The Woman Who Raised Me

Born 1919 – Sunde, Kvinnherad, Norway

The middle child of twelve. The reason I had stability. The reason I survived.

I don’t remember a time before Clara.

She moved into our home when I was just 18 months old. My parents worked constantly, my dad owned a construction company, and my mom worked right beside him. It wasn’t that they didn’t love me. It was just… a means to an end. The long hours. The stress. The emotional instability that came with chasing success while trying to raise a child. Clara stepped in, quietly and completely. Not just as a caretaker, but as the only consistent emotional presence I knew.

She raised me.

Clara was born in 1919, in Sunde, Kvinnherad, Norway, the middle child of twelve. Her family farmed potatoes and fished Cod or (Torske as she called them) along the rugged western coast. They were Lutheran, like most Norwegians at the time, but Clara had a fierce independent streak even as a girl. During the German occupation of Norway in World War II, Clara,barely in her twenties, found herself pulled into a world she never asked for.

She never spoke much about what she did during the war. What I know came in fragments, quiet moments at the sink, her hands in soapy water, speaking as if the weight of her memories could only surface when disguised as something else. Sometimes when we would lay in the bed at night, her light fingers rubbing my back, she would tell the stories of her life to me. She was fiercely private, especially with her own children, but she would tell me what was on her heart, or appropriate for me to ingest. I was a smart child, and would remember everything she told me, including the language. So, she had to be careful. It was at the kitchen table, I learned how remarkable she really was.

She helped Jewish families escape across the Swedish border.

She was guilty of compassion in a time when that could have cost her everything. She had contacts, she said. Routes through the woods. Ways to pass notes and messages sewn into coats. She mentioned the hunger more than once. The fear of being caught. But she never framed herself as brave. Only necessary. She didn’t give me detailed depictions. She always minimized the times she lived in, as not to scare me, I’m sure.

In mid 1945, when the risk became too great and the Gestapo began closing in on resistance networks, Clara left Norway. She was just about to turn 26. A middle daughter. A witness to horror. A quiet, determined woman, although small and frail. She boarded a third-class transatlantic passenger ship, the SS Bergensfjord, bound for Quebec City, Canada, wearing the same coat she’d hidden messages in.

Canada was her second chance. There, she met a Norwegian man, also a war immigrant, and they married, had two children, and worked humble jobs. Years later, they left Canada and moved to the United States, where in her later years, after her family was dead and gone, she met a calling to raise a child that wasn’t her own.

That child was me.

I don’t think my parents realized what she gave me. Not fully. But I did. I always did.

Clara didn’t just feed me and bathe me. She saw me. When my mother was cold or distracted, when my father was gone for days at a time running jobs, Clara was there. Calm. Present. Patient. Magical in the way she could turn a boiled potato into comfort. In the way she folded my socks with reverence. In the way her voice, still thick with her Norwegian accent, could hush my storms with a single word. Especially when she said, “Jeg elsker deg, lille due” – I love you, little dove.

She taught me kindness without ever preaching it. She spoke of peace but carried the soul of a warrior. She didn’t dwell on the past, but you could feel it…how much she had survived. How much she chose love anyway.

I clung to her when things in the house got loud. When moods shifted. When I didn’t understand why the air felt heavy. Clara’s presence was like a warm light at the center of it all. She was never rushed. Never sharp. She had this gentleness that felt like armor. I think it was how she kept herself safe, too.

Years later, when I learned the truth about her past…about what she’d risked, what she’d seen… details for another day; I understood what she’d really given me.

She gave me stability in a house built on shifting sand.

She gave me the kind of safety she never had growing up in a war-torn world. The kind of love you choose. The kind that makes no demands but never falters.

She wasn’t my mother. But she was the woman who raised me.

And she was my hero.

Always will be.