A story of accomplishment:
It was almost a year ago that I was presented with the opportunity to change a life. My decision that day was out of friendship, kindness and empathy. In May of 2011 I was working on a special technology project in Genting, MY. Malaysia was at that time exactly 12 hours ahead of New York which made facilitating conference calls relatively easy. I had been in the country for nearly a month and missed my family terribly which I believe gave me great insight into the plight of a friend of mine.
It was very early in the morning on Sunday May 8th and I was catching up on my email as I do most mornings. I read a blog post in my RSS feeds from my friend Brooke Farmer who is also a member of the JAFDIP family. The title simply read My plea for a Mother’s Day miracle. In that post Brooke detailed a heart wrenching account of being not seeing her teenage son for several months because the father had taken steps to intervene. Preventing her form talking with her son et cettera.
All that she wanted was to simple things to be able to talk to her son on Mother’s Day and to find an attorney in Colorado that could help enforce the custody agreement. Unfortunately, it was Mother’s Day and she had not lived in Colorado for several years. To make matter compound her predicament she had gone to Melbourne, Australia in search of work and ended up staying longer than expected. Thus the prospect of locating a sympathetic lawyer in the states was exceedingly grim.
Upon reading the post and all of the subsequent comments I decided that I needed to do something. I think my desire to help besides being the right thing to do is that I was nearly 10,000 miles away from my children. I know that if anything had happened to then I know I would have felt utterly helpless. In fact on one trip I received a call from my wife at approximately 3:30 AM because the truck broke down on the highway and I spent 30 minutes on the phone talking to her calming her down while she awaited help. In any event since it was still Saturday evening in the US which meant that I was in a unique position to help I thought more and more about what I could do a idea took hold of me.
What if I could help bridge a connection between one of my followers or even one of their followers and Brooke? I felt confident that someone in my circle of friends could help her find the local assistance she needed. I mean I have a huge network of attorneys in NY in addition to a respectably focused twitter following. Thus I carefully crafted the following note and sent it out to my stream simply hoping that someone would read it and retweet it.
RT @ mikelking : Ok peeps we gotta help a mom out PLS READ -> http://bit.ly/iBiLMO & RT @ brooke_farmer : Looking for a miracle on Mother’s Day.
As I watched the retweets stream in I decided to reach out to some of those individuals that had DMed me in the past asking for a tweetout. I carefully wrote a personalized message to each asking if they could help but sending out the above message which I DMed separately.
What happened next wasn’t entirely anticipated. Dozens upon dozens of people began retweeting the message. While it did not exactly ‘Go Viral’ on a crazy scale creating a tweet meme or anything the result was better than expected. Ultimately I was able to help Brooke make that important connection through another friend Shelia Rose (@ShebaJo) in my stream. Shelia Rose lives in Colorado and happened to have a few attorneys available to refer Brooke to.
Fast forward to now. Since Mother’s Day Brooke has returned to her home in LA and visited her son several times. They even went camping which is something that Brooke is not known to do. In fact if you read her post on the subject you’ll know she is kind of afraid of the outdoors. What is important is that she did what every parent learns to do sooner or later they conquer that fear even temporarily just to spend that quality time with their child.
I have taken the liberty of linking several key posts from her blog that update the state of affairs between her and her son. I think we can all agree that although she may have not gotten that call on Mother’s Day ultimately she got her son back and that is what truly matters.
Related articles
- A huge thank you (Learning the Language of Brooke Farmer)
- My plea for a Mother’s Day miracle (Learning the Language of Brooke Farmer)
- Progress. An update on me and my son. (Learning the Language of Brooke Farmer)
- Maybe we just had to get that out of the way (Learning the Language of Brooke Farmer)
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