Email from Eva Putzova [[link removed]]
John,

I didn’t grow up celebrating Mother’s Day.

In totalitarian Czechoslovakia, motherhood didn’t fit into the ruling Communist Party’s propaganda of (disingenuous) equality. Women were always portrayed as laborers — in factories, in the fields, and even in households — and almost never in leadership positions. I vividly remember the first two full sentences I learned to read from my first-grade reading textbook accompanied by an appropriate illustration: “Mother cooks. Father reads a newspaper.”

Mother’s Day came to my home country with democracy and maybe because of that I think of the many ways my mom shaped my entrance into politics in ways she probably doesn’t even realize. She was the first one to go to college in her family and graduated with an MS in Physics and Chemistry in 1968. Jobs in science and research were few and far between and as with so many women, she became a teacher in a local high school for the next 40 years. So much in her life was “decided” for her by the totalitarian government, including where she would live and what career she would have, but she has always enjoyed life and gave me and my brother a fantastic childhood.

In my eyes she was and is a superwoman.

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While my father was a man of ideas and his skills of a political pundit were underappreciated in the pre-Internet, pre-Twitter, pre-news-as-entertainment era, my mom was the pragmatic one — always resourceful, always in control, and always ready to take action. She made things happen. During the school year, she got up early to see my father off to work, made breakfast and cooked lunch for me and my brother before going to teach at 7:45am every day. I grew up with a hot meal for lunch every day of my childhood life. She spent evenings grading papers and preparing lesson plans while I sat wrapped around her watching TV. Every weekend she baked fantastic pastries that everybody loved. She taught me knitting and sewing and I spent endless summers between a community swimming pool and a sewing machine. It was the best childhood I could ever wish for.

My mom has never been and still is not my friend. She was and is a parent. She showed me what it means to live a meaningful independent life no matter the circumstances. She has always had friends. She had a career she loved and was a teacher union leader until she retired. She has never missed an opportunity to travel and wonder about the beauty of this world.

It was not just what she did as a parent but also what she didn’t do that I cherish and appreciate. She didn’t fill my days with activities but let me get bored, so I explored and created my own agenda and interests. The only extracurricular activities I was involved in were the ones I came up with. I always knew I would go to college but she never pushed me to do anything in particular — she gave me the complete freedom and time to decide what I wanted to pursue and then supported me unconditionally.

My mom gave me something that made me who I am: she gave me confidence and faith in my own abilities. There’s no doubt in my mind that she is the reason why I’m running for Congress today.

Being my mom’s daughter was the best leadership program I could have ever experienced.

Eva

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