Mothers

Sometimes, late at night, her faith run ragged from trying to raise a voice from the dead, Kim Mallory sneaks away to listen to her dream. She clicks her son's old laptop to YouTube. She clicks to an old video of her son giving an interview. He is Stafon Johnson, a USC running back, speaking to a television reporter after scoring the first two touchdowns of his career. "He's stuttering, he's searching for the right words," she says. "He sounds just beautiful."

If you ask my 10-year-old son, he'd tell you that I'm not a "real doctor. " His point of reference is my husband, David, a surgeon who usually leaves the house before 6 and works 12-hour days. Most mornings, while David is at the hospital preparing for the operating room, I'm home making breakfast for our kids or packing lunches for school. In the late afternoons, while David is wrapping up office hours, I'm busy driving my son to soccer practice or overseeing his homework. It wasn't always this way. Throughout medical school and residency, I worked as hard - if not harder - than my husband.

Some see telecommuting as a working mother's best friend. After all, having access to the office from home -- whether over the phone or through e-mail -- means Mom can be more flexible, fitting in family duties while also getting the workplace job done.  She can bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan ... at the same time!   The only problem, a new study in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior reports, is that performing this mighty feat may make her feel guilty.

An innovative social program taking hold in Latin America may have left Luz Dary Lopez a single mother, but it has helped her and hundreds of other poor women in this central Colombian city gain a measure of financial independence, self-respect and better living standards for their families. Partly funded by the World Bank, the program, called Families in Action, pays Lopez and 4,200 other poor mothers in Tunja about $100 a month as long as they attend diet and hygiene classes, get their children to school and have them undergo medical exams.

There is this image: Kim Clijsters celebrating a U.S. Open championship on Arthur Ashe Stadium Court with a combination of tears and a joyous smile as her 18-month-old daughter Jada toddles around with sweet abandon. Clijsters was the first mother in 29 years to win a Grand Slam tennis tournament. She was 26 and only three months out of a two-year-retirement. The Belgian had quit sports while at the top of her game, was married, had a daughter and then triumphantly came back to the courts.

The tale of the 'Tiger' Re "Parenting experts tackle 'Tiger,' " Jan. 23 A motivated, driven individual of any class, color or creed can become her own drill sergeant, no Chinese "Tiger Mother" needed. Despite the backlash over author Amy Chua's denial to her children of bathroom or water breaks, I imposed similar discipline on myself from middle to graduate school. Regarding the denial of play dates and the ostracization from not watching television, children can socialize with their siblings, who are raised with similar rules, to overcome isolation.

Officials who took 416 children from a polygamist retreat into state custody sent many of their mothers away from the children's temporary residence as a judge and lawyers struggled with one of the biggest child-custody cases in U.S. history. Of the 139 women who voluntarily left the compound with their children, only those with children 4 or younger were allowed to continue staying with them, said Marissa Gonzales, a spokeswoman for the state Children's Protective Services. The state accuses members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints of physically and sexually abusing the youngsters.

Thanks for Linda Mathews' article, "Mothering on the Telephone . . . It's the Busiest Signal of Them All" (May 10). I too had the preschool and after-school calls except for a year in Puerto Rico. (There, the children join mothers at work, coloring and finishing homework at nearby desks.) My daughter's phone contact continued through college, when there were calls to discuss course selection and love life. Now I'm in the postgraduate stage with calls from New York on questions about starting an acting career.