When I think of courage, I think of my friend M.  When I first met her she was a happily married woman with five beautiful children and a nice home, living what looked like the suburban dream. 
 
A couple of years later she had six children, was pregnant with the seventh, and had just lost her beloved mother to cancer.  And then her husband left her for the woman he'd been having an affair with for a couple of years.
 
These things happen.  They happened to her.  She fought hard for her marriage, hard for her family, and she lost. 
 
He quit his job and put his assets in his new partner's name so he didn't have to pay maintenance for his children.  He never paid a cent, despite being ordered to by the courts.
 
M. brought up seven children on her own.  She got up early, she went to bed late.  She put her creativity on hold, she worked as many jobs as she needed to.  She got sick.  She kept going.  She made good nutritious meals out of next to nothing, and she accepted charity with grace when every fibre of her being rebelled against it. She made her home a loving, welcoming place.  She got out of bed day after day after day when she was sick with grief and exhaustion and she did what needed to be done.
 
She has made heroic efforts to allow her children to have a positive relationship with their father.  She spent Christmas on her own every second year.  She never denigrated him to them, and she grit her teeth and attended school functions with him for her children's sake.  She negotiates with her ex-husband's new partner to make sure her children are cared for when they are at his house.  She feels sick and shaky and often cries when she puts the phone down, but she does it and she does it with grace and courtesy.
 
She has done this, suffering from depression and poverty and illness for more than 10 years now.  Her older children are out in the world and starting to understand her sacrifices.  Her younger children are still heedless and demanding.  Every one of those children has been clothed and fed and cared for and loved.  And every day M. gets up and does it again. 
 
I hope that I can help her to hang on, so that one day she will have the time and energy to write and paint, and make the children's books that have been burbling away inside her for a long, long time.  Because they're going to be very good and that courage and integrity is going to make them the books you'll want to buy for your children and your friends' children and children you've never met.


(name withheld by request).

...a story of my own.

My middle child was born with allergies, quite literally a couple of patches of eczema under each leg on the day she arrived.  The midwife dismissed them, as did the doctor, but she was an excessively unhappy baby and over time the patches grew and began to cover her entire body until it was obvious she had severe atopic dermatitis.

The creams only seemed to make things worse.  Her allergies increased, spreading to asthma, hayfever, severe food and drug reactions.  Every day of her life she was driven crazy with the itching; I vividly recall lying her down on her towel after a bath when she was around 18 months old; she was scratching her legs, crying with frustration, and, with a look of desperation no baby should ever know anything about, holding her arms out and begging, 'help me'.

And I did.  I read and researched, took her to specialists, made my own creams and ointments, tried a thousand others, changed her diet, her bedding, her toys. Stopped wearing perfume, used homemade cleaning products, the least offensive washing powders. Picked my way through the complicated maze of sensitivities and true allergies; every day something else, something new.

Eventually things changed for the better.  The itching lessened, the patches shrunk, the unhappy baby grew into a joy-filled pre-schooler.  Years of dedication and educating myself on her particular allergies and their effect on her particular body had made a genuine difference.  How much of one, I'll never quite know - but I do know that when people saw how well she was doing and told me how lucky I was, I became angry.  I knew how hard we had worked and how quickly things worsened again when we dropped our guard.  They still do.  So luck, schmuck.

Most of all, I learned that my actions could make someone's life better.  That making mistakes was part of the process and just meant I needed to try again. That I could make use of experts without having my actions dictated to by them.  That I could trust my own understanding, and rely on my own persistence.

And, of course, that I had been blessed with a daughter who was one of the very best.

(Submitted by Megan Young: www.thescentofwater.typepad.com)