Column | Mother’s Day – NRC

I had to think about my mother, to Paula van Roosmalen-Breekelmans, a woman whose small hypocrisy and unintended humor I miss more than I can sometimes admit. A few weeks ago I received a letter that she wrote to a good friend twenty years ago.

A sentence lingered: « This is how happiness is a brief pleasure and a long memory. »

I don’t know if that meaning is herself or if she has transferred it from a book by Toon Hermans, but I thought it was aptly and honest. She not only looked back on short -lived happiness, she actually scored the sparing highlights.

About twenty years ago, all her children had long left the house, she decided to suddenly celebrate Mother’s Day, which she had never given, to celebrate big with a brunch, a word that sounded strange from her mouth. She expected her children in a restaurant on the Posbank in the forest near Velp, where to her surprise, many more mothers celebrated Mother’s Day.

She complained about it on the terrace.

I found her smoking at a tree, something she has not officially done for a few years.

« What a confession, » she said about the mother at the table next to us, who unpacked one gift after the other.

« Our gift is that we are there, » I said.

She did not respond to that.

My sister had taken a bunch of flowers, and more importantly: her children, my mothers grandchildren. She pulled them on her lap one by one, and discussed aloud what she was going to do with them in her life. To the amusement park, to Center Parcs, to Brabant, perhaps by plane, something she had never wanted before.

« Well, I don’t know the plane, » my father said.

He was skilled skillfully.

« Today is Mother’s Day, not Father’s Day. »

We received a bowl of sandwiches with fish and cheese.

She picked up the crumbs of her plate like a bird with a finger, looked at the other mother who sipped hidden behind a mountain of gifts of a cup of tea.

« I may not have received the most gifts, but the nicest grandchildren. Much nicer than all other grandchildren. »

Then, in a trouble: « That’s not a mother at all, that’s a grandmother. »

Nobody had the puff to correct her, it was one of her many contradictions. A short pleasure, but a long memory.

Marcel van Roosmalen Writes a column on Monday and Thursday.

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