My mother has always had a special place in my heart. When I was a child the connection between us was tangible: She was a part of me. Merely a glance between us was often enough to calm me down.
She was a dress maker and I enjoyed watching her working:
she took her blue measuring tape to take some measures, folded the material in suitable form, transferred her measures onto the material and draw with a chalk the form she wanted to cut.
How did she know where to draw a line? How did the form find its way to the chalk?
She was a very strong character, who was practically a single parent of six children. My father was alcoholic and didn’t seem to care a bit of the well-being of his family. When my mother got ill and her state became worse year by year my father dealt with it as carelessly as with everything else:
he said my mother was hypochondriac, and claimed that she made it up to get attention. Maybe it was simply because she needed attention.
When my mother committed suicide I had from the very beginning the feeling that she made a conscious decision to help her children. It was very important for her that we got better chances than she had to achieve something in life.
Just before the death of my mother me and my sister had begun secondary school. When my mother saw that she couldn’t provide us ‘proper’ starting point she solved the situation in her own way.
I couldn’t even really mourn the death of my mother. She didn’t see in the situation any other solution but suicide. It was a direct reaction from my mother to the realities of life from her own vantage point. And the realities were what they were.
I didn’t accuse my parents. Instead of that I was absolutely furious at this world, which nullified every good effort, turned people against each other and subordinated them as prisoners of own circumstances.
I have a clear memory in my mind of one day after mother’s death as I stood in the yard of our new home and I had a heart crushing feeling when I thought about the injustice of this world. It seemed that people have no real means to rise above their circumstances. Anyway, I made a promise to myself that no power in the world could make me surrender because of challenging circumstances.
My mother had used the last chance she saw to help our life forward. In my new home we were expected to call our foster parent “mother”.
It was like a sacrilege for me. My mother had died, but she was still my mother. Her status had become no minor. She lived in me like my father also.
People who tried to turn my thoughts against my parents didn’t understand, what was important, what was good for me. How could they even think that it would profit me to despise the influence of my parents in myself?
My mother had given her life, so that we could have better starting point for our lives. I was happy that her action opened doors before us, because it was her will.
The only item I have left of my mother is her blue measuring tape. It is a human life long: each centimeter correlates with one year. This timeline has helped me define the relation of certain things to each other.