning ordinances. But this is a mission critical system, and Ewens refuses to let technicalities make these families’ hard lives harder.
“We have to be unconventional,” she says, with the same glimmer of steel in her voice I heard when she was talking about the cat.
Each year, Mother’s Day is like a long wooden spoon that reaches all the way to the bottom of our hearts and stirs up a swirl of feelings. For me what surfaces first, every time, is the sensation of my own mother’s voice — elegant and textured, like slubbed silk; soothing, unforgettable.
Today I’ll be feeling delighted gratitude for my own children, of course. And thinking of a coworker whose family will be part of a car parade at the Aviva Senior Life center, so he can finally wave to his mom. And hoping that those full-time working mothers like Ewens will come in for a bit of pampering and adoration for just this one day. Maybe the fathers can get their turn next month.
But I’ll also be thinking about the freshly minted mothers that Ewens described, who are bringing babies into a world they don’t begin to recognize.
“They’re scared,” Ewens told me. “They’re secluded and they can’t have all of their family members and friends there with them.”
She’s seeing an increase in cases of postpartum depression, and expecting more to come — such a cruel start for any family. Her board is working with other nonprofits, united by the Barancik Foundation’s First 1,000 Days initiative, to collaborate on addressing new mothers’ now-prevalent feelings of isolation and sadness.
Any of these providers can use your help. You can support Healthy Start Sarasota on its Facebook page, or at healthystartsarasota.org.
Motherhood is an act of bravery, even at the smoothest of times. This is not that time.
Barbara Peters Smith is the Herald-Tribune’s opinions editor.
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Mothers’ courage — all day, every day - Sarasota Herald-Tribune
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