Afternoons with a woman of valour (aka Mom)

For the past 18 months, I’ve been plugging away at a “writing project” with my mom, recording her memories about every photo in her 25 albums. These conversations are then transcribed – raw material for a family history. It’s a monumental undertaking.

Here’s a short list of the stumbling blocks. Mom’s impaired hearing and poor processing. I have a clear voice, but almost every question needs repetition and clarification. SO. MUCH. REPETITION. We interrupt each other constantly. She pauses to locate words. I make a suggestion just as she thinks of it. She uses a mash-up of English (mostly), her Grunnings dialect (frequently) and Dutch (rarely), which results in hilarious exchanges. Sometimes she can only think of the word in Grunnings and I have to play twenty questions to get to her meaning. Sometimes I want her to spell a Grunnings or Dutch word and she complains that she doesn’t know how to spell it in either language: “WHY do you even care about the spelling?”

Mom’s memory is impressive but, at 93, not perfect, so there’s lots of second-guessing. Often, we come across a photo that prompts her to correct a previous error. If I press too hard for further details, she gets irascible: “Well, you don’t need to know that. Those people don’t matter. Why do you even care about old Oom Harm and Tante Anna, anyway?” There’s a Kryn who is her brother, another who is her uncle and another who is her cousin. I get confused. Some of the grandmothers were married twice. My beleaguered brain balks at the tangled family tree. Mom also tells me stuff she doesn’t want me to share. I get warnings: “Don’t write about this, OK?” (I make no promises.) Some photos trigger anguish and mystification. Chaotic events and indelible images of the war have left scars without context. This is also true of the 1944 church split that ruptured her village, inexplicable to a 12-year-old. Her family stayed Gereformeerde, but their church was seized by the Vrijgemaakt faction.

Things remembered

Comically, Mom has nearly perfect recall about her clothing. When donations arrived from American relatives just after the war, her two older sisters got to choose their outfits first. Her petulance is still palpable. An anniversary photo shows the older sisters posing in store-bought apparel while she and her younger sisters were forced to wear homemade, dowdy, identical dresses. Turning the page, she proudly points out a black-and-white picture of a sweater she’d crocheted herself. She remembers it was red.

I was especially affected by the pathos of her first job, backlit as it was by her wartime childhood. As a child, she was sent to a sanitarium for five weeks because of malnutrition, with her dad discharging her into the care of a stranger at the Groningen train station. Her recollections are blurred glimpses: seeking safety in an underground shelter, large dormitory-style cribs, daily hikes, compulsory naps and being given a toothbrush for the first time. She turned eight during her stay and the Director made a show of presenting her with birthday gifts – a bow for her hair and stationery embossed with crimson and gold. Mom was awestruck. An intense dislocation haloed by this shining moment.

The last few months of the war are their own harrowing tale for another time. Mom was 12 when the Canadians freed Ten Post and the village organized a ragtag Liberation parade. The aftermath? Two parents, eight kids, lice, scarcity and worry. To ease the burden, Mom was sent to Stedum to help Tante Annie, who was pregnant again. She remembers washing the linoleum on her hands and knees around the perimeter of the large area rug in the living room. But Tante Annie was kind and Oom Koos was jolly. Moreover, Tante Annie had a sewing machine, oh luxury, and she taught Mom how to sew an apron! She didn’t go home much during that time, a foggy period of several months or more. Mom shrugs: “Well, it was a lot like home.”

Mom’s first job

Mom’s older sister landed a job as a maid for a farmer on the outskirts of Ten Post. It only made sense to hire out Mom, too, as a kindermeisje to the neighbouring farmer. Mom, maybe 14 or 15, would provide childcare, so his wife could help with the milking.

So, every Monday, at 7:00 AM, Mom biked to Lellens. She had to stay at the farm until noon on Wednesday. Back on Thursday morning until late Saturday afternoon. Each week, she comforted herself by counting down the days and hours until it was time “to go home.” At first, she was lodged in a “fancy” bedroom, then quickly shuffled off to a closet bed in a smaller room. Eventually, she ended up in a front room closet bed with no space of her own at all.

The farmer’s wife soon revealed her true colours, content to rock in her chair, knitting furiously until milking time. Mom was not really a kindermeisje at all. She was simply an underage maid, watching the children, yes, but also preparing meals, doing dishes, picking beans, dragging heavy rugs to the clothesline to beat them with a mattenklopper and scrubbing milk pails in the cold water of the ditch.

Mom shudders, remembering her cold hands. She had to wash the concrete floor of the unheated “secondary” kitchen on her hands and knees with a dweil, a coarse mopping cloth, and a pail of cold water. Occasionally, she’d escape to the only bathroom, an “outhouse” situated at the far end of the barn, and sit with her aching hands between her bare thighs to warm them. She dreaded walking down the aisle, enormous cows lined up in stalls on both sides, terrified that one might swish a vies tail in her face, or worse, splatter her with poop! A panicky gauntlet for a whole year, especially at night.

The farmer was a deacon in the Vrijgemaakt church. He paid Mom with nickels and dimes from the church collection plate. That galled her. Her eyes flash: “It made me feel like a nothing!” Then she relents, “Oh well, he was kind of a jokester and nicer to me than his wife.”

As Mom tells these stories in her own charmingly garbled way, that’s how she always ends. She pulls on some slender thread of good, shakes out some crumbs of grace and waves a beneficent absolution over it all. “Everyone had it hard.” “It was that time.” “It was the war.”

I turn off the record button, rise up and call her blessed.