Give Mom Hope
Since the start of its war with Russia, a custom of marking soldiers’ graves with yellow-and-blue flags has arisen in Ukraine. Today, cemeteries are awash in color.
Behind each flag stands a mother who has found herself in psychological straits. After the death of their children, moms often lose a sense of meaning in their lives and struggle to cope with their grief. Relatives often do not know how to help these mothers deal with the psychological wounds inflicted by war, compounding the sense of loss as families then risk breaking up in the aftermath.
It is necessary to give these mothers hope, providing them with renewed inner strength to continue living. The goal of our project, Give Mom Hope, is to provide psychological and spiritual help to mothers whose children have died in the ongoing war.
Mrs. Lyudmila Bogdashevska, head of the Capuchin Franciscan friars’ House of Padre Pio in Kyiv, initiated the project as a way to respond to a war that has deeply touched her own family: Mrs. Lyudmila’s husband is a doctor who works with Ukrainian soldiers, while her two sons are fighting at the war’s front. The Capuchin friars of the Custody of Ukraine are serving as chaplains for the project.
The assistance program was developed with the help of specialists, and involves multiple sessions spanning several days. The sessions target groups of women who stay at the House of Padre Pio, and groups are kept to no more than 16 participants to provide each attendee with sufficient care. The meetings are free, and the program covers travel expenses for those unable to pay them.
Among the program’s goals is the healing of psychological wounds through physical therapies. Spa procedures and visits to the sauna, along with massages and posture-correcting exercises, aim to help mothers take the first steps toward working out their emotional traumas.
The next step involves the work of professional hairdressers, who, after creating a new hairstyle and applying professional makeup, send the mothers to a nearby photo session. These beautification procedures can provide mothers with a new sense of hope, renewing their sense of self-worth and rebuilding their confidence.
The program’s third stage involves group therapy. Give Mom Hope provides an opportunity for participants to prepare their children’s favorite dishes. Program organizers provide the space and products needed to cook, while the mothers talk about their children as they work in the kitchen. They then set the table and eat their dishes, continuing their conversations. Women have said these sessions enabled them to broach topics they weren’t able to bring up at home, with the discussions often going late into the night.
The next step is work directly with a psychologist. Mothers are offered individual meetings with a counselor, and then follow these up with art-therapy group sessions.
Spiritual support takes place in the program’s chapel, which is decorated with portraits of the mothers’ fallen sons and daughters. Besides including scripture readings about loss, hope and resurrection, the sessions also feature candle-lighting ceremonies. The mothers are invited to light a candle and offer prayers for their lost children. They are then invited to light a second candle memorializing surviving family members (a husband, other children, etc. …), before then lighting a third candle for themselves. These third candles are meant to symbolize the mothers’ hope that has survived periods of grief and difficulty. Afterward, the mothers are invited to meetings with a priest-chaplain. These “Cappuccino with Cappuccino” sessions — so-called because the meetings take place with a Capuchin friar over coffee — allow for difficult issues to arise in a friendly atmosphere.
Participants have said Give Mom Hope provided them with a space where they felt both listened-to and taken seriously. Following past sessions, mothers have said they felt joy and began to smile again. Program employees have reported noticing similar outcomes: They have seen how depressed and grief-stricken mothers are upon their arrival, and have noted how calm and joyful they have appeared upon the program’s completion.
There is now a waiting list of 200 mothers who want to join the project. Until now, organizers have limited the program to one session each month, but there is a need to expand it to at least three times a month. This would allow the program to provide assistance for about 500 mothers a year.
To complete this expansion, the program needs to hire additional program and maintenance staff, including psychologists, art therapists and nurses.
We invite you to support our project. Total expenses per mother are around $875.