A mother for hard times: a Mother’s Day assignment for you all

Published : 9 May 2011, 03:26 PM
Updated : 9 May 2011, 03:26 PM

A 74-year-old doll with a broken leg sits on the bed at my sister's house. It was given to her by my mother.

That doll is a real survivor, her tight-blond plastic curls impeccable and her embroidered dress, only slightly faded. The doll's name is impossible for Americans to pronounce: Győngyi. Each phoneme of that name is as foreign to English-speaking natives as the story of her remarkable survival may be to most Americans. When my mother was four-year-old, visiting her grandparents in Budapest, air raid sirens blared, forcing my mother and her family into the basement below the apartment.

No one knew if Allied or Axis forces were decimating the city. Both sides bombed Budapest. What mattered that night in that basement bomb shelter was one simple fact: A little girl, my mother, was crying for her doll, left in the upstairs apartment three stories from safety. My mother's grandmother volunteered to risk her life to save this object of my mom's affection. My great-grandmother scrambled up the basement steps, climbed the stairs to her pitch-dark apartment, and rescued Győngyi as the bombs fell just blocks away.

I know very little about my great-grandmother. What we remember of our ancestors' stories dwindle with time, until they are pared down to single incidents that shed some light on who these people were, and how they are connected to us by a chain of love, despite distance and circumstance, language and time. What we recall, the flashes of personality that endure, are preserved in the stories of those moments where a mother's love meets the challenges of history. Yet, the character of our families, and ultimately our self-definition as a people rest more firmly upon the strength of these anecdotal accounts of extraordinary love, than they do on any event we may study in a history book.

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We struggle to make our lives better each and every day. Here in the United States, what we consider "Hard Times" are nothing compared to the struggles that you there in Bangladesh must face. Despite our differences, as parents we share a common goal. We struggle forward so our suffering will be so far removed from our grandchildren's reality, that they will only be able to experience it through stories.

I have often stated that your history has moved me. I can only imagine the suffering that the people of Bangladesh as a whole have braved since the 70's. Too many mothers have buried their children through the devastation of famines, floods, and military muscle-flexing. I wonder how many little girls' dolls were rescued from disasters by brave grandmothers. In a world of heroes, where epics have been written about the glorious struggles to take a hill or to plant a flag, no one builds monuments a mother's act of personal heroism. Cold stone is a poor medium for acts of warmth. Only in the stories we tell, that we pass from one generation to the next, can we truly commemorate the meaning of motherhood. As the generations pass, as we make things easier for our descendants, these stories assume a magical quality.

Here, in the United States, it's Youth Baseball Season. It is my fifteenth year as a coach. From my vantage point, I can overhear the parents in attendance.

A mother sits on the bench at a home game watching her son play ball. She has a textbook open on her lap. Between innings, she studies. One of the kids berates her, "Are you crazy, bringing homework to a baseball game?" And I smile, and I hope that her son will one day realise the depth of her sacrifice, the commitment to the betterment of her family. I hope that her son tells stories to his children about how his mother was there for him, even as she struggled to improve his conditions. I know she prays that her labours will allow him the time to pursue his studies and have the leisure to pay full attention to his own son or daughter's games.

And then there are the personal sacrifices that a mother makes in good times, regardless of station in life, and independent of circumstance and struggle. These are small moments that will live forever because they express the personal commitment a mother always has for her child.

I tell my own story to my children, about a mother who sat for two and a half hours in the dark lobby of the Vanderbilt Planetarium on Long Island so her nervous 15–year-old son, so desperate to look cool, could have some privacy with a potential girlfriend on their first date. I don't remember if I thanked my mom that night, but that act of kindness moved me, made me wonder how many more such moments of sacrifice had passed unnoticed. Thirty-five, fifty, a hundred years after the event, my grandchildren will continue to tell their children this simple story of my mother, as I tell it to you, my dear readers on the other side of the world.

Many of you are unfamiliar with American dating rituals of the 1970's (I know they are already alien to my own children) perhaps few of you will have ever been to a planetarium. Maybe some of you live in a place where a child must need not rely on a mother for transportation. Still, no matter how foreign the details, the lesson of love and sacrifice is clear.

When I was young, the fondness of that memory rested in the thrill of sitting in a laser light show, wondering if a beautiful girl would respond to the nervous touch of my hand, and how proud I felt that I forced myself to be brave enough to move my hand across the arm rest until we were holding hands.

Now, I have a son who is approaching the same age as I was on that long-ago date. In my imagination, I am not sitting next to that girl. Instead, I sit with my mother on a wooden bench, waiting in a darkened hall, chatting with a security guard. My mother, who was always teaching me something, communicated deeply with my future self that night, and her unspoken lesson is one I echo every time I wait in a car for two hours or drive a hundred miles out of my way to give my own children their own private moments of joy in which I, by necessity, am a mere conveyance.

As parents, we often measure success by how little our children realise that times are hard. My father grew up in poverty, during The Depression, and never realised that he was poor until he left his neighbourhood and entered the Air Force. My grandmother always managed to provide an exquisitely cooked meal for him, sewed him fashionable clothing, and made sure that he was shielded from the financial worries of the grown-up world. Our mother's sacrifices are often the kind that, for our own peace of mind, are invisible to us as children, and only sometimes recognised from the perspective of our adulthood. Their everyday acts of heroism, by their very nature, may pass from the personal oral history of the family without acknowledgement or mention.

My mom is an avid gardener. She taught me how to garden for food, and to value those "volunteers", the dandelions, chickweed and violets that found their way into our garden and that most people would regard as weeds. She taught me that just because something had been planted by the winds of chance, they were no less valuable than those seeds that we had sewed intentionally. Each plant has its special gift.

This is a poignant metaphor from my mother's own story of immigration, but it also speaks to the trials that many non-immigrant mothers must endure. I know several young adults whose mothers were once frightened teenagers with a difficult choice to make. Here in the United States, I also know a handful of young women who are now facing motherhood, literally bearing the consequences of that same difficult choice — to become a mother, often with no fatherly support. I wonder if the children of these women will ever fathom the depth of the sacrifice that their mothers once made. I wonder if they will ever appreciate how their mothers, while they were really still children, so valued the special gift of the "volunteers" that had sprouted in their gardens, that they allowed them to change the landscape of their lives, and cultivated them with love.

This Mother's Day, I think the best gift for any mother, as she smiles through a breakfast of omelettes and eggshells, burnt toast and ceramic art projects so misfigured that they seem to have been crafted on Jupiter, is to acknowledge some memorable act of kindness that characterises your mother's loving struggle. You may not be able to afford to buy her a huge gift, or take her out for a meal. Still, in these hard times, you could tell her a story, the story by which her great-grandchildren will know her. This way, she will understand that her family bears witness to the timeless heroism of her love, the foundation upon which the humanity of your nation rests securely, and that no disaster, natural or political, can ever hope to erase.

Happy Mother's Day!

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Frank Domenico Cipriani writes a weekly column in the Riverside Signal called "You Think What You Think And I'll Think What I Know." He is also the founder and CEO of The Gatherer Institute — a not-for-profit public charity dedicated to promoting respect for the environment and empowering individuals to become self-taught and self-sufficient. His most recent book, "Learning Little Hawk's Way of Storytelling", is scheduled to be released by Findhorn Press in May of 2011.