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.