Last month my (last surviving) grandmother passed away, if she had still been alive, she would have turned 99 the day after tomorrow, a Christmas baby. I have been thinking lately that, although during my lifetime I have only known her as a potter – always working with clay, making pots and sculptures on commission, and teaching classes – in a way, I am walking in her footsteps, with the work that I am doing. It’s just that they are the footsteps she took earlier in life.
During the Second World War, when she was in her early twenties, she started out helping people living in extreme poverty, together with a group of friends. All of these girls were relatively well off and had fathers in jobs that allowed them to provide certain necesities. For example, my grandmother’s father was the director of a blanket factory and he would donate blankets to the group of girls.
Aside from things like blankets and clothes, they also organised food and milk, to help poor mothers feed their children, and they would help mind the children and care for the mothers when the mothers were ill. When the war ended, the informal help they provided got further developed, in collaboration with a group of Catholic nuns. As such, my grandmother was part of the group who first set up social services in Tilburg (a large city in the south of the Netherlands), after the Second World War.
She was even given the opportunity to train as a social worker, despite not having had the opportunity to finish secondary school, because as the eldest girl of nine children, at age 14 she had to help at home, when her mother fell ill. She was a social worker until she married my grandfather. In those days, marriage meant automatic dismissal for women. She started a new life as a wife, a mother and a few years down the road, as a potter.
But she started out doing pretty much what I do: using whatever resources are available to try to make sure that parents are able to care for their children and helping put systems in place where there are none to make sure that the support needed is provided. And I am sure that some of the things that make me good at what I do, I learned from her.
For me Christmas will always be connected with my grandmother’s birthday, even though she liked neither Christmas, nor her birthday. And I hope that I can carry her spirit forward, by continuing to do work that in a way she started, more than 75 years ago.
I wish everyone who celebrates it a very Merry Christmas. And I hope that you will be able to see the light and love within your family and to carry it beyond the inner circle to include others as well.
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