FOR Cockburn author Sanja Tesic, International Women’s Day gives her the opportunity to reflect on the strength of her mother.
Talking about the worldwide day of recognition on March 8, Ms Tesic said her mother’s strength and resolve difficult childhood in war-torn Yugoslavia still inspired her.
Her family fled to Australia when she was 13-years-old after they were refugees for five years, during which time her policeman father was imprisoned.
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“When he came out, he said to my mum he didn’t see the future for my brother and myself and my mum there.”
Ms Tesic said her mother did the job of two parents while her father was in jail.
“My mother was the best friend of my dad and I remember every single letter said ‘dear, look after the kids’; you can just imagine the weight on her shoulders she had,” she said.
“She had so much love for us and always talked about the future as if it was going to be a good one, as if dad was going to come back and we were going to go on holidays and have a house.
“That was just a story she made us believe – potentially that couldn’t have been true.”
Her mother’s support for her children continued when they moved to Perth in the mid 1990s and Ms Tesic said she strove to emulate it with her own children.
“When my mum was doing cleaning jobs when we came to Australia, I’d come home at 3.30pm from school and she was always home at 4 and asked me how my day was.
“I had a cooked meal every single day; she would go through my homework even though she didn’t understand a word of English.”
Ms Tesic said International Women’s Day was a big deal in her homeland when she was growing up and it remained important to her.
“I remember when I was six-years-old, my dad would come home with a huge bunch of flowers for my mum; I was only 6 and he would bring me a box of chocolates and a rose.
“It was really celebrated for all women because it covers all females, irrelevant of whether you had children or not.”
Her book Born to Bloom: From Hardship to Happiness features stories from her childhood and she is on the cusp of releasing an edition translated into her native Serbo-Croatian.
“I had so many messages from people from my country that live in Cockburn, they’ve ready my book in English, but their parents are not fluent in English,” she said.
“They said they wished their parents could understand it because they have a lot of trauma and PTSD and it would be great if they could understand it.”
Sanja has an upcoming workshop with international author and distance healer Pipi Mila Dragica on Saturday March 14 from 2-5pm at Happiness Co in Victoria Park, which will be presented entirely in Serbo-Croatian.
“I’ve gone to all the Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian shops and clubs to put posters up so these people who still need healing can come and we start making peace with the past and we heal together,” she said.
“I don’t care what happened in the past, I want to be human and help people see there is a way out from the trauma they’ve been through. No matter what happens to you in life, it’s what you do with it.”