These moms know true love

Deedra Williams doesn't need breakfast in bed or a spa massage to celebrate Mother's Day tomorrow.

She received her gift last weekend at a quiet Montecito retreat from 15 women who, like her, are mothers of children with disabilities.

They hiked eucalyptus-shaded hills, listened to music and made collages with pictures cut from magazines. They talked for hours about the challenges of mothering children who may never be able to walk or speak, to go off to college or get married.

And everyone knew better than to interrupt, criticize or offer advice.

"No one tried to fix it here," explained Williams, a mother of two sons -- a "developmentally typical" 7-year-old, and a 14-month-old whose newborn jaundice left him with brain damage, hearing loss and cerebral palsy.

"We can relate to what each one is going through because we're all in the same boat," Williams said as we sat at table at La Casa de Maria Retreat with four other mothers.

"What I took away from this weekend," Williams said, "is acceptance."

And what I took away was a new appreciation for the unconditional mother-love that many of us give lip service to, as we continually push our children to improve themselves, carrying around our mental check-list of all their shortcomings.

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Raising a disabled child requires a sort of hyper- vigilance. "Motherhood amplified," Nina Loh called it, describing life with her 7-year-old twins -- a "typical" daughter and a son with spina bifida, who has had 13 surgeries and may need more. "The stakes are so high. And there's really no end in sight."

Woodland Hills therapist Diane Simon Smith knows the feeling well. The mother of two disabled sons, she began offering "Healing the Mother's Heart" retreats six years ago, to give women a safe place to vent "the anger, the guilt, the joy . . . all the feelings."

Smith's first child was born weighing less than 2 pounds. He was blind, mentally retarded and was never able to "walk, talk, sit, use his hands or feed himself," she said. He died of pneumonia at 17. His brother, two years younger and now 21, was born with Fragile X Syndrome, an inherited disorder that causes severe cognitive and behavioral problems.

I asked Smith if she felt cheated, robbed of some of the joys of motherhood.

Not cheated, she said, with its implied resentment and bitterness. Just sad, sometimes, "when I hear my friends talking about what their kids are doing . . . going off to college, getting married."