It was the last sleep over at Nancy’s before the Congress would end. I woke up at 5:30 am feeling a strong direction to tell my mothers story and to invite all the women who had traveled from international countries to meet. There was no space within the program for this, but with the immediate support of Nancy, and the graciousness of the organizers, I was able to follow through and here is what I shared.

Fifty years ago this year, The United Nations Charter was drawn up here in San Francisco. My mother attended. In her belongings after she died, I found a poem that she had written and submitted in the early fifties, to Common Wheel magazine.

Eight or ten lines..titled TO MY SISTERS. It was a plea seeking women to come forward and connect to support and share what they knew. Across the text was a rejection slip saying that this writing was not suitable for publication.I remember how cold I felt reading those words.

So now fifty years later I am able to stand here on this stage, in the same city where I was also born, and ask that my sisters from all the different countries meet face to face. I do not want to leave here without meeting you. I ask this for myself and for my mother. A completion.

So we met; 41 of us from different countries sat in Circle. There was a Presence in the room. We now have through GTW site, an International Circle Connection.

That day on our way home, Nancy drove me by the house where I was born and where my grandmother and mother looked after us during the war. It is at 3555 Clay Street, a few blocks from where the Congress was being held. I put some flowers at the garden gate and honored the women who had worked so hard and gone before me. The sense of lightness and freedom I experienced felt like a full completion and release of a burden of responsibility carried all of my life. The women honored; my mother completed, and my sisters together.