Mothers

Pumping breast milk at the office is considerably more time-consuming and inconvenient than feeding an infant formula. So the latest breastfeeding research will come as no surprise to anyone who’s considered either option: Women who take the least amount of maternity leave may be less likely to breastfeed, or at least breastfeed for very long, than women who take longer maternity leaves.  Researchers at the Georgia Department of Community Health...

A grandmother calls to her grandson, hushing him as she pins a flower on his surf shirt. Parents guide their children to an altar perfumed with incense and kneel together to pray. They all turn to see a procession, heralded by gongs and graced by monks trailed by worshipers balancing offerings on their heads. Westerners celebrate Mother's Day. On Sunday, Buddhists came together at Hue Quang pagoda in Santa Ana, ushering in Le Vu Lan , honoring mothers and wearing a pink or red rose if their own mom was still alive and a white rose if she had died.

SALTILLO, Mexico - The mothers knock on the doors of flophouses and morgues. They sift through pictures of prisoners and the dead. Clutching pictures of their own, some from long ago, they ask the same questions, over and over. Have you seen him? Does she look familiar? Occasionally, there is a reported sighting. More often, it's another shake of the head, a "Sorry, no. " And with that, weariness stooping their shoulders and worry sagging their faces, they board their bus and move on to another town.

Day laborer Mohammed Badr clearly didn't expect trouble when he left home to join the pro-democracy protests in Tahrir Square early on Jan. 29. He took his 5-year-old son, Mahmoud, and promised to return for dinner. "He kissed me goodbye and said, 'Don't be afraid,'" his mother, Sabrine, said Wednesday. "Then he looked me in the eye and said, 'You are not my real mother. Egypt is my real mother. I must go save her.'" Friends brought the boy home safe that afternoon, but the family didn't learn of Badr's fate until nightfall.

"Reluctance to Execute Women May Save Mother Who Killed 3 Sons" (Nov. 26) mentions that mothers who escape the death penalty are often portrayed as victims, but where is the justice for the real victims of their crimes? Where is the sympathy for the children whose lives were lost at the hands of the person who brought them into this world? The death of a child at a mother's hand is the ultimate betrayal. Why doesn't the punishment fit the crime? Sara Rice Palos Verdes Estates

In his column of Sept. 15, "She's a Mother Just Like Any Other," Leo Buscaglia has really missed in his interpretation of the behaviors of mothers "seeing their children as extensions of themselves." In my opinion, as a mother of four adults and one teen-ager, I feel some women of my generation behave in such a manner, not only as a way of showing caring, but, perhaps because they themselves have not grown, changed and become individual human beings comfortable with those changes.

A dozen years ago, my editor at the Los Angeles Times asked if I wanted to interview novelist Mary Gordon, who was in Los Angeles on a book tour. Enormously pregnant, I said yes, partly because I love Mary Gordon and partly because her hotel was two blocks away from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center — if I went into labor during the interview, I figured I could just walk. Given my state and Gordon's sympathetic nature, our conversation turned toward the difficulties of working and, in particular, writing mothers.

Terrell Owens has never been one to shy away from any kind of attention. Now that he's not getting it on the football field anymore, it's really no surprise he agreed to face three of the four women he's had children with on Tuesday's episode of the "Dr. Phil" show. But even T.O., the attention hound that he is, may have gotten more than he bargained for. None of the three women thinks too highly of Owens -- one of them even called him " evil " -- and they were all happy to share a laundry list of grievances with the father of their children.