President of the Republic on Mothers' Day on May 9, 1999
09.05.1999

Motherly Love is Estonian Home


Dear Estonian mothers, dear children and fathers here in the "Estonia" concert hall, and all over Estonia, and all over the world!

For the seventh time I am turning to you on Mothers' Day, as I shall do for two more times. I want to bring at least a tiny piece of happiness to your hearts, but how? I am afraid to repeat myself. On this beautiful sunny morning it seemed to me that everything has been said; that I was seeking new words for thoughts that are old and have become boring.

And then I thought about my own parents. My mother and father who are long dead but whom I still daily ask for advice. I thought about my grandmothers and grandfathers, two of whom I have never even seen - my mother grew up as an orphan and spent her summers in an orphans' home, but she nevertheless finished school, and more. I still remember how happy she was when at the age of thirty-six she brought home her licence for teaching French. She even took the document along when she was deported to Siberia, but a teacher's licence was not needed in Siberia and so there it stayed.

All the good things in us come from our parents. All evil comes from elsewhere. But the future only comes through children. If we want the future to be better than the present, we must be better ourselves. If not much, then even a little bit, but better than yesterday or the day before.

I have three concerns that we are able to turn into joys. But only if they become everybody's concern and touch every Estonian citizen, every member of parliament, every congregation, church and local government, every newspaper, every television and radio programme.

First, the concern about the young family.

Eleven years ago, during the culture council days, I asked you all: have we remained in order to stay? The council chairman Ignar Fjuk published a book about the joint plenary meeting of the boards of Estonian creative unions. The back cover of this book reads: It is you who now, here and right away have to answer the question if our nation will survive.

The back cover text also included several recommendations: the graphic artist Herald Eelma suggested starting a fund of voluntary donations for the Estonian family. Heino Pars, a film director, thought that the newspapers should have a little price addition for the same purpose and the Estonian Post, which did not yet even exist at that time, could publish a special stamp, the sales profit of which coul be developed into a global foundation for the young family. I am speaking of a time relatively long ago, in 1988. I do not deny that these and some other suggestions do sound a little naive today, but the problem still remains.

The problem has even deepened. And not only in Estonia. The social difficulties of developing countries have reached the back yards of rich countries. Of course, Estonia is not an underdeveloped country, but it is is not rich either. So why has the fate of young families and of young people themselves become such a burning question for us? The answer is obvious: the resent history of Estonia has been harder than that of the European nations. Let us think about all of our compatriots who have been through prisons and concentration camps. It is not right to say that the prison camps toughened and invigorated. They devastated. The camps made people weak, because they were robbed of the support of their homes. Eleven years ago the writer Jaan Kaplinski pointed out to us that our people are sick. This can be seen - I qoute - "... on our very people as a kind of a measuring tool. There are crimes, suicides, (...), the growing use of drugs, the violence. All this (...), is nothing else than escape. Escape from what? From the life that is perceived as not worth living." (End qoute). We should understand that there are people in this country for whom the liberation came fatefully late and who did not know what to do with their new freedom. The children whom they left in the streets are the saddest victims of our past. And it is also an obstacle for the young family who sees the inaptitude of Estonian society, inaptitude, not indifference in shaping the family policy. Let us for instance think of the clumsy slogan: "There is no such thing as a free lunch!" This correct, but still wholly stupid sentence overlooks a very simple obligation: every child in Estonia must have enough to eat! The children could be amply fed with the money spent on conferences and symposiums held on this subject! Let every one of us think what we ourselves could do, let us listen to the church that says: "Let the children come to me". Let us not forget that the number of street children is very small and we do have enough strength to help them in their plight. This is not even a goal. It is an unpaid debt; it is a beginning from where we can start towards our goal.

What is the goal, then?

The goal is the mother, of course. Because mother is the carrier of life and home. Home forms the future of a child. Home determines if he or she is glad or sad, industrious or lazy, curious or blind to the world, self-trusting or blaming others. Home determines if the child grows up to be a citizen or an idler. The school can only sow knowledge, but the soil must be loosened at home. The first teacher is always the mother. But who could teach the teacher? Who would tell the mother and the father on their way to christen their child that the name Kalevi with a Y at the end will make their child ashamed of its parents, when it is grown up? Who would say: do not make your children unhappy for the rest of their lives, by giving them names borrowed from the TV soap operas or the society journals? It will not make the child a better swimmer if you call him Johnny Weissmüller! We can only spread this kind of knowledge via the public opinion, and here I hope for the help of the Estonian news media, the TV and radio. We have already had a good spell of freedom. Now we need to see if we have used this freedom wisely. When we find more violence in the newspapers or in TV than there is in the steets, then this is no more the journalism once shaped by Jannsen and Jakobson, Harald Tammer and Juhan Peegel.

So here is my second message - let us scrub our souls clean on Mothers' Day, and let us wash the whole of Estonia with brush and soap on this coming year of home decoration. Symbolically as well as practically. In Estonian climate the second Sunday of May falls into the best period for planting firs and birches. This can be a symbol or it can be an act. I wish to thank the Estonian Men's Choral Society, the patron of this year's Mothers' Day, for coming to the New Zealand of Viimsi peninsula and helping me to plant trees. The formerly closed Soviet border zone with its concrete bunkers must become a garden. I wish to specially thank the young people from Võrumaa who planted a Võrumaa grove on this windy shore. And this is what we shall do during this year of home decoration all over Estonia: we shall help the mothers and scrub our fatherland clean of the dirt of the past. We shall sum the year up at the beginning of the second quarter next school year. Let the home decoration year be our common bouquet of flowers to the Estonian mother who has carried our language and our frame of mind through the fifty years of slavery and whose love we can never pay back to herself, but always to the next generation, to our children.

And thus, take along my third message for the Mothers' Day, a message that overturns all the market laws, and plant it in your home garden. It goes as follows: joy can not be bought, it can only be made by oneself. Love can not be bought. It either lives in a person or the person lives without love.

My best wishes to Maria Kondratjeva who is hundred years old on this Mothers' Day. I wish to tell you, dear Estonian mothers, that I love you all!