Gifts of Motherhood
For a Lot Of Moms, Having It All Means Giving Something Back

By Lonnae O'Neal Parker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 14, 2006

Before Michele Booth Cole walked her two daughters inside the Toys R Us that December morning two years ago, she made herself clear. They were there to buy a Christmas gift for a little girl at Mommy's job whose own mommy and daddy couldn't afford to get one, she explained to 5-year-old Grace and 3-year-old Madison.

"You will get gifts later on, but we're not getting anything for you. Do you understand?" The girls nodded. "Are you going to be okay?" They nodded again. "And we're not going to ask for anything," Cole stressed. More vigorous nodding.

They combed the colorful aisles of the huge Langley Park store, and the girls couldn't resist pointing to all the toys they liked but were careful not to ask for. They found the Bratz doll from the other little girl's wish list and stood in line. They looked at the games and dolls and dressy feather boas one more time. Hard to leave it all behind, but they did without a fuss, Cole recalls.

It was a small moment to reflect on sharing and selflessness, she says. One of many such intersections between her life as a busy mother of three girls (Grace and Madison, now 7 and 5, and 23-month-old Justine) and her passion for hundreds of other children whom she serves as executive director of Safe Shores -- The D.C. Children's Advocacy Center, a nonprofit organization for victims of child abuse. It was the kind of moment she wishes mainstream American culture had more of.

For many, this is a time of inward-looking, high-powered motherhood. Shelves of books focus on the acquisitive, obsessive, competitive aspects of new-millennium parenting. The right clown for the best party for the perfect child. The math tutor and soccer coach for the little ballerina . But some women turn from that -- or at least refuse to make a steady diet of that alone. They hold to the adage "to whom much is given, much is expected," to the Jewish cultural demand of tikkun olam ("repair the world") or to the W.E.B. Du Bois notion of "a talented tenth" who lead by example.

There are deeper, more rewarding ways to be a modern mom, they say. It merely requires taking that high-powered gaze and training it beyond just the threshold of your own door.

For years Linda Swain ran a travel business with her husband outside Philadelphia, and cared for her four children. "I coached softball, directed their talent shows and chaperoned field trips," she recalls.

But she always felt she was wired to do more. At softball games, she says, "Parents would get angry with me because I would make sure every kid would play, no matter if we were winning or losing." Kids have to learn that competition doesn't always rule the day, Swain says.

She's had her children volunteer since they were small. Church and school activities at first: visiting the elderly, helping with clothes drives for the homeless, making dinners for shut-ins. For 10 years, Swain has helped raise money for the Arthur Ashe Youth Tennis and Education Center in Philadelphia. She's taken her kids along to watch what she does and to play with the kids, most from disadvantaged backgrounds, who participate in the programs.

"I can talk until I'm blue in the face," she says, "but unless they're actually seeing it, it doesn't really become a part of them." Sometimes they complained -- I don't want to get up that early, can I do it next week? I have homework! -- but, tough, she says. Responsible parenting means resisting the complaints if it helps mold good citizens. Now, a daughter who attends Fordham University does weekend community clean-ups in New York City, and another daughter is helping choreograph a dance program for a fundraiser at the Ashe Center.

Three years ago, Swain began hosting a television show, "Moms on the Move," which airs on cable channels and the Philadelphia NBC affiliate and features mothers who devote time or money or smarts to good causes. "I don't know how we can effect the change that we need in the world," she says, "if we don't get out of our private circles and reach out to people we don't even know."

Historically, women's work has always included outreach and caring for the most disadvantaged in society, says Kathleen McCarthy, director of the Center on Philanthropy at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

In the 1790s, the first women's charities in large Eastern cities helped keep widows out of almshouses where the cities dumped paupers, vagabonds and madmen. Women's advocacy helped abolish slavery and win suffrage and, briefly, temperance. "Women's clubs and social settlements introduced kindergarten and juvenile courts at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century," says McCarthy. The black clubwomen's movement worked in anti-lynching crusades, established schools and helped fund black newspapers.

Volunteer work continues to be a major avenue of influence, McCarthy says, and children especially benefit from exposure to volunteer networks that give them "a sense that they can actually change something for the better."

It's also a matter of self-interest. When choosing students, top colleges and universities pay particular attention to volunteer and extracurricular activities, McCarthy says.

One upcoming study finds that volunteerism in the young is a strong predictor of professional success. Francine Carb, president of Markitects, a Philadelphia-area marketing research firm that conducted the study, says interviews with more than 90 women showed that volunteering incubated and honed their organizational and public speaking skills. Carb says many of her interviewees were part of a generations-long tradition of giving back, one they were trying to pass along to their own children.

"There are examples of women who are doing well financially and professionally, and they don't want to raise bratty -- okay, let's say entitled -- children," says Carb. "Kids that feel they are entitled to cars and money and private education and all the electronic devices in the world. Children who feel there isn't another side, there isn't an inner city, there isn't a less fortunate group in their community."

Carb cites her volunteering to prepare meals for the elderly this past Martin Luther King Day with her 12-year-old son. He had to cut up raw chicken, and was not happy about it. "At first he was like, 'It's yucky, it's chicken, why do I have to do this?' " Carb remembers. Then she told him to think of his grandparents and to imagine he was making food for them. After that, he started cutting with gusto.

Part of good mothering "is to teach your children about the entire society, not just your own microcosm neighborhood of 10 square blocks," she says. It's a sentiment a number of parents share, says Jason Willett, a spokesman for the national nonprofit VolunteerMatch, whose Web site matches volunteers to organizations that need them. Willett says the site has generated 2.5 million matches since 1998. In 2001, he says, search fields were added to the Web site because so many parents were clamoring for opportunities to volunteer with their kids.

"This is my theory: given something specific people can easily respond to, they really respond to that with their time, their expertise, their money," says Bethesda resident Nancy Leopold. In 2001, she co-founded CollegeTracks at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, where her daughter went to school. The nonprofit organization, which has expanded to Wheaton High School, works with students who need help applying to colleges and getting financial aid.

"It became very clear to me that there were kids at Bethesda-Chevy Chase who were not going to have the same advantages in applying to colleges as my kids would have -- who didn't have a grownup in their lives who had been through the college application process," Leopold says.

Leopold's mother was a civil rights and antiwar activist. "That was the sort of soup I swam in," she says. They weren't observant Jews, but "adhered with fanaticism to the cultural demand that one give back," she says. "We were comfortable. We had all the rights and privileges that made up a full-fledged member of society, and we had a responsibility to make sure others did as well."

Three summers ago her daughter spent a month with other high schoolers in Costa Rica, volunteering at a day care center. And Leopold describes her 15-year-old son as a kind, sensitive, socially gifted child. "Just a mensch," she says. "He doesn't have the specific program to prove it, but he will."

Karen Sternberg of Great Falls is a part-time gemologist with three girls: a 12-year-old and 10-year old twins. They organize their giving, especially with Safe Shores, according to the change in seasons, sending e-mails to collect clothes from neighbors and friends. Capri pants and shorts for spring and summer, school clothes in the fall and winter coats. Her husband, a restaurateur, also sponsors annual dinners to support the Hoop Dreams charity that funds educational opportunities in poor communities. Her girls have violin and jazz dance and tennis. They go to Hebrew school once a week and soccer practice twice.

"It does feel overwhelming, and sometimes it is," Sternberg says. Sometimes it takes longer to put together that bag of clothes or drive it into the city because the rest of life sneaks in. But "I think you have to make time for it. If you have to put it on a schedule, you schedule it. It just becomes something you do."

In addition to the clothes gathered for Safe Shores, last year her oldest daughter and two friends made $35 from a lemonade stand and donated that as well. A couple of times a year they prepare emergency foster care bags for the center, personalizing them by imagining they are shopping for girls their own age.

In addition to time constraints, "sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the need," Sternberg says. "You can't do everything, you can't give to everything. We pick our charities and interests and try to give to those as much as we possibly can."

"It makes me feel like I'm a good person," says 10-year-old Madison.

On a recent weekday afternoon, Michele Booth Cole gives a tour of the cramped Safe Shores offices. She walks through the waiting room full of toys and points out the pictures of the staff members when they were small, so that children in crisis who come to Safe Shores might feel less intimidated. Cole, who lives with her husband and girls in Silver Spring, says sometimes the contrasts in her life hurt. The first time she went to an event at her daughter's school, she got teary "thinking about how much pain and lacking there is in the lives of some kids, and how much excess there is in the lives of others."

"One ever feels his twoness," she quotes W.E.B. Du Bois.

The rich learning environment at the school is what any parents would want for their children, Cole says, but she doesn't think her kids will become acquisitive. For one thing, they can't afford it, she says, laughing. Her husband also works with a nonprofit, as a director of a college counseling program for middle through high school students in Washington.

With her Harvard undergrad and Georgetown law degrees, Cole figures she could probably make five times what she makes now. But "it's a purpose thing," she says. "After all, what are we here for?"

She gets that these are difficult mommy times. She and her husband are constantly busy with the demands of their three young girls -- with doing hair and reading stories and making crafts. But she says her life can't just be about the beauty and love inside her own house.

"For one, it's kind of shortsighted if you really think about it, not to try to affect for the better the world where your children are going to live as adults. If nothing else, I want my children to live in a world where somebody is not going to crack them over the head to get their purse or their iPod."

She says her own purpose was solidified by growing up with her grandmother, a pastor's wife in Columbus who taught Sunday school and typed church bulletins. In college, she mentored a little girl for nearly two years. Cole gained perspective from "seeing the experience of someone who had so much more struggle ahead of her," she says.

Teaching her girls to look around them is as much a part of her parenting as the recent spring break activities like a trip to the zoo and baking bread. "They seem to feel empowered by a bigger sense of themselves by doing something for somebody else. But that doesn't carry the day all the time," Cole says. "They are 5 and 7, and sometimes they want just for them."

Still, it's about making choices, she says. "We're all endowed with gifts and talents and abilities -- something we can do here to make it better. Some people say, 'I'm pouring it all in my kids,' " Cole says, but "there's enough to go around."

It's like falling in love with your first baby. Then adoring the second and third just as much. The same is true when you direct just a little of that high-powered modern mom intensity outside your own space.

"Your heart doesn't have this limited, finite capacity," Cole says. "It has unlimited capacity, and you find out the more you share, the more you are able to do."