For My Mom, on Mother's Day

My mother and me

I am in awe of my mother, and I have been my whole life, though I have rarely said it.

Two weeks ago, I took her to Salzburg for her eighty-sixth birthday. While we were there, I finally let myself feel the full weight of what she survived, and what she chose to do with the rest of her life.

She walked beside me on the cobblestones of a city we used to visit as a family, stopped for ice cream in a square we remembered, and looked up at the fortress on the hill the way we used to. I kept catching myself watching her, not because anything was wrong, but because I think I was finally letting myself see her. What I felt walking next to her was how much I love her, and how rarely I let myself feel that directly.

My mother was born in Munich in 1940, in the early years of the war. Our family is originally from Schlesia, what is now Poland. As the war went on, my grandfather decided the family would be safer in Prague, so they moved there. He worked as an optician in the city, and when the Russians approached, many Germans left, but he chose to stay.

By May of 1945, when the war ended and Russian troops entered Prague, the family was suddenly in danger. Czech civilians, many of whom had suffered deeply under Nazi rule, turned their pain into retaliation. What followed were brutal, often unspeakable acts. As German civilians, the family had nowhere to go.

By then, fear and despair had overtaken entire families. What happened next is almost impossible to put on a page. My grandmother, more terrified of what would be done to them than of dying, did something no mother would ever do unless terror had taken over: she slit the wrists of the entire family, her own and her husband's and her mother's and all four of her children's. The Red Cross found them. My mother lived. Czech civilians took her father and her grandmother away. We have always assumed they were killed, because we never heard from them again.

As the family tried to make their way back to Munich on foot, her two-year-old brother, Paulchen, got sick. They had to leave him at a small hospital in Plauen, and he died there. At the border, a soldier trying to escape to the West grabbed my mother and ran across with her, using her as a shield while border guards fired at him. Once across, he left her in a refugee camp, where she stayed for weeks before she was reunited with her family. My mother was five years old.

In Munich, my grandmother kept the family together however she could, washing the clothes of American GIs and boiling potato peels into soup. My mom, still a child, took on the household and the care of her siblings. She only went to school through the eighth grade.

What she didn't get from school she taught herself. She became a ferocious reader of fiction and non-fiction. She loves culture, and at eighty-six she still goes to a classical concert, an opera, or a reading once or twice a week.

With only an eighth-grade education, she also handled the hard practical things in our family without ever seeming intimidated by them. She managed the finances, the insurance, the bills, the paperwork, first when I was growing up, and later for herself and my father. I learned more from watching her in those years than I learned from anything she tried to teach me.

There are pieces of those years she still doesn't talk about. None of it got processed the way our generation would process it. It shaped her, but it didn't harden her. Somehow she became more open because of it, not less. I don't understand how a child comes through that and grows up to be curious about the world, but she did. It is the thing I have spent the most time trying to learn from her.

In her twenties she moved to what was then Southwest Africa, now Namibia, to work as a nanny for a German couple living there. She did that for a year, then moved to Cape Town to be with her mother and her brother. When a friend offered her a job in Japan, she took it. I've never quite understood how she did any of it, alone, without a plan.

She took Japanese classes in Tokyo, and one of the teachers was my father. She decided he was going to be her teacher, and that was that. A year later they were married, and nine months after that I was born. They lived in Japan for five years before the constant earthquakes convinced her it was time for us to move to Munich, in 1975.

My father didn't speak the language, didn't know anyone there, and he wanted to practice acupuncture in a country where most people had never heard of it. My mother sat next to him at every appointment in those early years and translated. She built the practice with him in her language while he learned hers. She raised my sister and me in two cultures at once, and she did it without a lot of attention or recognition for any of it.

My father passed away in December of 2022. My mother and sister were with him while I was trying to get back from New York. The center of our family is now her, and I'm grateful she's still here.

Our relationship through my childhood was difficult. I see so much of her in me now, which may be part of why we struggled as much as we did. I call her almost every day now, and even at eighty-six she still tells me how busy she is. That part of her has never changed.

What I grew up watching in her was a willingness to keep beginning again, in new countries, new languages, new roles, over and over. After everything she lived through, she somehow stayed curious about life instead of withdrawing from it. That is the part of her I've spent decades trying to grow into.

I admire her more than I admire anyone. I work with leaders who have been through hard things, and I have rarely seen anyone respond to what life gave them the way she did. The remarkable part is what came after the surviving. She chose to stay open when nothing about her childhood would have justified it, and she has continued to choose it for the next eight decades.

Walking next to her in Salzburg, I could feel all of that underneath the day. It was one of the places we used to go as a family. The fortress hadn't changed. She had, and I had, and the people we used to walk those streets with weren't there.

There won't be an unlimited number of these trips. That's the part I've been avoiding. It's easier to stay busy, to call on Sundays, to tell myself there's still plenty of time. But walking next to her that day, I felt the ache underneath all of it — the simple fact that I love her, and it won't always be like this.

I see some version of this in my coaching work too. We delay the trip, the visit, the conversation, not because we don't care, but because the love underneath it feels bigger than we know what to do with. In Salzburg, I stopped trying to make the day mean something. I just tried to be with her. That turned out to be enough.

When I got back to Brooklyn, we talked on the phone. She told me the whole visit had felt like a dream, that it had gone by so quick.

Some version of this is probably true for others on Mother's Day too. Whoever your mother was, or is, she carried more than you knew, probably for longer than you knew. Some of who you are came from her, even if you don't always remember to say so. Today is a good day to feel grateful for whatever she gave you, even if you're not sure how to say it.

My mother has never quite understood Mother's Day. She thinks we should always honor our mothers, not just on one day a year. I think she is right.

To my wife, Sienna: today is for you, too. Thank you for the way you mother Kade and Sabrina, and for being the partner I needed to learn what mothering can look like up close.

Mom: Thank you for surviving what no child should have to, for staying open to everything you didn't choose, and for never making any of it about you. Whatever I have figured out about how to live, I learned most of it from you. Happy Mother's Day. I'm still learning how to actually be there.

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