I normally don’t post anything on a Sunday, but today is extra special.
We celebrate mothers.
And rightly so, for where would any of us be, without them? They gave us life, they sacrificed so much to care for us, feed us, clean us, clothe us, raise us.
Even if your own experience with your mother wasn’t like that, you still see how this is the ideal, and I hope you can at least feel gratitude for the gift of life.
I saw a post pass by, earlier today, that made an incredible observation:
Instead of sacrificing children, we honor those who sacrificed themselves for the sake of their children. They make it look easy, at times, but it takes actual sacrifice, so often, and they do it lovingly and caringly. Heroic. Their example always serves to push us forward towards excellence. “What would your mother think of this?” She never ceases to protect and teach us, if we’re willing.
I love that this day, set aside to honor mothers, is still a thing in our Western culture. Not just of Western culture, but globally. Mothers have always been revered, worshiped even. The figure of the Mother Goddess, for example, bears witness of that.
Even the modern day celebration, started by Anna Jarvis in 1907 and first celebrated in Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia, was not the first time this idea has come up. Several decades earlier, in 1870, Julia Ward Howe issued a Mother's Day Proclamation and held several feast days to honor mothers. After having written the Battle Hymn of the Republic, she was moved deeply by the loss of life in the Civil War, caused by ‘sons killing the sons of other mothers’. Earlier even, in France, Napoleon had instituted ‘La Fête des Mères’, the Feast of Mothers. Their concern was a declining birth rate and population, primarily. Believed to have been started by Napoleon in 1806, the first official feasts started in the 1890s.
Earlier, even, you have the English ‘Mothering Day’. Started as a feast on which believers were invited to renew their faith, through a pilgrimage to the church they were baptized in, or the church they grew up going to: their ‘mother church’. In the 1700s, a proclamation was made where the feast was officially extended also to honor all actual mothers. It became a break from Lent, and servants were allowed to go home for the day to spend with their family and mothers.
Older even, you have the pagan rites for all the different mother goddesses, in Roman, Greek and other religions. The Hindu also have a feast with a similar aspect: Durga Puja, honoring the goddess Durga. In some of the rituals in this 10 day festival, married women were honored or took part of festivities to ask for the blessing of the goddess.
Regardless the reason, the idea to honor mothers has always appealed to people. Mothers are special. We all recognize that. Even if an individual mother might not have been, we know that ‘Mother’ still is worthy of honor.
So we honor them, today.
Congratulations to all mothers, present and past! We love you, and we recognize all you do and have done!
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Allow me, on this day, to honor in a special way a line of very strong women in my own family, who lived out their motherhood in exemplary way.
(And because I just wanted to share the story of my great-grandmother, Maria, because she was bad-ass to the core.)
But first, a little detour, taking place before the period I want to tell you about.
The year is 1926. Edmond De Ridder, my maternal great-grandfather, made his way to the Town Hall, to declare the birth of his firstborn child, a son!
In his delight to share the good news, he stopped at a few too many houses of friends and relatives, who offered him a drink of jenever in celebration at each stop.
By the time he reached the Town Hall, he had forgotten the name he and his wife had agreed upon… Instead of ‘Albert’, he had told the clerk ‘Carolus’. You can imagine the chiding he got when he returned home and his error became known!
My great-grandmother, Maria De Ridder (née Maes), still got her way, as the little boy, Carolus in the official books, would only be called Albert. That is how our family and his friends knew him. Albert De Ridder.
(My great-grandmother on her driver’s license)
Fast-forward a few years, and our town is under German occupation in WWII. The Germans are calling up young men for labor in Germany, and my great-grandparents received the letters calling up her oldest son. But Albert doesn’t want to. His brother André was still too young, and his brother Leon hid for a while with local farmers. Albert, however, decided to stay where he was.
So the Germans came to look for Carolus, as that was the name in the official records. Repeated letters were ignored, for who knew ‘Carolus De Ridder’? At some point, a small group of Germans was sent to their house to get Carolus.
“We are here to bring in Carolus De Ridder to fulfill his duty to the Reich and go work!”
“Carolus who? Don’t know that person.”
“Carolus De Ridder. This is the De Ridder family, right?”
“Yes, but we don’t know any Carolus. Hey dear, do you know ‘Carolus’?
“No honey, who is that?”
“Well then, who is that young man sitting there?”
“Ah, that is my son, Albert!”
Exit Germans.
Even if any informant or neighbor would have wanted to betray my family back then, they could not have, as no one had any idea that Albert was actually officially Carolus, and thus could not have pointed him out.
A little time later, to finish the act and to keep her son safe, my great-grandmother had heard on a clandestine radio broadcast that Ludwigshafen, where her son was supposed to have gone to, was very severely bombed (or one of the rail hubs on the way there, I am not clear on that detail from the stories I remember hearing).
So she marches off to the German Kreiskommandantur, gets in front of the leading officer, and starts yelling at this man.
“I put my son on the train, where is he now? I haven’t heard from him! He was your responsibility once he got on your train, where is he!?!”
Of course, no one had any idea of the situation on the ground after the bombing, some bodies could not be identified, etc. The officer got intimidated, and was happy enough to be able to get her to leave with some bogus excuse. My great-grandma thought “I’m a woman, why would they hurt a woman?”, but she managed to get her son’s name, Carolus, connected to that transport, and have him recorded as missing in Germany, keeping Albert safe in Belgium.
She even got the pay every worker received, which entered Carolus’ name officially in the books, getting Albert off the hook. Maria then went to her priest to ask if she could keep that money, as Albert never did the work that money was for.
“Keep it, don’t worry about it”, the priest told her.
She sincerely thought they would not harm women, because of an experience she had in the FIRST World War. German soldiers then had this thing where they tried to grab/pinch women’s legs, but that was strictly forbidden by the army. They were very strict about that, with iron discipline.
At one point, my great-grandmother, as a young and attractive girl, saw this soldier suddenly get down (to tie his shoe, she realized later), and she thought he was going for her leg. *Smack*, her open hand slapped the German soldier right on his cheek (my grandmother having trouble not bursting out laughing at this point of her story).
Nothing happened, the soldier took the hit and affront, and she realized that if the soldier had put in a complaint, he himself would have gotten in trouble, as he did appear to go for her legs, and that was a very clear breach of regulation. So she trusted that German officers would always protect women.
My grandmother, a little girl back then, wouldn’t remember too much of the war, except that if she saw a German soldier, he would almost always be singing. If she saw 2, they’d be singing in 2 voices. If she saw 3 or more together, they’d be singing in 3 or more voices.
And she remembers seeing waves of planes fly over.
Not that much later, in September 1944, our town was finally liberated by part of the 4th Armoured Brigade, with the 44th Royal Tanks Regiment (RTR) and B-Company of the 2nd KRRC, followed shortly by the l/7th Queen's Royal Regiment, under Lieutenant-Colonel W.D. Griffiths, and within a few days reinforced by the Royal Scots Greys and units of the 1st Polish Armor Division under general Stanislaw Maczek.
As part of those exhilarating but chaotic first days, units of the local resistance groups, at that point with an added number of ‘warriors of the last minute’, carried out ‘arrests’ of ‘collaborators’. In some cases, this were people who openly sympathized with the Nazi regime, and worked to help the German forces reach their goals in our town, at times by betraying others.
Not all, however, as others they captured were simple folk, who had dared to sell bread to German troops, or done deliveries of food or other such tasks, as part of their trade. It would not look good to refuse them service, after all. Some of that backlash was understandable, but a good deal was blind violence, settling scores, holding the slightest help offered to Germans against people, forgetting the good they also did. A lot happened without any respect for the rule of law, and very cruel things happened.
One such victim was the daughter of my great-grandmother’s neighbors. Fluent in German, she had helped as a nurse at the Eastern Front. Back home, she was ordered to help in the Kreiskommandantur to help translate between the German orders and the Flemish locals, and vice versa. As such, she received bonuses (money and/or food or fuel stamps), or had access to such.
But, as a worker in the German offices, she was targeted as a collaborator, a traitor, a German whore. A loud crowd gathered in front of their house, rifles at the ready, to drag out the poor girl, shave her head, etc. My great-grandmother, hearing the commotion, rushed outside.
Immediately, she pushed the resistance fighters away from the girl, and started to curse them out, as well as several of the bystanders who were cheering on the humiliation of the girl.
“You, and you!” she’d yell, pointing her finger in their faces,
“Just last week I saw you standing here, with your hands out, to get food stamps and help! Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves?!” (Followed by a string of incredibly colorful and creative names…)
No response from the fighters and crowd, just seconds before still so courageous and boisterous.
“And you there! Yes, I know you! I’ll go tell your mother what you are doing here! Get out of here!”
And they all left, and never bothered the poor girl again, who had indeed used her position to secure more food and fuel, and had been very generous in helping those in need in her own street and neighborhood. This story was confirmed by the daughter of that girl, years later, whose family still remembers and tells that same story of Marie De Ridder telling off those armed and angry men, with nothing but her pointing finger and sharp tongue.
My grandmother’s father came home during liberation day, and he also had seen some of that ‘repression’. He said he never wanted to see anything like that again, so horrible it was. Men forced to lick the inside of toilets, well beyond mere humiliation, while being beaten. Some, which he didn’t see, got executed without any trial. Again: some had it coming, I suppose, but a good deal of others were victim of feuds or blind hatred.
My great-grandmother knew that, and where during the war she resisted injustice where she saw it (she and her 2 oldest sons were members of the resistance), she continued that same attitude afterwards. She would smuggle in food and such things to the prison in Lokeren, where the victims of that wave of ‘repression’ were held, under the pretext of visiting a family member, helping whoever she could.
When I see the highly polarized situation we have today, and I compare that with her steadfast and motherly desire to help those in need, regardless of camp or color or side, I feel so many today are missing the point. What an example she was.
My grandmother, the sister of Carolus/Albert, also remembered being sent out to local farmers with a basket, to get potatoes and such, or on other errands around town (realizing only later that she had helped smuggle messages and such).
My great-grandmother passed right before she turned 90, and still insisted to have a Trappist beer every day. Even at that ripe old age, she loved to play cards, and you better not try any funny business when you played with her, for her vocabulary of curse words and insults was never-ending, and her spirit was as strong as ever.
She had the most delicious chocolate bonbons in her house, and seeing that (by then) frail old lady in her seat, with her glass of beer in her hand, and those sharp eyes, is one of my earliest memories.
A mother, if there ever was one, caring for her own children, but just as easily for any others who she saw in need. My grandmother, and my mother, were from the same stock. Strong, caring, loving. I am blessed to have had the best mother, and grandmother, and great-grandmother. What an example, what a witness.
And of course, my own wife. From a very different heritage (her forefather came in the 1620s from France, as a stone-mason and ‘Marin’, navy soldier, to help build the colonies, in what is now Quebec, and later moved to the US, where my wife’s grandfather was a mounted police officer in the city of Detroit), she bears the same strength and love and care (I suppose that I subconsciously was looking for a woman who’d meet the example of my own mother and mother’s mothers!). She has the strength to keep me in line, and the wisdom and love to do that in such a way I cannot but love her more, each day. And to see her with our children, her motherhood is a constant joy for me.
For all mothers, again, and especially to my wife: congratulations, and may God continue to bless you in great abundance!
A wife of noble character who can find?
She is worth far more than rubies.
Her children arise and call her blessed;
her husband also, and he praises her:
“Many women do noble things,
but you surpass them all.”
Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting;
but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.
Honor her for all that her hands have done,
and let her works bring her praise at the city gate.
God bless and thank You Moms 🙏🙌
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