A Mother’s New Year’s Wish and Intention
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.