Home of the Mother

A Bit about Mamie’s Childhood

In the 20 years that I had the opportunity of living near to our beloved Mamie, I was able to receive confidences about her childhood. She spent her childhood in a house in the Schaerbeek district (Brussels, Belgium), situated on Herman Street.

Mamie had only one sister, named Jeanne. Jeanne’s character was very different from Elisabeth’s, which was Mamie’s baptismal name. Jeanne was very decisive, friendly, daring, physically attractive. She liked mathematics, especially accounting, that is to say, arithmetic. She liked risky games and, as the little girl she was, she liked swings, sliding down the staircase hand-rails, jumping rope, climbing trees....

Elisabeth (Mamie), on the other hand, was more pensive, introverted, shy, reserved, and she liked everything that was humanities, that is to say, reading, writing and reflecting. Her favorite games were to observe the others and to reach conclusions about what she observed. In addition, Mamie suffered much because she thought that her hands were ugly; especially her thumbs, due to which she generally maintained her fists closed with her thumbs folded against the palm of her hand and enclosed within the other four fingers.

She told me this with the intention that I would get to know her and see how character defects are not an obstacle for the grace of God to reach a soul and transform it according to the divine will.

Like other girls they liked to go out to the street to play. However, it was not advisable to stay long in the park. Close to her house there was a beautiful park with tall, centenary trees, well-formed paths, and hedges that became the girls’ delight. The possibilities for games were so many that the entire Josaphat park came together. There, in addition to woods, existed four small lakes full of ducks and swans, a flat piece of land for games, a common stadium, a school in the fresh air. There were too many good things for the imagination of some girls who saw themselves attacked by temptations to “flee” and go to play in the park.

The one who most suffered from these temptations was Jeanne, her younger sister. Elizabeth, as the older sister that she was, heard the intimate desires of her sister’s small heart to go play in the park; and, persuaded by her sister, they stealthily snuck out of the house and headed towards the swings of Josaphat park.

But, the poor ones. They were discovered and punished.

And Mamie said to me: “My mother without fail blamed me, the eldest. And even though I tried to persuade her that it had been the idea of my sister, I was always the one who was accused as responsible and therefore punished.”

Later, opening her heart, she said to me: “The same thing always has happened to me. I have had to pay much for what others have done.”

Mamie always took conclusions out of her childhood. There was never bitterness in her reflections. There was a certain condescension to her neighbor’s miseries and to the limitations of those who, endowed with authority, could punish her. I never observed even one word of rancor, of anger, or of acridness towards her parents who easily punished her for faults which she had not committed.

Thus was Mamie. She told me that she was like this by nature. I think that this her nature was perfected by grace and Mamie also had to pay for what she had not done.

By Fr. Rafael Alonso