On Mother's Day

During the years that my family lived in Belgium, we lived in a Flemish area of Brussels. I was barely aware of the country’s deep, cultural and political ‘Flanders vs. Wallonia’ rift. In fact, the only way it touched my life was that street signs were posted in two languages. My mother, on the other hand, ran up against the problem at least once, when she called our local police station after an attempted burglary at our home. Our local police station, as it happened, was also in the Flemish district. My mother did not speak Flemish. The police officer refused to speak French. Then, in English, with no room for misunderstanding, she pointedly told him that she could speak English, French, Swedish, German, Spanish or Italian. In which language was he going to help her?
He assisted my mother in French. Miraculously, the police officer’s command of a language he claimed not to know was quite strong.

If my mother had a motto, it would be: Get it done. As she often reminded us, a job half-done was a job not done at all. The reciting of this maxim was especially annoying when the job at hand involved polishing silver or the annual chore of pulling up weeds from between the stone slats of our terrace (a task that invariably left little callouses to form on the side of the forefinger).

On second thought, perhaps it would be: Suffer no fools. No one wanted to be on the receiving end of one of her steely gazes, especially not when accompanied by a swift tongue-lashing. She could - and would - cut hubris with a single comment. She had a knack for turn of phrase. When my sister was born, the doctor saw her resemblance to our dad and said, “Well, there’s no question who the father is!” to which my mother responded, “There never was.”

When I was 15, I held a party on a weekend my parents were out of town. The following Monday, my mother surprised me by picking me up from school. Immediately, my guilty conscience told me I’d been found out, but instead she chatted pleasantly with me about her day and I breathed a sigh of relief. As we pulled into our driveway, she remarked casually that she had run into our neighbor earlier.
“Phil said he was sorry he wasn’t invited to my party. It looked like quite a success.”
My stomach flipped.
“I had to tell him I didn’t know what he was referring to.”
I had trouble hearing for the pounding in my ears.
“And that I was away for the weekend.”
The jig was up.
And it was then, and only then, that she turned to look at me. There was no reason to speak. The look on my face said it all.
My mother, the tactician.

My fiercely loyal, silly, loving, beautiful mother passed on to me the importance of the Golden Rule, being a good friend, choosing a mate I could laugh with, making time for myself, and finding a doctor I liked. I'm proud to say she also passed on to me her withering gaze.