Mixed Blessings : On Mom’s Big Day, Some Get Pampered, Others Struggle

Mothers all across the Southland were pampered, ignored and obligatorily honored on the first blisteringly hot Sunday of the year.

Mothers who survived last week’s Westlake-area fire struggled to get their families’ lives back on track.

Mothers in jail got a few more visitors.

Homeless mothers got something special to eat.

Elderly mothers, some of whom have outlived their children, got remembered by strangers.

And on the mayoral campaign trail, even though neither Michael Woo nor Richard Riordan could spend quality time with Mom--could it be mere coincidence that Father’s Day comes after the election?--both courted the Mom vote.

Riordan announced that he was flying to New York on Sunday afternoon to see his 101-year-old mother, Geraldine, while Woo brought his 76-year-old mother, Beth, to the opening of his Harbor-area campaign office in Wilmington.

“This is a good way to have Mother’s Day, with a great deal of hope for the future,” Beth Woo said.

Woo, who planned a private Mother’s Day dinner, shook hands with potential voters who were sinking their fingers into plates of seafood at Ports o’ Call, a shopping center in San Pedro.

“We were walking through the food tables and everybody has been eating shrimp,” Woo said. “My hands are sticky.”

Riordan, who is expected back from his Mother’s Day jaunt today, also campaigned in the area. At the Harbor Christian Center, after Pastor Don Ezell delivered a sermon extolling the virtue of forgiveness, Riordan took to the pulpit and quipped: “If Mr. Woo attacks me more than 490 times a day, do I still have to forgive him?”

Meanwhile, across town, it was a somber Mother’s Day for those still reeling from the Burlington Avenue apartment fire that claimed 10 lives, including those of two pregnant women.

At the Red Cross shelter set up in the Belmont High School auditorium, the faces of the women were lined with the stress of being mothers without homes. For nearly a week, Catalina Martinez, who used to live in the building, has been looking for a new home for herself and her four kids.

“Everything is so expensive,” sighed a despondent Martinez at a Mother’s Day brunch organized by the Red Cross.

The one-bedroom apartments she can afford have refused to take her, she said. “They say I have too many kids. I don’t know what to do. What am I supposed to do--send them to Mexico?” She said thieves have stolen the few things of value from her Burlington Avenue apartment--a telephone, a radio.

Across the picnic table, Marta Guillen offered to help, telling Martinez about the one-bedroom place she just found. Wiping her brow and eating her first meal of the day, the mother of three says she is relieved that things will start getting back to normal for her and her family.

“Thank God,” added Guillen, caressing her 2-year-old daughter sitting on her lap.

“It’s very hard to be out on the streets like this with your children. They don’t eat and sleep here too well. The Red Cross treats us very well, but it’s not like at home.”

Eleven-year-old Rosa Ramirez, one of the 36 children and 24 adults still staying at the Red Cross shelter, would rather forget about Mother’s Day this year.

“We don’t have the same friends. Some of them have died,” she said, waiting for her mother to join her for brunch. “It’s just too sad to celebrate. I just hope we get a new apartment soon.”

Elsewhere, a program to help mothers with AIDS find suitable families to adopt their children opened its doors Sunday. Called Tanya’s Children, the nonprofit foundation was started by Tanya Shaw, a single mother who died of AIDS in February and who had struggled to find a family to take in her two young daughters.

At two Skid Row missions, scores of homeless mothers were treated to special meals, and at the Sybil Brand Institute for Women, more visitors than usual waited in line to talk to women inmates--friends or relatives--behind unbreakable partitions.

At a Glendale convalescent home, aging mothers, many of whom have outlived their children, received single stems of carnations, gerbera daisies and mums, donated by a local florist.

Dolores Tendero, 91, did not have a vase for her orange freesias, and her one living daughter--the other died some years ago--could not come to see her on Mother’s Day.

But with tears running down her face, Tendero said she was grateful.

“Whatever you have, you have to be content,” Tendero said.