Just another mother – homage to a woman without whom I wouldn’t exist

Some years ago, I got a very official looking letter from a lawyer in a small town in Sweden. I had no business in said town, had at most driven through it, so I was rather curious as to what the letter might contain. Very formally, the letter informed me that I was a potential beneficiary of the estate of one Iris – well, I would have been had she not left it to someone else. Still, as I was a close relation to Iris, the lawyer wanted me to confirm I did not intend to attempt to dispute the will. I had never heard of Iris.
I had never heard my mother or any other relatives speak of Iris.
Intrigued, I called up the lawyer, who told me Iris was 104 years when she died and that her maiden name was Iris Berg. “Her father was…”
“Don’t tell me,” I interrupted, “it was that rat Carl Berg, wasn’t it?”
The lawyer chuckled. “I’ve been getting that reaction very frequently,” she admitted. “Like from all of Iris’ relatives who’ve called me.”
“He was a terrible man,” I said. “Horrible husband, even worse father, abandoning his children like he did.”
“He seems to have been a good father to Iris,” the lawyer said – which did not help at all. Carl Berg was, and will forever be, the bastard who left wife and children high and dry and took off.
I told the lawyer I would of course not dispute the will – Iris had left what she had to a foster son – and hung up.

So why this visceral reaction to Carl? Let’s take it from the beginning, which means introducing you to my great-grandmother, Sigrid.

Sigrid was born on a large farm in the Swedish region of Östergötland. Her parents were progressive in that they firmly believed in giving their daughters the benefit of an education – not entirely common in the late 19th century, and Sigrid was sent to Stockholm to become a primary teacher (Women were only entrusted with the education of the lower grades) After some years of studying, she returned home and in the town of Motala, she met a young dashing man called Carl Berg. Carl was an engineer. He was also handsome and charming and Sigrid was quite, quite swept of her feet. Her parents were impressed: a son-in-law who was an engineer, imagine that!

Carl was, by all accounts, a modern young man, more than proud of having an educated wife. But once they married, Sigrid soon found herself in the family way, and eldest daughter Greta was born. The babies came rapidly after that. My own grandmother was number four, and soon enough there was a number five, six, seven and eight, all born very close together.

What Sigrid thought of all these babies, I do not know. But when she became pregnant for the ninth time, Carl decided he’d had enough.
“I can’t cope!” he said. “What is it with you, popping out one baby a year?”
Umm… that is what usually happens when one has lots and lots of unprotected sex, and in the first decade of the 20th century, protection was not exactly around.
Carl decided to ignore his contribution to all this procreation, told Sigrid she was on her own and left. Just like that. Nice guy, huh? And not once during all the years that followed, did he send as much as a krona (Swedish currency, more or less a shilling/dime) home. Nope, Carl was gone with the wind, leaving his poor wife and their children to fend for themselves. And yet Sigrid never uttered one single negative word about him.
“He was a weak man,” she’d sigh. “How can I blame him for that?”
I would. As I struggled to feed my children, as I spent hours foraging for nettles in the spring and mushrooms in the fall to fend off starvation, I’d curse this irresponsible oaf that walked out on me when I needed him the most. Not only did he never send any money, he never bothered to write. It was as if he had ripped out the pages containing his wife and offspring from his book of life. While she never blamed him, her children most certainly did, a certain acidity tingeing their voices whenever they talked about their father. Him disappearing caused them to grow up in poverty, any dreams of studying beyond the seven years of mandatory school crushed by the need to begin earning money.

My grandmother began ironing at well-to-do households before she was twelve. Her older brothers worked long, long hours doing odd jobs, her older sister did laundry and as soon as the younger siblings were old enough, they too contributed.  They never had new clothes.

The above isn’t uncommon, not then, not now. Women and their children are abandoned every day, left to cope while the male butterflies that populate the world flutter on to new, prettier flowers. Not that I’m insinuating all men are butterflies – no way. Most men are conscientious and devoted fathers, but when a parent does walk out it tends to be the father, not the mother. Maybe this reflects the prevalent view that children are mainly the mother’s responsibility – that’s how things have been ordained throughout the ages. Or maybe this just proves that some boys never make it over the threshold to manhood. Interesting, isn’t it, that while all girls chafe at the strings that hold them back from becoming adults too soon, quite a few boys never want to make that transition (Peter Pan f.ex). This just goes to show that women are much more realistic than men – the romantics in this world are men rather than women.

I have often wondered how my great-grandfather, Carl, explained his behaviour to himself.
“Like a rabbit; the dratted woman kept on getting pregnant” must have fallen flat, given that he was an active participant in the actions leading up to babies.
“She’s better off without me.” Well, even Carl couldn’t believe a lie the size of an elephant. No, he knew that leaving his family was the equivalent of condemning them to the poor house – and his wife to the silent insinuations that somehow she must have been to blame, because Carl was such a nice and upright man.
“I have dreams to fulfill, places to see! She was choking me, holding me back, and all those children … I never wanted more than two!” Huh. And what about her dreams? Or did he believe being the single mother of nine kids was her favourite fantasy?

All those men who walk out leave a wake of abandoned children behind. Sons who will either emulate their father’s sorry example, alternatively become ferociously protective of their future offspring. Daughters who will have no standard against which to measure their future husbands and probably end up marrying men as good for nothing as their own father was. Children who become adults far sooner than they should as they try to help their mother – if they don’t take off the moment they can, sick and tired of growing up with mothers who can never quite make ends meet.

Sigrid’s life became a nightmare. Her eldest daughter was taken in by Sigrid’s parents, the younger children she had to cope with on her own – including the newborn baby. The whole family lived in cramped accommodation – not so uncommon at the turn of the last century, but a come down for Sigrid, raised on a well-to-do farm before marrying her successful engineer husband. They lived in a one room house with a small loft and an even smaller kitchen, sleeping as tight as sardines.
“Good thing, that,” my grandmother’s brother, Harry, would say. “We’d have frozen to death otherwise.”

Somehow Sigrid coped – most mothers do, don’t they? Let me rephrase that; somehow most single parents do. Despite financial uncertainty, despite going bowlegged with the weight of responsibility on their shoulders, they struggle on, putting the well-being of their children first. Testament to just how successful Sigrid was in creating a warm, loving home are her children (well; were. Most of them are dead by now). I’ve grown up hearing stories about her, stories told with so much love and admiration for this woman who never bewailed her fate. Sigrid was one smart lady; instead of drowning in a sea of bitterness, she rolled up her sleeves and got on with her life. It must have been horribly hard at times, but Sigrid didn’t expend her energy on complaining – she invested her time and efforts in her children.

All over the world, single mothers today are doing just that, sacrificing their dreams and hopes so that their children can continue holding on to theirs. And today the burden on the single parent is higher, because most of us live far away from kin and relatives, the extended family that once acted as a social safety net round people like Sigrid no longer exists. The least they deserve is a flower to cheer them up … (And this is one stubborn rose, flowering despite the snow!)

So what about Carl, what happened to him? According to my mother’s uncles, the man moved very far away and remarried – wait wait; became a bigamist, as he never divorced Sigrid.  In actual fact, those uncles were wrong. Carl only moved like two hours away from Motala, where he settled down with a new wife (except legally she wasn’t his wife, given the whole bigamy thing) There were two new children, and Carl settled down to a life of structured peacefulness, far removed from the life Sigrid was living. Where his children by Sigrid knew daily hardship, his two new children were given every advantage in life: excellent education, a comfortable house, good clothes. And all the while, less than half a day away, their half-siblings grew up in poverty. It seems that at some point (on his deathbed, perhaps?) Carl told his children about all his other children. Iris seems to have been fully aware of her half-brothers and sisters, but she seems to have been hesitant about contacting them. According to the lawyer, she had some sporadic contact with one of her half-nieces, that’s all.

Receiving that letter regarding Iris’ passing made us all remember Sigrid again. I only met her once, when I was about one, so I have no memory of her, but sometimes, you don’t need your own memories, not when you’ve grown up hearing one after the other of Sigrid’s many children and grandchildren speak of her. I know she sang a lot, that she had mild OCD and always opened her house to those in need. It may have been small and cramped, but at my great-grandmother’s table there was always room for one more.  I also know she believed in God and found strength in her faith during those years when life must have been one constant drudge. I also know her favourite psalm, which – surprise, surprise – was also the favourite psalm of all her children and grandchildren. When I hear it, I don’t think of Sigrid: I think of my mother, and how hr eyes would tear up, her voice break, whenever she heard it. But she’d still sing along, as I do whenever I hear it. And yes, my eyes tear up as well. (Here is a link to one version of it )

Despite my comment to that lawyer, nowadays I tend to agree with Sigrid: Carl was weak, not bad, and so he deserves pity rather than ire. Besides, I’m sure he spent many a sleepless night thinking about his Sigrid – nine children in thirteen years speaks of an element of passion. (Yikes! Nine in thirteen years…)

All the people presently on this planet have a common denominator, we had an ancestor like Sigrid.
Our forebears did not collapse to freeze in the snow. Despite the advancing ice age, saber-tooth tigers and other challenges they soldiered on. They didn’t say “WTF” and take off when for the third time in one year their crops were consumed by locusts.
They didn’t shake their fist at the sky (well, maybe they did) and yell “Enough! I’ve had it!” when yet again the dratted wolf took their sheep. When the going got tough, these our progenitors didn’t stop walking. They might have had to crawl at times, there were days when it was touch and go, but ultimately they gritted their teeth and never gave up.
Like Sigrid, they endured, holding on to the hope that tomorrow would be better than today, if not for them, at least for their kids.

In many ways, Sigrid wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, she was just another mother.
Just another mother . . . Where would the world be without mothers, without fathers?  I guess that’s what life boils down to in the end; being a good enough parent to see your children safely on their way, hoping they will do the same for their children, an endless chain of offspring extending into the future.
Just another mother . . . what better epitaph can there be?