MOTHER'S DAY | An Appreciation for Hilda van Stockum

With Mom in 2005, when she was 97, the
year before her death.

May 10, 2020 (Mother's Day in the USA)—We celebrated Mother's Day today. That always-on-Sunday celebration was invented in the United States by Anna Jarvis. Her mother had held Mother's Friendship Days to reunite families and neighbors separated during the U.S. Civil War. Her daughter, Anna Jarvis, carried on the torch.

On May 10, 1908, the first official Mother's Day celebrations took place in the United States. That's also when three-month-old Hilda was on a boat with her parents to Java. (In 1914, Woodrow Wilson designated the second Sunday of May as Mother's Day.)

So, in a year when my Mom would have turned 112, our family's honoree today was Alice Tepper Marlin. Our daughter Caroline made a magnificent dinner for us to share. As we are hunkered down to avoid spread of the coronavirus, it was a good time for reflection.

Caroline with her Mom, Hachikō and John.
Artwork by Brigid Marlin. Photo by SL.

Alice and I remembered to each other our joint vivid experiences of our mothers in the past half-century (the 49th anniversary of our meeting was in March). Alice was especially grateful for our long vacations with the Marlin children and grandchildren: "Hilda and Spike organized the vacations so that the cousins would get to meet one another, form memories and bonds," she says. "Hilda favored the simpler life, self-reliance, home remedies for ailments, family time."

Caroline added: "She encouraged children to exercise their imagination. They were provided with writing and painting materials and they made things. They had performances."

In this time of "social distancing," when people must stay away from events and shopping where people congregate, we are thrown back on our own resources. The Marlin children, and then the grandchildren, had a chance to work on common vacation projects. I especially remember our vacations at Rosturk Castle in Mulranny, County Mayo, Ireland, especially as I have learned more about the man who had the idea for the castle, Colonel Vaughan, and started building it in 1867. He was from a one-time recusant Catholic family. Of the 13 Vaughan children who grew up in Courtfield, Ross, Herefordshire, six became priests and five became nuns. Another interesting vacation spot we spent summers in was Skibbereen, in southwest Ireland, when all the young cousins were thriving. Other memorable vacation homes were in Robin Hood, Maine; a vineyard villa in the hills outside of Florence; and a French chateau in la Ferté St Cyr.

Alice loved all these vacations. She missed out on big family gatherings in her childhood because her only sibling left home to go to Bryn Mawr College when Alice was eight. She also had an intellectually gifted mother, who went to Barnard College and then earned an advanced degree at  Columbia University. Alice's mother was a scientist. She chose the Baldwin School for Alice after much research, and instilled in Alice a respect for learning, especially science.

Mom's skillful understanding of what children need probably originated from her own mother, who was sent scads of instructions by her own Irish mother when she brought HvS to the East Indies when she was a few months old. HvS had six children to practice on, and was trained by Maria Montessori, who established a training center in Dublin. Mom was very proud of the book she did for Montessori course, and told me several times how much she misses having the book she did as part of the course. She thinks she loaned it to someone connected with a Sisters of Loreta convent in Dublin and somehow it was never returned. We have a bad copy of the book, and would dearly love to get back the original to republish it.

I intend to keep writing more about HvS, and her Dutch-Irish mother (Olga Boissevain), and her Irish mother (Emily Heloise MacDonnell). My niece Christine Schintgen would like to do a biography of HvS as a literary lion in the children's book field. I would like to focus on Hilda van Stockum as a correspondent with and about her family during World War II.