When my daughter, Emma, was a baby girl, I rocked her to sleep every night, singing the Irish ballad, "The Maid of Culmore," a favorite of my maternal grandmother, Catherine Ellis.
Emma’s birth had been difficult, with an emergency stay at Dartmouth’s neonatal intensive-care unit. We thought we'd lose her, and every day I was grateful just to hold her.
Being a mother has been the greatest experience of my life, and I cannot begin to fathom what the mothers of the 234 young girls who were abducted in the middle of the night in Nigeria on April 14th are going through on this Mothers Day.
If I were a mother from Chibuk, Nigeria, and if I had lost my baby girl in that middle-of-the-night raid, I think I’d be nearly wild with grief, rage and fear.
Some of the Nigerian girls have apparently escaped. Others may already have been sold into forced marriages, which is really just a form of sexual slavery.
These are girls who were training to be doctors, teachers, and community leaders; they were at the formerly closed school to take their final exams. One more day, and they would have been on paths toward leadership. Instead, armed soldiers came into their school, herded them into trucks, and took them away.
According to the BBC's Tomi Oladipo, the name of the group responsible for the kidnapping is Boko Harum, which means "Western education is forbidden," in the Hausa language.
Nicholas Kristof, in the Sunday NYTimes, reports that the attack in Nigeria is part of a global backlash against girls’ education. The Pakistani Taliban shot 15 year old Malala Yousafzai in the head because she advocated for girls’ education. Acid has been thrown in the faces of girls walking to school in Afghanistan.
This cannot stand; we can no longer be silent.
Social media campaigns have started, with the hashtag "Bring Back Our Girls" catching fire. There have been demonstrations worldwide. Republican senator Susan Collins of Maine, and all 20 women serving in the Senate, signed a bipartisan letter calling on Obama to take action.
According to CNN anchor Isha Sesay, Nigeria's President Goodluck Jonathan has now accepted an offer of U.S. military support in the search for the girls. The Nigerian government has the whole world watching; an additional abduction of eight more girls, and a village raid, has caused a tipping point; and Boko Harum will now become the hunted.
By keeping up this public outcry, and by signing the change.org petition, now up to almost 600,000 signatures, we can perhaps influence real change in attitudes about women the world over.
This Mother’s Day, I’ll think of my daughter, now 26 and far from home. I’ll hold her close in my heart, and trust that she will remain safe and secure. And I’ll dare to hope that the Nigerian mothers – and fathers too for that matter — will soon be reunited with their abducted daughters – once again looking forward to futures bright with promise.
