By Jonathan Landaw

The other day I was almost finished typing out a paper my wife had composed for college when suddenly an uneasy feeling swept over me. Her assignment had been to sketch her family history in an attempt to discover patterns of view and behavior that might have been passed down from one generation to the next, and she chose to focus primarily on those patterns involving her late mother. As she wrote: “By reviewing our family history it may be possible to recognize and then free ourselves of those ‘inherited‘ traits having a destructive effect on our adults lives and, perhaps more importantly, avoid passing these dysfunctional traits on to our children.”

She began by mentioning some of the significant early influences on her mother’s life and then wrote about the ways in which these influences might have affected her mother’s relationship with her own children, particularly with Truus herself and with Truus’ younger sister, Nellie. She wrote: “My mother was a middle child [of nine children] whose father … was a carpenter and whose mother was a strong-willed woman who ran a café from her home. By all accounts, my mother was an attractive, bright and lively girl and a great favorite of her father’s, a fact of which she was proud. I remember my mother saying that my grandfather had told her, ‘Frieda, if you were a boy, there would be no limit to what you could become.’ But the reality of life in those days was that sons, if they were able to, took up the occupation of their father while girls were expected to be dutiful daughters, grow up devoted to serving their family and eventually marry and raise a family of their own … [Thus it happened that despite] the fact that my mother was a bright girl, she went to school only as far as the sixth grade. Around that time one of her own aunts became ill and it was decided that young Frieda would quit school and take care of her. As far as I know, even though my mother enjoyed school, she did not protest against this abrupt termination of her formal education. She had been taught that family duties come first, far outweighing one’s own individual desires in importance, so she accepted this decision without complaint.”

Other events are then mentioned, particularly the way in which the outbreak of World War II, which had such a massively destructive effect on the Dutch people as a whole, squashed her plans to become a nurse. The paper continues: “Along with traditional values handed down over generations, the war reinforced the notion that security was to be found only within the extended family structure. The family was all-important and to put aside one’s own desires for the sake of furthering the interests of the family-at-large was not thought of as a sacrifice, but as a natural fact of life, a necessity. You supported the family and then, in your old age or illness, the family supported you.”

Commenting on how these experiences influenced the ways in which she herself was raised, Truus wrote: “My mother gave everything for her family and expected that, when she had children of her own, they would support her. But things did not work out according to her expectations, and she never was able to come to terms with that … I think my sister and I bore the brunt of our mother’s disappointment. The boys were allowed to be more independent, but the girls were expected to fulfill those traditional roles of dutiful daughter, wife and mother with which she herself was personally familiar. Yet neither my sister nor I have ever been the type of daughter she wanted, or expected, to have.

Most of what was written up to this point occurred long before I was ever introduced to Truus or her family. But then there comes a description of a pattern of behavior that I myself had seen enacted many times, and it was while typing this section that I became particularly uneasy. “When there was a visitor presenting our house, my mother was all charm and graciousness, a source of always entertaining stories; when the visitor departed, she told us what we did wrong, what we should have said and how we should have behaved. The contrast between her two faces – the warm, delightful hostess seen by outsiders and the bitter, critically disappointed parent that my siblings and I had to deal with afterwards – could hardly have been more extreme.”

I recognized this “split personality” type of behavior only too well. Before I was accepted as part of the family, I only knew my future mother-in-law’s charming side. She was always extremely kind to me and did everything to make me feel at home. Later, when I witnessed the embittered and hyper-critical side of her nature – especially as it was directed towards my wife – I was shocked. Where was the kind person who had welcomed me so warmly? And when I was typing the last section quoted above, a similar question arose in my mind: Where in this description was the loving woman I had known; what had happened to her?

I told Truus of my uneasiness and said I felt that something was missing from this otherwise all-too-accurate portrait of the woman her mother had become. She replied by stating emphatically what she always felt in her heart to be true: that nothing her mother ever did or said was motivated by the slightest wish to harm anyone, especially not her beloved children. This was evident not only in the way she completely devoted herself to providing a stable home for them all. Every member of the family also knew that their mother would have gladly and instantly offered her own life to save any one of them. If she criticized the ways in which Truus and her sister led their lives – and this she did continuously – it was only because she wanted to save her daughters from making mistakes that would lead to their unhappiness. Now that she was in the position of elder, she felt she knew best how things should be done; in contrast, the opinions of her daughters, who obviously lacked her own years and experience, were invalid and therefore not to be trusted. She simply could not understand how one of her own children could view things in ways so different from her own. For example, the only interpretation Frieda could make of the unfamiliar manner Truus was raising Lisa, our first-born, was that this was her daughter’s indirect way of criticizing her, of complaining about her own upbringing! But just as it was true that Truus’ behavior was void of such vindictiveness, it must be understood that her mother’s behavior was similarly lacking such a mean-spirited motivation. It is by recognizing and honoring her good intentions that we can forgive her less-than-skillful actions. And it is only with this forgiving attitude that Frieda’s life and legacy can be properly understood and appreciated. Once I recognized this and realized I had a chance to express this recognition here, my uneasiness evaporated. (Furthermore, it allowed me to get away with writing only about a quarter of this month’s column; the rest I could steal from my wife.)