As Mother’s Day approaches, we reflect on the experience of mothers who are not able to live with their children.
Funded by CPT, Rosebuds is a weekly group for women whose children live elsewhere. This can be through adoption, foster care or any other kind of kinship or special guardianship order. Rosebuds helps to harness the strengths of women through a blend of peer support and structured sessions. Topics include emotional and mental health issues, healthy and unhealthy relationships, healthy lifestyles and positive social involvement.
Leeanne Rowinska, Rosebuds Project Worker, shares: ‘Rosebuds is a group for women living apart from their children’.
These simple, challenging words hold within them individual stories of bravery and kindness, hope and healing, support and learning. It is a place where women who have experienced profound loss – of a kind that is often hard to talk about to other people – come together and support each other to envision a different kind of life for themselves. We move from grief and shame to healing and self-forgiveness. Behind the door, a special kind of magic takes place every week – funded by Charles Plater Trust.
In the time we spend together, the thing we do is rediscover our voices, voices that have been lost to violence and abuse, loss and fear. We learn to not be afraid to use our voices, we work out what those voices want to say after long periods of silence. And we use them to share and support and to laugh again.
And some of those women wanted to share their voices with you:
“I have been a member of the Rosebuds group since late last year. I am normally not a confident person but after working with Rosebuds for a few months I have revived my confidence to the point of asking if I could assist in writing a submission to support the ongoing funding of the group. Personally, through Rosebuds I have been able to find a safe place where I can express my pain, despair and frustrations. I have also found so much hope through speaking with the facilitators and fellow women. In each group there is an abundance of empathy and general kindness. There is never any sense of judgement, which is something that can often discourage women from seeking help due to fear of shame and guilt. Through regular groups, myself and other women, learn what it means to be a healthy individual.”
“I feel like I’m going to a safe place processing my pain and trauma. In the beginning I was very nervous to start the group. I have met lovely people. My anxiety is better now than when I started. Now I enjoy new things, I have a lot of independence now.”
“Amazing group of women who support and help each other, it really helped even if I was having a bad day struggling with anxiety, I feel supported and accepted by these amazing women.”
After visiting the women in January, Philippa Gitlin (Chair of the CPT Grant Making Committee and Sponsor to Rosebuds Project) said:
“I was impressed by the real engagement of all the women in the session, and the clear and extremely supportive facilitation by the Project Leader. It was obvious that the women attending were benefitting from the mutual support as they were very open to discussing their issues and defining their goals. There was a real sense of the women developing their confidence to advocate for themselves, while accepting responsibility for their situations."
As we celebrate Mother’s Day this Sunday, then, we also celebrate the incredible work of Rosebuds Project in supporting those mothers unable to be with their children – helping them to grow, learn, and feel accepted as mothers.
Learn more about Rosebuds here.
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