About the Film

The walls of Virginia Morton’s house are covered with quilts. Quilts of different sizes, different colors, with different patterns and with different stitches. For Virginia, it is the stitch that really reminds her of the hours she spent on each quilt...because her stitch changes as her life changes. There are stitches of hope, stitches of joy, stitches of peace and stitches of sorrow. Through her stitching, she has always expressed any turmoil in her mind and calmed any sorrows in her heart. The past few months have produced stitches of worry. Her son just finished basic training and is on his way to fight a war, thousand of miles away from his hometown of Antioch California, to fight and give it all. For his country! And no amount of stitching can keep him safe.

Virginia is just one of the mothers MY CHILD-MOTHERS OF WAR paints a portrait of. These courageous mothers of our country’s soldiers are still mothers of the sons and daughters they’ve raised for nearly two decades. Sons and daughters they raised to play baseball, to go to the prom, to get married and have children of their own, but not to risk their lives…far from home. MY CHILD explores how these mothers manage to get through each day knowing that bullets could be destroying the “center of their universe.”

And then there are the other mothers. The ones whose children come back in pieces…or not at all. How do they carry on when their precious children return to them, somehow less than when they last saw them…or after the messengers of death, dressed in uniform have shown up at their door?

To make their lives bearable, some women make quilts, some women build shrines, some make packages to send to other soldiers, and many share their stories with other mothers; their friends, their neighbors, over the internet and now through this documentary. Military mothers have a strong voice and a compassionate heart. The politics of war can split a country…a world, into pieces. A mother’s love for her child can unite us all, if even for a moment.