Many of you have read my personal story: Nazi thugs terrorize the inhabitants of Amsterdam. A young mother joins the Resistance and hides a Jewish girl when her husband is deported to a slave labor camp. They must endure brutal betrayal and near starvation, but a little daddy’s girl learns about moral courage and female strength and discovers the woman she wants to become.
Reviewers have stressed its relevance for today. As we grapple with a resurgence of white supremacy, political polarization, hatred, and violence, its message of survival and resilience gives hope. We are reminded that moral courage, human kindness, and perseverance have the power to move the arc of humanity toward consciousness and unity. In the darkest times, we can discover our strongest light.
If you feel inclined to recommend or give it to a friend as a gift of hope this Holiday season, it is available in most local bookstores and, of course, on Amazon. It can now also be purchased in an audio version. And I am always available to sign your copy or send a personal note.
With love and deep gratitude for your friendship and ongoing support,
Hendrika
Hendrika de Vries
hendrika1@cox.net
www.agirlfromamsterdam.com
––Author of When a Toy Dog Became a Wolf and the Moon Broke Curfew. . .
a memoir of resistance and resilience in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam.
Winner of the 2019 May Sarton Women’s Book Award.
Non-fiction Author Association Gold.
Winner of the 2020 Eric Hoffer First Horizon Award.
Winner of the 2020 Eric Hoffer Culture Award.
Winner of the 2019 Nautilus Award for Memoir and Personal Journey.
2020 Next Generation Indie Book Finalist in Memoirs (overcoming adversity/tragedy).
2021 Winner in Memoir and Young Adult Non-Fiction, NYC Big Book Award.
I am thrilled to announce that my memoir, When a Toy Dog Became a Wolf and the Moon Broke Curfew, is now available in audio format. The audiobook is narrated by radio host, Jane Mickelson, a Pacifica Graduate Institute alumna.
May the New Year bring the “miracle” you wish for.
We walked with deliberate steps.
Placed our feet with care
on the slippery surface
of the ice-covered sidewalks and bridges
of our Nazi-occupied town.
Held on to each other tight,
so not to slip and fall into the dark canal,
where thin ice would not hold
or protect the body of a seven-year-old
that could disappear in the stagnant water below.
A mother and her little girl,
barely visible in the winter’s dusk,
walked with purpose and determination
that last night of the year.
Two small human shapes
in a world swallowed up
by cruelties of war and hatred.
Obeying an inner need for
human contact and hope,
they risked the curfew of the oppressors
that had extinguished all light.
Heavy blankets of clouds clung
to the earth in dark layers,
shrouded its familiar landmarks.
No illumination eased the harsh
darkness of a desperate world.
No visible light guided the path.
Not from windows of homes
covered with war’s black out material.
Not from historic old lampposts
that stood powerless to help.
Their lights extinguished indefinitely
in a conquered city without power or heat.
No flashlight, no matches, no light permitted.
The powers of darkness in total control.
Mother and child continued with vigilance
along the treacherous path
that led to the ancient church
for the gathering in a communal prayer—
a plea for the end of hatred and oppression,
the return of human kindness and peace.
On this last evening of the year
they joined hands with neighbors and strangers,
united as one in a desperate last hope:
“Let there be an end to the war
in the coming New Year.”
The child would remember
the burning smell of tiny candles
held in the hands of wearied bundled-up adults.
Squeezed together in hard pews,
they beseeched a God
for a miracle with which to survive
the unknown months of dwindling food,
of hatred and violence that still loomed ahead.
A benediction ended the service.
The church doors opened.
The shuffling to the exit commenced.
Sounds, strange human sounds of
“Ahhh…Ohhh…and Ahhhh…,”
reached the little girl’s ears.
A lilting lifting symphony
of tired human voices awakened and in awe
sprang into words.
“A Miracle, a miracle, it’s a miracle!”
Lifted by the power of the human voices,
swept up by the throng that moved as one,
mother and child reached the large open doors.
The child blinked.
The Light almost blinding her eyes.
A brilliant full moon had pushed through the clouds
and touched the earth where she stood.
As if mocking the darkness,
the moon’s full round brilliance
lit up the landscape
with the light of high noon in the midst of day.
“A Miracle …a miracle,” the mother whispered.
The Light guided the mother and child’s steps
to find their way home with ease.
They reached safety before curfew,
avoided the threat of death
at the enemy’s hands.
“A miracle” the mother insisted
for the rest of her life.
Mother and child would have to endure
four more months of cold and starvation,
run for their lives on the Day of Liberation
in a mass shooting by Swastika-bearing men
who refused to accept defeat.
But Peace came.
And human warmth and decency
would restore the Light to the city of Amsterdam,
whose heart the Nazis had almost destroyed.
A miracle? perhaps…
On that New Year’s Eve,
on that particular night
in Amsterdam long ago,
a seven-year-old girl learned that
the powers of hatred, oppression and darkness
ultimately did not have the last word.
And deep inside her
the Light from the darkness
would grow and illuminate my life’s path
in the many long years that still lay ahead.
I have found one of the lovely surprises about growing old if you are lucky, is that you become part of a web of friends, colleagues and family members who span the planet. Over the years they stretch your mind and enrich your life by their diverse cultural lifestyles, beliefs and rituals, and personal myths. At Easter, some celebrate by attending the church of their choice; others feel more attuned to the ancient goddess of spring and renewal, Eostre, from whose name Easter was ostensibly derived. Many of them celebrate the sweetness of spring with egg hunts for children and grandchildren or honor nature’s gift of renewal by planting their gardens. And in Australia, where I lived during my most formative years, they remind me that the equinox marks fall in the Southern Hemisphere, which challenges me not to see the whole world through the lens of my European origins.
But in this year of the coronavirus lockdown of our world, we each in the private spaces of our social isolation are challenged to contemplate more deeply the meaning in suffering and death. We reflect on our sacred stories and nature’s cyclical renewals for assurance that darkness and suffering, even death, do not have the final word in the grand adventure of life.
With deepening awareness of our interdependence, we reach out to one another on our various technological devices and reimagine the world we want our grandchildren and their children to inhabit.
When I was seven years old, my mother turned on all the lights in every room of our apartment in Amsterdam and marched me into the kitchen where she struck a series of matches and lit every jet on our gas stove including the oven. She placed two straight backed kitchen chairs next to each other facing the open oven door and commanded me to “sit”. I climbed on one of the chairs and felt the blast from the gas jets and open oven heat my face and the full front of my body. My mother sat next to me. “I want you to feel this warmth and see all the light and always remember it”, she said. “We are facing cold, dark days, but … I want you to know that no matter what happens, all this light and warmth will return.”
The following day all electricity and gas were turned off indefinitely in the city of Amsterdam. We faced one of the coldest winters on record. Our daily food supply would dwindle from 800 calories to 500 to 200 to nothing in the following six months. I would learn to eat tulip bulbs and watch old men collapse and die of hunger and cold on the streets near our home. No, there was no toilet paper. Some 20,000 people died of cold and starvation. My mother and I were among the lucky ones who survived. Miraculously, life renewed and resurrected itself and taught us to experience joy again. Thousands of babies burst upon the planet by the following spring, the first of the explosion of baby boomers who set about to change the world.
It has been seventy-five years since Amsterdam’s liberation. This spring, my husband and I celebrate Easter isolated in our home because of the novel coronavirus. We still treasure the tiny cloth bunnies we gave each other on the first Easter after we met, fairly late in life. Mine sits on the control panel in his car. His on my desk near my computer. We connect with friends and family via Skype and Zoom. Two doves coo as they mate on the balcony outside our living room. A pair of finches have decided to create a nest in the potted fern that hangs in our carport. Memories of Easter rituals past resurface in my mind’s eye. A curly-headed little grandson, now a grown man, stumbles as his basket filled with eggs rolls down the slope of our front yard. His mother scoops him up and they chase his eggs down the hill both whooping with laughter. It seems only yesterday that my young granddaughter, now twenty, practiced her artistic skills on our back deck as she painted two dozen boiled eggs with wild imaginative designs. I marvel at the cycles of life that I have been privileged to experience and the way the arc of human history, despite its often cruel and destructive detours, ultimately bends towards courage and love.
As my mother said, “The warmth and the light will return.” While we hide indoors from a virus that attacks our lungs, Mother Nature has a chance to breathe. In our Northern Hemisphere the sun shines a little warmer each day, daffodils push up through frosty winter ground and bare trees slip on their spring greenery. And even in the Southern hemisphere where life prepares for winter instead of summer, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, who has wisely placed her nation in total lockdown, has given the Easter Bunny special dispensation to hop around.
On December 31, 1960, I “missed a great New Year’s Eve party,” so my then-husband told me, because I had just given birth to our second child, my son Grant, in Adelaide, Australia. I assure one and all, that the 9 lb. 10 oz. baby boy was worth missing any New Year’s Eve party. And as I held my newborn son in my arms and looked at the little face that looked so much like my own father, my New Year’s wishes and intentions for the new year popped crystal clear out of my heart, as they did with the birth of each of my three children. I would be the best mother in the world and wish for my baby to be healthy and safe so he could grow up to be a kind and caring human being.
Of course, the wish expressed by parents all over the world, regardless of place or language, is that their children will be healthy and safe. When I was 13 years old, my family and I celebrated New Year’s on board of an immigrant ship. Along with hundreds of other young postwar Dutch families, we were in the midst of the Indian ocean on our way to a new future in Australia. In the hope of creating a new life of opportunity for their children in a land on the other side of the world, parents and would-be parents had left behind their friends, family, culture and language. As the ship’s captain challenged us to sing the English words to Auld Lang Sine that New Year’s Eve, young men and women who had managed to survive the brutality and devastation of Nazi-occupied Holland, shared their hopes and prayers for a life of safety and opportunity, not just for themselves, but for their young and future children.
My earliest memory of a mother’s New Year’s wish and intention goes back to the Eve of 1944-45. I was seven years old. The city of Amsterdam where I was born and raised had been crushed under the Nazi boot of hatred and violence. It was one of the coldest winters on record, and Amsterdam was in the death throes of the Hunger Winter. All gas and electricity had been turned off indefinitely. Food rations would dwindle to nothing as men, women and children died of cold and starvation in their homes and on the cobblestone streets of our neighborhood. Many of you have read my story in my memoir When a Toy Dog Became a Wolf and the Moon Broke Curfew. I have shared the story of the “miracle moon” that broke through the dark clouds and lit a safe path home for my mother and me, before the Nazi-imposed curfew when we could be shot. We had attended a communal church service, where a devasted community of men and women came together to pray for peace and an end to the brutal war that had lasted almost five years. In a letter my mother wrote to her own mother that New Year’s she wished and prayed that the year ahead would enable us to say: “It was the year in which the war ended.”
That night after we came home, my mother, like a priestess engaged in an ancient ritual, lit a small fire in the living room fireplace. She crumpled up several old magazines, piled them on our last handful of anthracite coal and struck a match. She took the half cup of flour, some water, and a smidgeon of oil that she had carefully saved from a previous ration card and mixed them into a batter. Then, seated on the floor, she baked four tiny pancakes in a small fry pan over the flickering flames. Two sweet-smelling golden little pancakes for each of us. No five-course meal or grand New Year’s Eve banquet would ever match the power of that New Year’s Eve shared mother-daughter tiny feast.
I would always remember the hope and strength I felt in that ritual. It instilled in me my mother’s powerful intention to survive. She was not going to let us die of starvation.
As we now face the year 2020, I am filled with good intentions, some easier than others—I must lose the ten pounds I gained over the Holidays, I must be kinder to the person that rubs me the wrong way, I will spend less money eating out , and I will definitely exercise more regularly. But somewhere underneath my intentions, there always lies the bigger wish, the prayer to the Divine from the depth of my soul. It’s the hope for a more peaceful kinder world, where our future children and their children may be safe.
It’s the hope, the prayer, even if unspoken, that surely lies on the lips of every mother, father, grandparent, aunt or uncle, god parent, foster parent or caring adult when they first cradle a helpless newborn baby in their arms.
It’s the hope, the prayer, that gives emigrants and refugees the awesome courage to leave everything familiar behind and travel long distances, often dangerous, in order to find safety and a better life for their children.
It’s what gave my mother the courage to join the Resistance in the midst of Nazi tyranny and white supremacist hatred, after my father was incarcerated in a German POW work-camp. When years later she was asked what possessed her to risk her life and the life of her child to join the Resistance and hide a Jewish girl in her home, she answered that she would hope someone would do the same for her child if circumstances were reversed.
When a family member called her a “foolish idealist,” she warned: “Remember, not one of our children is safe unless they are all safe.”
Perhaps my mother’s words have never held more truth than on this last day of 2019 as we transition into the year 2020. Hatred marches emboldened across our world once again. Even Houses of Worship cannot assure sanctuary, and the denial of climate change threatens to destroy our planet, the home that all of our children share.
So today as I meditate on my prayers, my hopes and my intentions for the Year 2020, I wish and hope for strength and resilience for those who dare to resist the leaders that abuse their power to spread hatred and division. I wish and set my intention for the safety not just of my own children’s children, but for the child at the border separated from her family, for the child in the inner city going to school hungry, for the child mocked or threatened for being different, and for the child hiding under the school desk hoping that this will not be the day they are shot to death.
If there is one thing my long life and the courage I witnessed as a child in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam have taught me, it is this: There is strength in the goodness of our shared humanity. If we set the intentions, we can and will make the world a safer place for all.
That is my Wish for 2020. Happy New Year!
And don’t worry too much about the pounds you gained over the Holidays. They are easily lost by going door to door to canvas for the upcoming election.
It takes one person to tell her story. It takes a village to hear its meaning and give it wings. As we approach this North American Holiday of Thanksgiving, I want to express my deep gratitude for my amazing global community of family, friends, colleagues, neighbors and so many others who have supported and encouraged me in the publishing of my memoir: When a Toy Dog Became a Wolf and the Moon Broke Curfew.
I had always thought of writers as lone journeyers ensconced in cave-like spaces and small rooms with clicking typewriters (yes, I am that old). There may still be some truth to that image, but this year has taught me that it takes a village to publish a book and give meaning to the story. Of course, I spent many hours alone with my MacBook Air, writing and rewriting my text until it finally took its current shape and form. But it would never have left the file on my desktop named “When a Toy Dog. . .”, if it had not been for the strong support and encouragement from family members, friends, colleagues, and lovers of story.
As many of you know, the love of story runs in my blood. I absorbed the magic of storytelling as a little girl mesmerized by her daddy’s bedtime tales of heroes and heroines, and of mythical lands where creatures could change their shape at will. It’s not surprising that one of my earliest jobs was secretary to the Chief of Staff of the newsroom of an Australian newspaper. The magic of the click-clack of the newsroom typewriters set my imagination soaring with all the stories being sent out into the world.
As a young mother in my early twenties, my children clamored for me to tell them bedtime stories, as I had done with my dad.
“I really can’t remember any right now,” I would sometimes tell them at the end of a tiring day, to which they’d laugh and say: “Oh, mommy, just make one up,” and I would, as they listened with glee and added their own imaginative twists to the story.
When I joined the many other women of my generation who went back to school in the 1970s, I submitted stories to the college paper and experienced the thrill of seeing my imagination in print. I embarked on a career as therapist and was inevitably drawn to the study of depth-psychology with its emphasis on the timelessness of our world’s great myths, those universal tales with immortal characters and sweeping plots that amplify our mortal human twists of choice and fate.
There was just one story that I tried to silence, the true story of my own childhood. But if I wanted to help others work through their trauma, I needed to acknowledge it. With encouragement from family, friends and colleagues I wrote down my memories and shaped them into a manuscript, but I still hesitated publishing it. It felt self-indulgent, or maybe it was just too real. Then I saw neo-Nazis wearing swastikas in Charlottesville, Virginia, on my television screen and witnessed the escalating rhetoric of hatred and discrimination. I realized I had no choice. Those of us who have survived violence and cruelty, no matter where or when, have an obligation to share our stories of endurance, strength and resilience.
Nevertheless, writer friends who supported me spoke a word of caution. The publishing process would be hard work. I smiled at their warnings. The manuscript had been written. An editor had scoured it and made sure that my English-learned words were Americanized. It was accepted for Indie-publication by She Writes Press. The hard work had been done. Right? I had no idea! In blissful ignorance I dove into the publishing details of metadata, first pages, bisacs, blurbs, cover design, back cover bio, author photo, publicists, book launch, book reviews, author interviews, and more. As this year nears its end, I am exhausted, exhilarated, overwhelmed, thrilled and in total awe of all those who have the courage to write and publish their stories.
Since its publication on August 27, my memoir When a Toy Dog Became a Wolf and the Moon Broke Curfew has found its way to bookshelves in Indie bookstores and on Goodreads and Amazon. I have discussed its contents on radio interviews, podcasts, and at schools, houses of worship and gatherings of wonderful book readers and other writers. I have been honored to talk about the courage, strength and resilience I saw in my mother and others who resisted Nazi oppression, even in the face of death. They showed me the woman I wanted to become.
I marvel at how my little book is growing wings to fly around the world. It has even found its way to the Netherlands and Australia. But it could not have done so on its own. It needed the skills and hard work of the whole global village. You know who you are. Some of you are even on Facebook. You read my manuscript, you supported me in going with the Indie Publisher. You told me my story had importance and needed to be in print. You helped me with my photos. You commiserated and let me whine, when the promotional journey in the digital cyber world caused a major traffic jam in my brain. You insisted that my poor old gray cells could master the daunting weird world of social media. You kept supporting and encouraging me. You bought my book, and then bought more copies for your friends. You wrote reviews (please keep writing them). You attended my presentations. A beloved cousin even read and praised my Advance Reader copy as his body was preparing him to die. Thank you, my dearest Cor, I will miss you and your wise sweet words to me so terribly.
This has been a challenging year for many people. We have all witnessed too many wanton cruel deaths, painful physical and emotional sufferings endured by dear friends, and a growing threat to our democracy and the health of our planet on which our grandchildren and their children’s future depends. At the same time, I was privileged in September to share my story with hundreds of middle and high school students at a wide variety of schools. These young people, who face challenges to our planet today that I could not even have imagined when I was the age they are now, listened with authentic interest and attentive engagement. They told me that my war story of resistance and resilience under Nazi oppression gave them hope. Their courage made me weep and gave me hope in return. They asked me to write in their notebooks. The girls gave me hugs. The boys shook my hand. Overwhelmed by their enthusiasm, I fell in love with all of them.
So, even as predatory forces once again attempt to spread their rhetoric of hatred and superiority, I give thanks for the goodness, hope and courage that still resides in the human heart and soul. When my husband and I celebrate Thanksgiving with family in our personal way this year, I will bow in gratitude to all those who dare to tell their stories of resistance and resilience and all those who take the time to listen, really listen. It takes one person to tell a story. It takes a village to listen and give it wings to fly.
Happy Thanksgiving to All. In gratitude, Hendrika. November 2019.
From the time that I was a little girl curled up on my father’s lap, enchanted by his bedtime stories of fairy-tale heroes and heroines, and mythic far-away places where magical gods and goddesses could morph into animal shapes at will, I have always loved stories. One of my first jobs as a teenager was secretary to the Chief of Staff in the editorial newsroom of an Australian morning newspaper, where I thrilled to the clicking of the newsroom typewriters that sent stories to print. A young mother in my early twenties, I made up bedtime stories for my children. I wrote stories for the college paper when I joined the many other women of my generation who went back to school in the 1970s. And when I decided to become a psychotherapist I chose to study depth psychology, so that I could explore the world’s grand mythic tales that amplified the archetypal patterns in our mortal stories. There was just one story that nagged at me all my life that I tried to silence. But if I seriously wanted to help heal others, I would need to let her have her voice. My memoir When a Toy Dog Became a Wolf and the Moon Broke Curfew. . .is her story.
Many people who first hear about my memoir are curious about the meaning of the title. The images refer to actual events that I personally experienced and describe in the book, but they carry a deeper symbolic meaning that speaks to the experience of many women today. In the actual events, the tiny toy dog becomes a fierce wolf, a protector, in a little girl’s imagination when her father is taken away. Her belief in its magic strength empowers her to ask a German guard to pass it on to her father, who is now separated from her by a barbed wire fence. She later recognizes this wolf-like strength in her mother who joins the Resistance against Nazi oppression, and models to her how to move from victim to heroic survivor, from helpless child to a grown-up empowered woman. The image of the moon refers to an actual unexpected brilliant full moon that guides a single mother and her small daughter safely home along ice-covered sidewalks and bridges on a pitch-black cloud-covered night in WWII Amsterdam when streetlights were extinguished, windows darkened by blackout material, and a Nazi curfew that if broken could get anyone shot. In our patriarchal mythologies the moon is often seen as feminine. Its cool reflective light deemed lesser than and merely passively reflective of the burning masculine sun. But as I listened to my clients’ stories in our therapeutic sessions, a more exciting meaning began to reveal itself to me.
Like so many survivors of trauma, I had closeted my childhood trauma in the dark basement of my psyche. I was born at a time when little girls were groomed to be mothers and housewives. We were supposed to marry princes and live happily ever after. We learned at a young age that trauma needed to be encapsulated, hidden in the darkness, so we could survive and get on with our lives. Often the defenses that hid the trauma only cracked when penetrated by other crises years later.
I discovered in working with my clients that my story of the traumatized child was not just mine, but the story of every client who walked into my office hoping to be healed. Every reflection, every story of victimization, whether of hatred, cruelty, abuse, betrayal or discrimination, also hid the courage to survive and the resilience to move on. Like the waxing moon each story increased the light to reveal assaults carried out and hidden in the dark. It made me question the moon being symbolized as feminine because of her passive reflection, because it was clear that when women reflected on their experiences and shared their stories they beamed an active light on every abuse that hid in the dark. I realized that in the sharing of our stories we create the “miracle” full moon that can break the curfew of oppression.
Privileged to see the archetypal depths in my clients’ struggles, the moral choices they faced, the decisions that would change their lives and lead them into unknown territory, my awe and respect increased for the potential of courage and goodness in our shared humanity. I wanted my writing to express those depths.
I was also teaching a graduate course in mythology and personal transformation at the time. The class consisted of mostly female students, and many were reading Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ brilliant book, Women Who Run with the Wolves. To illustrate the collective archetypal depths of our experiences, I shared the segment of my story in which I imagined my stuffed toy dog as a fierce wolf, a protector, who could bring my daddy back alive. As we talked about the strength and courage required in resisting oppression of any kind, students shared their personal images and stories. At times the room would literally light up with joy, as we delighted in the shared discovery that our heroic descents into our life stories revealed not only trauma but wild strength and deep potential.
I will never forget when one elegant student shared that she was “sick to death of having to be skinny and gorgeous.” “All my life,” she said, “I have felt like a poodle, to be petted and groomed, with little pink bows on my head.” We could almost hear her growl, and I just knew she would be howling at the next full moon.
Through the courageous stories told to me by clients in the therapy office and students in the classroom, I learned that our personal stories are wellsprings of deep healing where our differences fall away to blend in our common humanity. I began to see my childhood experiences as portals through which I could reach out and touch the rage and pain, but also the courage, strength, and amazing resilience and joy that unites us. It deepened my desire to join my authentic voice with others. Like a brilliant “miracle” full moon, the gathering of our life stories can light up the curfew of darkness imposed by oppression and illuminate a safe path home for all.
My memoir about my childhood in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam during WWII was released on August 27. But it’s not just my story. It’s the story of every child who experiences violence, deprivation, and bigotry. As we adults consume our planet’s resources and divide human beings because of the color of our skin or the deities we pray to, my heart weeps for the children. Children who are separated from parents at the border, children who go to school hungry, young girls who are being sex-trafficked by rich men in power, children who need to learn safety drills because of school shootings, and children facing a planet stripped of its natural beauty and capacity to sustain them. I survived my traumatic childhood, in part because there were enough adults around to sacrifice and fight for a more just world. I pray that today’s children will be able to say the same when they reach my age.
This week a daughter in Poway buried her mother, a victim of yet another vicious hate-fueled shooting on a House of Worship. As we send cards and flowers, and make phone calls and visits to our mothers on Mother’s Day, she will be grieving instead. And, at age eighty, I suddenly miss my own mother, a strong woman of deep faith. I wonder how she would have responded to our current environment of escalating hatred and bigotry.
I was just a little girl when the Nazis occupied Amsterdam in WWII.
“Don’t let them make you afraid,” my mother said, and when they deported my father to a POW labor camp in Germany, she joined the Resistance and hid a Jewish girl in our home. A moral choice that caused one of my uncles to accuse her of being a “bad mother” on the day of my grandmother’s burial.
WWII had been over for several years, when in a voice dark with condemnation, he demanded to know what had possessed my mother to risk her life and especially the life of her own child, me, by hiding a Jewish girl.
I will always remember my mother saying softly “Because I would hope that someone would do the same for her if circumstances were the other way around.”
He called her a “foolish idealist.”
“Yes, foolish,” my mother said, “because I want my children to grow up in a more just world.”
Perhaps in a moment of grief at losing his own mother, he yelled: “You are a mother. A mother! Your responsibility was the safety of your own child!”
“But that’s exactly why I did it,” my mother said, pointing a figure at his chest: “Don’t you realize that not one of our children is safe unless they are all safe.”
Years later when I became a mother of my own three children, I often thought of my mother’s words and asked myself what kind of world I wanted my children to grow up in. Motherhood has been both idealized and demonized, with examples of mothers ranging from the immaculate Virgin Mary to the vengeful Medea, who fed her children to her philandering husband. In reality most of us mortal mothers muddle along, somewhat less dramatically, in a fair-to-middling way. We do the best we can, but above all our concern is for our children to be safe.
Motherhood comes without an instruction book, and I am not sure that the maternal instinct is always a given. I have seen many a non-biological mother or father doing a better job at mothering than the women who gave birth. In recent years we have witnessed tiger moms, soccer moms, and moms who paid large sums of money to help their children cheat on college entrance tests so they would get a step up in the relentless drive to success that is the American dream.
My own mother could be a “tiger mom.” She disciplined and demanded the very best from my sister and myself. She also attended all of my swim meets and my sister’s running events, where she made no attempt to hide her joy when we won or her chagrin when we lost. So I guess you could also call her a “soccer mom.” But in my mind she would always be a “warrior woman,” a mom who taught me never to let oppression have the final word. I recognize her fierce faith and courage in those who fight for Civil Rights and equality, and in the members of the #Me Too and the #Never Again movements.
Right now, it may seem as if evil is in the ascendency and Mother’s Day for many a day of grief rather than joy. But let’s not forget that women throughout history have always known grief. They have stood at the graves of sons and husbands slaughtered in brutal wars. They have cradled their dead children murdered in senseless shootings in schools and violent neighborhoods. They sit at their elderly mothers’ bedsides and grieve as they ease their deaths. And, yet, their emotional strength endures from generation to generation. It is passed on from mother to daughter and from mother to son, in the desire that their grandchildren and great-grandchildren may live in a more just world.
So on this Mother’s Day, as we remember our own mothers, let us honor the “foolish idealists.” The women and men who still dare to imagine and fight for that better world–a world where every child’s mother and every mother’s child is treated equally and able to walk, study, play and worship in safety.
In a front page article entitled “School Shootings Leave a Long Trail of Trauma” the New York Times (Front Page: March 29, 2019) explores the lingering trauma to survivors of school shootings.
On April 6, 2019, the Editor of the New York Times printed the following letter that I wrote in response to the article.:
As a Marriage Family therapist who has treated trauma survivors and as a survivor of a mass shooting myself, I think we miss an important factor in helping the survivors of school shootings. How can they heal when they do not feel protected by those in charge of their country?
In May 1945, when I was seven years old, my mother and I were on the Dam Square in Amsterdam celebrating the liberation of our city, when German soldiers opened fire and more than 30 people were shot to death. I was able to heal from the trauma, in part, because the Allies arrived and took charge. But in 2017 television images showing torch-bearing neo-Nazis with swastikas in Charlottesville, VA., triggered old fears. Memories resurfaced of gunshots, of running for safety as people screamed and fell bleeding to the ground, and suddenly I wanted the presence of the Allies who conquered the Nazis and made a 7-year-old Dutch school child feel safe again.
Who are the Allies for America’s children today? Where are the liberators who will remove the guns and make today’s American schoolchildren feel safe?
