Mother's Day is a time of reflection, not celebration, for Sept. 11 widows with newborns

By Katherine Roth, Associated Press, 05/11/2002

NEW YORK -- Katy Soulas' husband will not be around on Mother's Day to accompany his family to church, go to a barbecue and spend time with the kids. So she plans to take her six children to the shore to put messages in bottles for daddy, thanking him for "making mommy the mommy she is today."

Like at least 123 other women across the country, Soulas was made a widow by the Sept. 11 attacks and has since given birth to a child who will never meet his father. As with others in the sad sorority, Mother's Day has become a time of reflection for Soulas.

"The kids are thankful for me -- and I want to be thankful for Tim, for making me a mother," Soulas said. Tim Soulas, who worked for the bond broker Cantor Fitzgerald, was on the 105th floor of one of the World Trade Center's twin towers when two hijacked jetliners were slammed into the buildings. More than 2,800 people died in the attack.

"This 9-11 stuff is almost like a scarlet letter, it marks kids for life and we all have to live with it," said Soulas, of Bernard Township, N.J., whose children range in age from several months to 12 years. "I somehow want my kids to come away from this with a new sense of compassion. I want to find good in evil."

She and most of the other new Sept. 11 mothers have been helped by the Arlington, Va.-based Infant Care Project, started by the nonprofit Independent Women's Forum. The program gives each mother a $2,000 grant to pay for in-home care for the first month of the baby's life.

"Most people think about the loss of a husband in terms of loss of income," project director Judy Hill said. "It also means the loss of an essential pair of helping hands that a husband typically provides when a newborn comes home."

Hill said the program has enrolled 90 of the 124 mothers it has found, though she suspects there are more she has not yet located. She hopes to have a gathering of all the mothers -- and a few widower dads -- this fall. Most of the mothers have not met one another.

In Brooklyn, Barbara Swat-Atwood cares for 2-month-old Robert while her daughter Margaret, 2, and son Gerald, 3, vie for attention. On a shelf, a photo of her firefighter husband, Gerald Atwood, smiles down at them, a near mirror image of his toddler namesake.

"Mother's Day? These days every day is Mother's Day. I have these wonderful smiles from each of my children. They make each day worthwhile," Atwood said.

There are difficult moments, though, like when Gerald asks about his daddy. Atwood finally learned to tell her son, "Daddy is in the stars and the sky and the moon."

"Even in the dark?" he asks.

"Especially in the dark," she answers.

She says she looks at her children differently since her husband, from Ladder Company 21 in Manhattan, died in the attack.

"Obviously, loss can happen to anybody at any time, anywhere, and that's scary. You see how very, very fragile life is," she said.

Atwood, who lost her own father to a heart attack when she was 7, knows how hard it is to grow up without a parent. She said that she almost didn't marry her husband when he told her he wanted to be a firefighter.

Last year, for Mother's Day, he gave her a watch and built a back door on the house.

This year, her Mother's Day gift was the unexpected arrival of a half dozen, huge boxes from strangers in the Midwest. A friend of her sister in Michigan had spread word that Atwood never had a baby shower for little Robert.

Atwood's eyes welled with tears as she opened several of the boxes filled with toys for all three of her children, diapers in various sizes, and a terrycloth bathrobe for herself.

"I guess this is my Mother's Day gift. A baby shower."

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