Connie Page One
Constanze Lucke
Born 8.8.1966, Germany
The Story of Her Life
"We were happy. I think we were contented with the simple things in life."
My name is Constanze Lucke and I was born here in the city of Brandenburg. I have a brother and a sister. My brother is one year younger than me and my sister is four years older. My parents, my brother and sister all live in Brandenburg. My dad is a surveyor and my mum trained to be a laboratory assistant and an insurance sales person. I went to school here for ten years and then did a three-year course at the medical high school in nursery education. In the days of the GDR, nursery education was still counted as a medical subject. The training was to look after children from birth to three years old and it included both educational and medical subjects. After my training, I went to work as an educator in a children's home, which housed children from birth to three years of age. Once they were three, they had to move to another home and I always found this problematic. Then the reunification came and I qualified further as a state-registered-educator. I became head of the team on the ward where the youngest children were. Those were the babies from one week old to eighteen months.
Could you tell us about how you lived with your parents?
We lived on a newly-built estate. Our flat had two big rooms and two small ones. My parents always went to great efforts to ensure that, as children, we had our own rooms: not just free space but our own actual rooms. They went without so that my sister and I could each have a room of our own. There was a divider in the big room so that my brother also had his own area. There was a playground right outside the house and we spent a lot of time there, playing with other children from the neighbourhood. I didn’t go to either a crèche or a kindergarten, because my mother managed to organise her working-hours to work in the evenings. She was a laboratory assistant, and then retrained to sell insurance so that she could manage everything at once. She went to work after my father came home in the evenings, so there was always somebody at home to look after us. It was a safe and wonderful time. In general, I can say that we were a happy family.
I have very strong ties to my parents. I have such a warm feeling in my heart, but I can't express it properly. I was so lucky to have been able to enjoy such a cosseted childhood. Of course, I value that all the more, because I have often seen the opposite during my work in the home and in the SOS Children's Village. My childhood was quite different and perhaps that's why I can pass it on differently. Maybe I can achieve a measure of healing, and perhaps my parents will continue to have effect.
Connie's Story:
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All these mother's stories come from SOS Children's Village Hermann Gmeiner Academy. Copyright is reserved and no unauthorized use permitted. Use for non-commercial purposes may be requested. The interviews telling about the lives of some SOS Mothers form part of an interesting study on being a replacement Mother to children in need in SOS Children's communities worldwide.