By Rebecca Trujillo | directora
Magical shoes is working to affirm mothers with daughters and daughter with mothers. The work consists of working together in affirmation groups of mothers and in affirmation groups of daughters and then bringing them together to celebrate and learn together with the other mothers and daughters. The program uses a lot of dynamics. Our psychologist is leading this program because right now in these families we are working with all young girls who are older than 13. At the same time one of our social promoters is working with the mothers directly in the neighborhoods. She is finding ways to affirm the mothers. The aim is to help them to affirm one another, by walking in each other’s shoes. This is where it becomes difficult because many of the mothers are struggling with their daughters as they are recalling the problems that they had at this age. Staff are coordinating this work together to share the information across the line so that each girl will be able to hear the affirmation of their mother without reacting to their mother’s fears. Their mothers need to face their own fears as they think about their daughter growing up in a world which was not so easy for them, especially because their daughters have to face that world with a disAbility which the Mothers do not understand. So the first subject is learning more about their daughter’s disAbility, and understanding.
The first task is to help the girls understand their own disAbility without blaming their disAbility on their moms. And their moms have to forgive themselves and not blame themselves for their daughter’s disAbility. In all of this we are counting on the collective wisdom of the two groups before we bring them together again as a total group. We are grateful for the help we have gotten through Global Giving in order to attempt this project at a pace which fits the mothers and daughters and not at an accelerated pace which only skims the surface. We are also integrating the work we are already doing with these families in special education, therapy, and prevention of violence and in the mother to mother program. We are learning that it is not easy to do this work in a vacuum but that we need to give these daughter-mom groups special attention because there is a strong nerve of fear. And we want to be sensitive to their fear by giving them facts about their disAbilities and what is known about those disAbilities, because knowledge dispels fear. We are doing a survey on their understanding of their disAbilities and their acceptance of these disAbilities with both the mothers and the daughters to create a baseline. For all of us in FE the mother daughter relationship is very important and is often ignored in the work for people with a handicap, so we want to face this together and make changes.
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