A Blogger Gets Personal For Mother's Day: The Gift

Some of my mother's letters to Dora

My mother in Paris In the 1950's

As I knew her, in the 1970's

Dora (on the left) with her sister shortly after arriving in Soest from the East

Dear Reader, I hope that you will forgive me for getting a bit more personal than usual, but it's Mother's Day this Sunday and I have wanted to post this tribute to my own mother. I hope you won't mind.

The Gift

Shortly after my mother's death, one of her life-long friends sent a thick envelope. Inside were all the letters that my mother had written to Dora. The letters spanned the years 1955, when my mother, in a moment of youthful spontanaïty had traveled to Paris to work as an au-pair and ended in 1975, the year my family moved to the United States from Europe.

My mother loved writing and I was aware that she had kept up this epistolary exchange. For most of her life, she had lived away from her native Germany. Sending written messages from foreign lands was her assurance that she would not be forgotten by people back home. The telephone, which she told us cost too much, was reserved for special occasions, when a new baby cousin was born in the old homeland, when someone had died or at Christmastime, when we took turns wishing far away family members "Frohe Weihnachten," before my mother would gently reclaim the receiver.

So the image of my mother quietly sitting at the kitchen table, fountain pen in hand, forming her perfect letters on the almost see-through blue air mail paper, is still clear in my mind.
She would be so absorbed by this activity that as a child, I danced around her in the hopes of getting her attention. The reward for giving her just a few more minutes to "finish the letter so that it can be mailed" was a walk to the post office, where the stamped, addressed envelope would disappear in the narrow slot of the yellow mailbox, her words sent on a journey.

My mother wrote far more letters than she received. She didn't seem to mind. I always suspected that she wrote more for herself than for the letter's recipient. There was only one person who answered all of my mother's correspondence. That was her friend Dora. With unerring preciseness, a response from Dora would find its way to my mother within a fortnight, no matter where we lived.

The two women had first become friends in Soest, my mother's little hometown in Westfalia. My mother was 18 and bored to tears with her existence as a secretary for an insurance agency. Dora worked in the same office. She was roughly ten years older, a refugee from the East, who had landed in Soest with just the clothes on her back. As opposed to my mother, Dora had already had too much adventure in her life. Fleeing from the advancing Russian army in 1945, her family had been separated on the train ride West. Her father, hoping to get something to eat for the family at one of the stops along the way, failed to return on time before the train resumed its route. They never saw him again, never knew his fate.

No, Dora was happy having survived with her mother and sister. A boring life in a small town was happiness to her. It meant safety. It meant stability.

My mother on the other hand was not willing to settle for a mundane existence. She dreamt of discovering far away worlds. So when a Dutch pen-pal ( yes, she had already discovered her love of letter writing) convinced my mother to join her in Paris to work as an au-pair, my mother did not think long.

So started the correspondence between my mother and Dora, between two unlikely friends who would stay in touch until my mother's death in 2003.

When I called Dora to tell her the news, she started crying. "For me, your mother will always be the beautiful twenty-one year old who hopped on a train to Paris for adventure" she told me, her voice filled with emotion. I envied Dora for having this memory of her, a memory which I could not share. My own memories were so overwhelming that in my desperation to hold on to my mother, her face, her voice, her tales: everything seemed to fade from my mind. I became uncertain of the details and dates of the stories about her youth. I was afraid that I had lost the chance to pass them on to the next generation. And just as I was doubting my own recollections, cursing myself for not paying more attention to her when she shared them, the envelope arrived.

There were about thirty letters inside. A note from Dora simply stated: " I have kept your mother's letters for over 50 years. I reread them one more time and was briefly reunited with my dear friend, the young woman who set out on an adventure so many years ago. I am sending them to you and to your sister. They belong in your hands now."

And through Dora's incredible gift, through the faded pages of this correspondence, started so long ago, I find my mother again, not the sixty-nine year old woman who died too soon, but the twenty-one year old who still has her life ahead of her. This is the mother I did not know: the young girl, full of exuberance, flirtatious, impish. She writes of first loves, of discovering Paris and then of lost innocence. Later still, she writes of becoming a mother: with the birth of my sister and then mine. Here I find the details of precisely at what hour of the day we were born, the labor and her first impressions upon laying eyes on us. She writes of her trials as a mother, of being worried that I was not better in school, of my day-dreaming too much. In her beautiful handwriting, she is telling her story once more. I have started to meticulously type this correspondence into the computer so that I can share the letters with all of my mother's grandchildren. Her three grand-daughters are now the same age as their grandmother was when she left for Paris. They are charmed by this young adventurous woman and her tales.
So letters kept for fifty years bridge the gap between generations. Twenty-one year old grand-daughters meet their twenty-one year old grandmother. It is a priceless gift. I stay in touch with Dora, sending her letters which she answers as dutifully as she answered my mother's so long ago. Almost blind, her handwriting has become shaky and too large. But as long as her words still find their way to me across the ocean, I am content. I hope she knows how thankful I am that she introduced me to the young woman who was my mother.

By Katia Kelly
May 2008

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