Mother’s Day

This Sunday will make seven years that I don’t get to call and wish my mother a happy Mother’s Day. It really is true when “they” say you never know what you got until it’s gone. Finishing the book I’ve created over the last four years culminated in one final big wish for me: that my mother were still alive so that we could have those conversations we never had. To ask questions that I always asked myself about those things I did not understand. Here is a snippet from the book, a glimpse of the woman I thought I knew, coming from the father I had never known. Life-changing.

On a bright summer day in 1953, Susanna Fornoff walked into the print shop where my father had worked as a typesetter ever since his 1947 release as a prisoner of war. She was looking for part-time work, to supplement her modeling assignments and serving meals at a local Gasthaus. She was hired. My father was smitten.

“Susi was very pretty, with dark hair, a bright smile and those high heels! I was shocked when she agreed to go out with me. Ha! I was more shocked that I had nerve enough to ask her—I was a simple man with nothing to offer. Ach, we were young and wild, zipping around on a motorcycle. She was only twenty-three, six years younger than me.”

He stares into the near distance, seeing images I can’t begin to imagine.

Until he digs in a cabinet and pulls out a worn photo album, which he places gently in my lap. Monochrome pictures of a woman I don’t recognize until suddenly I do: a smiling young woman with a cloud of wavy dark hair framing a face flush with vitality, with eyes that gaze flirtatiously into the lens. She is glowing. In a striped tube top, knee high riding boots and large pearl earrings sitting cross-legged on a motorcycle. Leaning gracefully on a ship’s railing, an A-line dress with oversize front pockets, tiny waist accented by a thin leather belt. With Father, both in bathing suits, lolling beside a lake. Page after page.

My young Papa looks like the proverbial cat who has just swallowed a mouse. Mom looks happier than I had ever seen her. Than I ever thought she could be. The woman in the photos has the world by the tail and swings it fearlessly while yelling yee-haw at the top of her lungs. She is strong and confident. Her eyes sparkle with life, at once challenging and engaging the camera and the man behind it.

I’m stunned. This is a woman I never knew. 

Early memories must have noted this vibrant woman. She was the one who showed up that fateful December day at Oma’s door, excited to become an American officer’s wife. As the image of her large smile drifts back into my mind’s eye, I realize how quickly and completely I had forgotten that woman. The father I had never known has now brought her back to me.