Hi mum

My eldest daughter is in her final year of primary school and in Holland it is a custom that group 8 goes in a school camp. Usually, a far destination would be chosen, and the camp would last at least four nights, but undoubtedly due to budget cuts, the school booked a two night stay in ‘Costa del Zeumeren’ in Voorthuizen, only 40 kilometres away. The teachers definitely planned to exhaust the children and return them as living dead, so they decided to cycle to the camp site (one day) directly followed by the ‘bonte avond’, one day full of survival activities, a night game in the second night and then the bicycle trip back.

What the children didn’t know was the teacher, sir Eric, had asked help from parents for the exciting night game. Of course I volunteered, as I do not want to skip any occasion in which I can dress up or disguise myself. On top of that, the idea that my role would be ‘ghost’ was very attractive. My daughter has a bully in her class and I already had fantasies about how I could scare the shit out of him. 

The whole week, my head prepared for my Oscar winning role. Unfortunately, my body needed to go to work. So suddenly it was Thursday evening, around half past nine, when I realised that I had to leave in half an hour without having prepared a single thing for my outfit. I blasted through the attic, opened boxes and bags with old dressing clothes for plays and the only acceptable outfit I could come up with, was a relic of our Halloween Party, in which I was a witch and my partner was Dracula. I took the witches wig, and Dracula’s coat, grabbed some fake blood and facial paint with me and ran out of my house. In the car, I reread the instructions of the teacher in my head: ‘And you can haunt the children by making scary sounds.’ O my god, scary sounds. What on earth are scary sounds? The clock was ticking though and I had to pick up some other parents. My eyes fell on a bicycle pump, and what the hell, that sounds scary in the middle of the night, doesn’t it? Also I grabbed a bottle of perfume, but I had no idea why. 

We arrived at the camp site at half past ten. The teacher welcomed us. ‘So, are you prepared for the big show?’ ‘Hmm,’ I mumbled. ‘I need to change clothes somewhere and put something on my face, I guess there is a place where I can do that?’ ‘Actually, no,’ he said. ‘My idea was to walk you guys to the site right now, so the children will not see you.’  I tried not to show my huge disappointment. 

We started walking a trail close to a lake. It was still very light outside and the wind blew like hell. Meanwhile, the teacher started to explain the game. ‘Pupils walk in groups of four. They all have a list of seven sounds they need to find, in the order that is on their list. The sounds are: an owl, horse feet, peeping door, burbs, a rattle, an alien, and a frog . There is one guard’- one enthusiastic father raised his hand’- with a bright flashlight. He walks around and if he catches one of the pupils in his light, they need to go back for the last sound they found. So there are seven teachers or parents  with sounds. You all hide somewhere.  And last but not least we have a ghost, from who no one knows.  And you make scary sounds that are not on the list.’ And he looked at me, expectantly. ‘What do you have?’ ‘Well, actually…’ Before I could say anything further, the wind blew so fiercely that we all startled a little. ‘I think my sounds will fade away  in the wind.’ I said. ‘So I think of something else to frighten them.’ Sir Eric gloated. ‘All right, improvising, excellent!’ 

We walked a little further and then the teacher held still. ‘This is it.’ And then he admitted a little shyly: ‘There used to be a lot more trees, but apparently the removed them.’

We stood in an open field close to the lake. There were some bushes at the borders, in the middle of the field there was a giant tree and there were three hay bales. Not even close to a wood. ‘How are we even going to hide ourselves here?’ one mother asked. I was in shock. ‘Just spread a little around the field. I hope it will get darker than this and it will be fine. So come on, hide! The kids will be here in twenty minutes.’

Together with the father playing the guard, I walked to the border. Behind the bushes, there was a dried up ditch and we dove in there. On the other side of the ditch, there was already a road where cars drove fastly. At least, it was a good place to change. Although it wasn’t dark, it was not very bright either. And my ‘changing room’ had no mirror. So purely by feeling I put my wig on, I smeared some fake blood on my lips and placed the cape around my shoulder. As I forgot to put my rucksack off, a hump turned up beneath the cape. The guard looked at me. ‘Wow, don’t scare the car drivers. You look … well … weird.’

I hid in the ditch, which resembled a trench from World War I, and waited for the first group to arrive. You could see and hear them at a long distance. They tried to listen to the sounds the other parents would make, but the wind blew them almost from their socks. As soon as they would approach me, I would jump out of the bushes to scare them with … well, whatever I looked like.

When I heard the group coming, I moved to attack position and I jumped forward. But immediately, I got stuck in the brambles. The group walked passed me without noticing a strange creature, struggling herself loose in the bushes. 

This was definitely not going to work.  I should move. Maybe walk around. I saw some pupils in the distance, maybe it would scare them if they saw a shadow of a strange person walking in the field? So I climbed out of the bushes, got stuck in again, pushed myself up and started walking. A few yards behind me, a group turned up. ‘What the hell is that?’ I heard. ‘Maybe she is the owl! Let’s go over there.’ I hadn’t taken the possibility into account that they would think I was to make a sound from their list. So I turned around and started running towards them, making a  roaring sound and putting my arms up.

I have no idea how ridiculous that must have looked. However, no child in that group of four screamed, or seemed to be shocked otherwise. Instead, one of them turned around and walked right up to me, to inspect me. She looked me directly in the eyes and said, with a voice full of irony: ‘O, hi witch.’

I decided to run and while I was crossing the field, I heard them laugh. I dove into the border on the other side of the field and squatted in the high grass. Soon, another group approached me. They came very close and I suddenly jumped out of the border and roared. There were four boys that at the maximum didn’t expect this, but were not intimidated whatsoever.

I heard one of them say: ‘Let’s find out who she is. Come on!’ They come closer to me and stood there, at a half meter distance. One had , around his wrist, a small flashlight which he turned on and pointed at me. ‘Who are you! What is your sound?’

I had no idea what to do. The only thing that came to my mind is whispering something like ‘Go away’. I tried to make it sound spooky, but the boys started to laugh. ‘I don’t know her, who is she?’ ‘Who are you? Witchy witchy, come out of there!’ One came closer and seemed to reach for my wig. In panic, I felt in my pocket and found the bottle of perfume. I got it out and sprayed it towards him.  ‘I smell liquorice’, another one said. And then the fourth:  ‘Come on, she bores me, let’s go over there.’

And then they left. This was not at all the performance I had had in mind. Disappointedly I walked, without even trying to disguise, towards the giant tree in the middle of the field. Around the tree there were some bushes, like an island in the see. Here, I found the guard. ‘Hi! Did you scare them already?’ he asked. Apparently, he was having great fun. ‘Eh … well, yeah.’ And mumbling: ‘Little psychopaths.’

We agreed that we should work together when we saw three pupils crawling through the grass towards our island. ‘I try to catch them in my light, and when they start running, you scare them,’ he instructed. ‘Well… all right …’ The guard sneaked behind them, I thought: ‘He ís good’, and he caught them in their lights. They actually started running towards me, according to the plan,  and I jumped from my island and roared, again. For the first time, two girls screamed. Just when I was thinking I was improving my performance, one of them said: ‘O, hi mum!’

I ran away and the rest of the game I hid in the border close to the lake and did not come out until I heard the teacher shout: ‘We have a winner, let’s call it a wrap!’ Groups of pupils joined together and then I heard someone say: ‘Where is the witch?’ I felt the urge to stay in the border forever, even go to sleep there. When the last pupil passed, I sneaked out and closed ranks. No one saw me until we arrived at the gathering point. ‘Ah, there is the witch!’ the teacher said. All pupils turned around, came closer and inspected me. One touched my fake hair, one my hump, another my coat. And my daughter grabbed my arm and said: ‘That was great fun, wasn’t it?’ Four of her friends agreed. ‘You look really scary.’

When we strolled back to the camp, I walked next to the bully of the class. He was in the group that had won. He told me he was heavily disappointed that I had not encountered his group, they had had no idea that there was a witch in the game. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I would have scared the shit out of you. And I doubt if you had won the game then.’ ‘We doubt that too,’ he said wisely. 

Back at the camp site, where the lights were on, my daughter looked at my face. ‘What is this, on your mouth? That looks strange! Here, clean it up.’ She handed me a washcloth. ‘What was it anyway?’ While I was scrubbing the fake blood off, I told her: ‘It was meant to be blood of a child I ate.’ She looked at me, incredulously. ‘No kidding.’ I nodded.  ‘That is … scary, mum.’ And then she laughed out loud, said goodnight and went to bed, with her friends.

Miss Fortune cookies

It sounds like a nasty thing to say, but my eldest daughter used to be a bully. One day, her two female teachers had a ‘ten minute meeting’ with us and they hesitantly tried to tell us that our daughter had some awkward manners. They apparently didn’t realise we weren’t shocked at all. Actually, we were almost a little relieved that our daughter did not behave completely differently in school than at home.

The teachers suggested a special training programme for her. In Dutch, it is called the ‘kanjertraining’ (Google Translate gave me ‘whopper training’, but that can’t be right). In England it is known as the Tiger Training. In ten sessions, children – both bullies and bullied – and their parents, are trained in social skills and in emotional patterns. The method consists of the so called caps, which represent how children are likely to react in certain situations. The red cap is from the monkey, that always makes a joke out of things. The yellow cap stands for the rabbit, that is really shy and withdrawn. On the black cap there is a picture of the ‘bully bird’, that reacts unkindly and aggressively in all situations. The white cap is the Tiger Cap, which represents the behaviour of a ‘normal’ self-confident person. 

Children learn to experiment with these types of behaviour by putting the caps on. They experience how their reactions can influence other kids' behaviour. The parents are obligated to join their children and they learn a lot as well. To be quite honest, in the beginning I was very sceptical. After ten lessons, the results amazed me. Anyhow, this story is not meant to be an advertorial for Tiger Training. My story starts when we were asked to prepare the last session. 

In the previous session, every child was asked to write down a compliment and a tip (euphemism for criticism) for every other child in the class. Those compliments and tips were gathered in an envelope with the name of the particular child on it. Subsequently, the envelope was given to another kid with the following assignment: create something for this person and use all those compliments and tips in it. You can paint, mould, craft or glue something, whatever you want. The only condition was that the child could reread his little notes over and over again. 

My daughter got the envelope of Marianne, a really sweet, way too heavy, ever bullied girl. During our trip home, we exchanged ideas on an original craftwork for Marianne. And then, like I was struck by lightning, I had the best idea ever. I got so enthusiastic about it – and I had to admit that I liked the idea that my daughter would bring the most original and ‘never done before’ creative work to the next class – that I wasn’t open to any other idea of my daughter herself.

‘We are going to bake fortune cookies,’ I stated.

‘What are fortune cookies? ‘

‘Cookies with a little note inside to wish you luck or whatever. We can bake them ourselves, and put the notes with compliments and tips in it.’

‘That is a great idea mama!’ my daughter yelled. ‘And I’m sure she likes cookies, she is a little too fat, isn’t she?’

I ignored that point, because of this excellent idea. When we got home, I immediately googled the recipe for fortune cookies. It seemed childishly easy to me. A little bit of flour, egg white, corn starch and sugar would do the trick.

I had the presence of mind to ask my daughter to type all the little notes in Word, just to be sure. In the meantime, I prepared the batter. Half an hour later the first cookies went into the oven and we sat cosily in the kitchen for twenty minutes. After the prescribed time, I took out the plate, scraped off one cookie and tried to fold it. That was, after all, the whole point. It bended a little, and then broke. Okay… that was not what I had in mind. I tried another one, but this one was already cold and did not bend a single millimetre. Damn. Now what? 

While we ate the failed fortune cookies, which were actually completely tasteless, I surfed on the internet to find out what I had done wrong. And this time, I read a little further than what was in front of my nose. If a recipe allowed comments, those were like: ‘The cookies break all the time, what can I do?’ Before I knew, I was completely sucked in the world of fortune cookies: tips and tricks to avoid breaking, instruction videos on YouTube, small changes in the recipes to make the batter more rubbery and do not forget the folding techniques accompanied by an oven schedule. The trick appeared to be to keep the cookies warm – but not too warm - until the moment you were going to bend them. 

The next day, I had spoiled four batches. The dustbin was full of misfortune. I had gone to the store three times for more eggs. Every family member had eaten enough cookies for the rest of their lives. The compliments and tips on Marianne had been printed out four times. My daughter saw the fatal date coming closer and she tried to change my mind. But I couldn’t let go of the idea she could steal the show.

However, batch five was a bit more promising. I was able to fold the note in the cookie. But when I tried to bend it, it still broke. In batch number six I managed to fold AND bend two cookies, after changing the recipe again and watching an elaborate YouTube instruction. 

My husband tried to convince me to acknowledge that the project had failed and that I should start to think of another way to surprise Marianne. ‘Just one more try,’ I cried, begged. I must have looked like a psycho cook. There was fortune cookie batter in my hair, behind my ears and under my armpits. ‘Please, go to sleep first. Tomorrow we will decide what to do.’ As he mentioned this, I noticed he was in his dressing gown. It was three o’clock in the morning. 

Four hours later, after a restless night sleep, I called the office and took a few hours off. It was the day before the last Tiger Training day. I made myself a strong cup of coffee, rolled up my sleeves and prepared the last batch of batter. This part I could do without thinking. And then, suddenly, it worked. I was able to fold the papers into the cookies and bend them without breaking, using the edge of a saucepan, one of the more advanced techniques. I did it! One hour later, 22 cookies, filled with compliments and tips, were gloriously waiting for an applause. The instruction video specifically mentioned that you should let the cookies dry for 24 hours. So I put the cookies on a griddle and placed it in the utility room. 

I took a shower (heavily needed one), let the babysitter in and went off for work. 

When I got home, my whole family was gathered around the babysitter in the kitchen. They all looked like they suffered from serious death fears. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. 

‘Well …’ I immediately saw my husband struggling with the question ‘how am I ever going to tell her this’. 

The babysitter: ‘I accidently let the door of the utility room open. The dog ate all the cookies.’

I can’t tell you what happened next. I burst out in rage. I might have threatened to kill the dog and apparently and they had foreseen my reaction and they had already put him away, thank goodness. 

It took me a few hours, three Valium pills and a G&T to calm down. Then I dried my tears, sighed, pulled myself together, went to the kitchen and prepared the batter for the last time. It was an excellent texture for folding and bending. At eleven o’clock at night I finished the last fortune cookie, with an almost professional touch. Before I could finally go to bed, I had to walk the dog first. I put aside all my hate towards this fortune ruining animal and went outside. 

It was full moon and quite light outside. When he sat down for his poop, I saw a little piece of blue paper coming out of his butt. Would it be a compliment of a tip? It was a step too far to get the paper out of the turd to read it. Then I remembered one of the tips (because I tried to fold it over eight times into a cookie). And suddenly I knew for sure. This had to be the one that said: ‘You could be less serious and laugh a little more.’

Copywriter in existantial crisis

I have a friend who is a genius.

It’s not easy to explain what he does. He’s a trainer and consultant. He trains people in sales, leadership and management qualities with radical new and innovative ideas. No schemes, roses, core quadrants, MBTI, or colour typing. Nothing like that. He has created a whole new philosophy on leadership and relationships. He has changed the way I see the world, my work and myself forever, and is has made me a lot less glorious than I'd always thought I was. I have attended his trainings more than twenty times and I could be called an ambassador, fan, or, if you like, a roadie. By the way, there is nothing new age, woolly or guru-ish to this man. He’s a cold blooded realist. 

Recently, he has written a book. And that is where the big ‘but’ kicks in. 

He’s my friend and I’m a copywriter. So he asked me to proofread and revise his book. In the beginning, I was really pleased to be asked for this desirable job. To be the first to read his book and finally show him what I was capable of… wow.

Apart from quite some of misspellings, grammar mistakes, contaminations, anglicisms,  expletives and pleonasms, the found his style a little bit laboured. So I started to rewrite the first chapters rigourously . On top of that, I commented in the margin things like ‘inconsistent’, ‘incomprehensible’, ‘duh’ or just ‘?’

I sent them back with a strong belief of having done a good job. Then his assistant called me. She sweetly explained to me that my friend was really happy that I did this job, but that he actually freaked out because of all the changes I made. I tried to defend myself. ‘But I only  corrected the real mistakes!’ ‘But due to your revision, it doesn’t say what he meant to say.’

Actually, that is not new to me. For example, I tend to rewrite all the passive forms into active ones. The sentence: The text will be revised by a professional press corrector is likely to be changed in A professional press corrector revises the text. Of course, there are a few good reasons to use a passive form, but it requires thinking, and most officials and lawyers use them automatically without any brain activity. I’m always fully prepared to argue with them, but I wasn’t prepared for this type of discussion with my genius philosopher.

His assistant kindly requested me to only correct the real typo’s and spelling mistakes and comment in the margin 1) why I thought a sentence should be changed and 2) with at least two suggestions for improvement. “It could be that we decide that the sentence with the grammar fault is actually the best,” she added.

With slightly less motivation I started to work on the next chapters. However, to explain why a sentence was wrong, took me twice as much time.

In the meantime, I had asked the assistant to send me first two chapters, to see which corrections he had accepted. To my surprise, he even ‘undid’ some corrected spelling mistakes. That was especially the case with the spacing issue: in Dutch you spell every word that consists of two or more compounds, together, without a space. In English, you don’t. My friend separated all my carefully put together words again.

I called his assistant (because he was too busy writing) to do some inquiries on this strange behaviour. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘He thinks this looks better.’

Looks better? What the F***!

And that brought immediately back the remembrance of two situations that I apparently had repressed.

I worked for two ladies who invented a really nice and sympathetic product, which could help people who had lost their beloved through a period of mourning. I wrote all their copy and argued more than once over this ‘space’ problem. The day they launched their products onto the market, I was invited to the party. The first thing I saw, was the huge banner, flag type, with an gigantic space typo. I was shocked. ‘I corrected that! I’m sure.’ ‘We know,’ one of the ladies reassured me. ‘But we thought this looked better.’

While I finished my third champagne, they asked me to come up on the stage. The other lady really thought she honoured me by saying – while I was standing right next to the spacing error: ‘This wonderful copywriter corrected all our copy. We really appreciate that she is so precise and stubborn.’

What the F***. Stubborn? Me?

The second situation was that I was pitching and I had to come up with a company slogan. Unfortunately, I lost the pitch to an advertising company. I was on a pretty good terms with the woman who invited me to pitch in the first place, and I asked her to see the result, just to be able to learn from it. When I opened her email, I immediately saw two major grammar mistakes. In the company slogan! I called her and explained to her what was wrong. Do you think she was grateful for this unasked advice? No. She said: ‘But this slogan felt better.’

These are the moments I wished I had studied medicine instead of becoming a walking dictionary. I would love to treat these customers.  

‘Yeah, I do agree. Those stitches don’t look good on you. We will not treat your appendicitis.’
‘Chemo really doesn’t feel good. Let’s not.’ 

The book of my genius friend is now for sale. In the word of thanks he states: “Thank you, dear Vera, my dear friend, for your professional revision work.”  At the same time, the blurb on the back of the book contains two major mistakes because, after all those discussions,  he hated me so much that he didn’t want to let me revise the very last bit any more.

By the way, his book is good.

 

Going to the mattresses

Since February, last year, my back has been aching. It started with small pangs when I tried to carry a box. A year later, I can’t get out of my bed in the morning. I had no idea that mankind needs a back so much. It is not that I can’t function, but I just look stupid all the time. I can’t pick something up from the floor without clutching something, or leaning heavily on my knees. For my work, I need to carry boxes and I just cannot get them into or out of my car without bending my knees like a Russian dancer. When I want to get something out of the bottom kitchen cupboard, my movements look like I’m on a French toilet. Getting out of the car is accompanied by a deep groan and the resemblance of a ninety year old. A minor detail is that I need three painkillers a day. 

However, I have never visited a doctor for this. My excuses are awesome. At first, I was convinced that it would just go away. On top of that, I didn’t have the time to go to the doctor’s. When it didn’t go away, I tried to make a doctor’s appointment but I never managed to call between eight and ten in the morning, which are the only hours suitable to make an appointment. Furthermore, I got scared that it had something to do with loss of muscle strength. But that diagnosis would lead to the conclusion that I should do something in a fitness school, and I just don’t have the time. Then it got worse and I started to be afraid that it could be a hernia, and I would need surgery. And I simply don’t have the time for the rehabilitation.

One day, I was waiting for the bus at Schiphol and regretting my not so high heels, and I tried to distract myself from the pain by looking at an enormous television screen. Suddenly, a commercial from TEMPUR came on. A TEMPUR Mattress is a high quality mattress, made with NASA technology. The mattresses and pillows form themselves under the influence of body temperature and weight and adjust themselves to the contours of your body. Therefore your back, neck and joints can rest in a natural position. Medical specialists recommend TEMPUR Mattresses to people with severe back problems. After a night sleep on a TEMPUR Mattress, you feel like a teenager ready for the day. To be honest, I was already convinced when NASA popped up. It seems to me that when astronauts use it, it must be good. On top of that, the commercial added that snoring can be considerably reduced on a TEMPUR mattress. And as the snoring of my husband had caused severe marital problems, I saw idyllic pictures of us renewing our vows. 

After this breaking news, I immediately managed to find the time to go to a Better Bed kind of store. The eager look on my face apparently gave away the loads of money I was prepared to pay and alerted the salesman immediately. I told him all the ins and outs of my back pain and he kind of sang his sentences: ‘Of course I’m not a doctor, but it seems to me that this is a classical situation of a too firm mattress. I can assure you that your life will be much better after we have helped you to a new one!’

And then he started his magic trick. He led me to a bed and asked me to lie down on it – off course, after taking my shoes off. I had stood for a long time and this bed felt like heaven. I closed my eyes and almost fell asleep. ‘Hum…, little bit too hard though, I think,’ the salesman said. ‘And you are so long and tall and light weight, this bed is too firm.’ I couldn’t help feeling flattered. The salesman led me to another bed. When I lay down, I immediately felt less pressure on my back. At that moment the salesman noticed my husband and asked me if he had sleeping problems as well. Before he could answer, I shouted: ‘He snores! And he’s always tired.’ ‘Really? Typical case! Your mattress is too soft.’ I got up. ‘That means that …’ ‘Yes I know…’ The salesman said. ‘It means that you both need a different mattress.’ He bent his hands like someone died. My husband was shocked. ‘That’s the price of getting older,’ the salesman said. ‘When we are young, it doesn’t matter what we sleep on, as long as we are with our beloved.’  I could have sworn he was grinning. 

‘But let’s concentrate on the lady now. This mattress is not suitable as well. Your hips are not supported enough. That means I have to bring you to the TEMPUR area.’
‘I told you so!’ I whispered triumphantly to my husband.

Like removing the veil of a bride to kiss her, the salesman removed the cover of a bed that already looked like heaven. I lay down and instantly felt that this bed surely supported my hips. And my neck, and my shoulders. I felt the fatigue flowing out of my body. Vaguely, in the distance, I heard my husband ask the salesman how much it cost, but I couldn’t have cared less. I was absolutely convinced that this mattress would solve all my problems. My back ache, the snoring, my tiredness, my stress. My business would flourish, my marriage would be better than ever only because I would sleep again. That was priceless.

Because of the diagnosis that my husband and me should have different mattresses, the salesman sold two TEMPUR beds that day. One firm, one soft. And yes, they could deliver the following Wednesday, so the painful period would soon be behind me. On top of this, the mattresses had 10% off, and we got two pillows for free. We only had to pay € 2.500,-.

Four months later. I still take three painkillers a day. I need help to get out of the bed in the morning. At night, when I turn on the other side, stabbing pain wakes me up and keeps me awake for several hours. Then I listen to the deafening snoring of my husband, which makes the frame of the bed tremble. And regarding the idyllic marital scenes: in the middle of our bed is a hill. That’s is because of the fact that the firm mattress of my husband is 5 cm thinner than my soft one. Whenever we want to lie next to each other, he has to climb up or I have to fall down.  When we go to bed and we are both on our own mattress, we sometimes ask: ‘Your side or mine?’ But even the thought of the effort that is needed to conquer the barrier between us, makes us stick to our own side.  The salesman was right: € 2.500,- is the price of getting old.

The dark side of December

The dark side of December

Since we're quite on our way in January, I thought it would be safe to post my last writing tasks. It's about a mother's terror in December. I't a long story, but I put two assignments into one. Have fun, and please let me know what you think.


The dark side of December
In spite of what the golden lights on the Christmas tree,  the warm, sparkly lights in every shopping street, the flickering, heartwarming candles and crackling fires in living rooms are trying to convince me of, it can never compete with the dark, miserable feeling that overwhelms me when December starts. It is the month that my motherhood is challenged the most. No, it is the month in which I have to face up to the fact that I am possibly just a terrible mother.

It starts with Sinterklaas: a group lie Dutch parents tell their children, just to have a useful threat at hand for a couple of weeks. Two of my three girls are luckily not believers any more (and I decided the third one won’t ever be – I’m telling her now in the middle of the crowd that watches Sinterklaas coming into town that this is a man dressed in a strange robe and a fake beard). But school has found a solution for older children not to miss all the fun: draw lots and make a surprise present and a poem for the one you selected. And then they return home. At first the piece of paper is moved from the table to the windowsill, from there to the kitchen, and if it doesn’t disappear in the recycling bin, it will be buried for ever in the bits and bobs drawer. Until that terrible question on the third of December: “Muhum … where is the lot? And what should I make? And what name  did I draw?”

It all ends with this scene: my husband is jigsawing, gluing, hammering, nailing, and sweating, and I am trying to rhyme the life of this kid I have never seen together. And if I ask my daughter: “What kind of a boy is Tim? And what does Senna do after school?” the answer is always: “He is nice and she goes home after school. I don’t know him/her very well!”

The morning of Sinterklaas we drive to school with the boot full of ‘surprise presents’, in the afternoon we drive back with a trunk full of ‘surprise presents’ and then I hope I soon find a way to get rid of all this rubbish.

Then the yearly ice skating trip is coming up. Which means that the girls need skates – ones that fit, preferably - and the school needs transportation to the ice rink, for which they turn to the MOTHERS. My children want me to drive too (I don’t know why, I’m terribly moody with a lot of children around) but I snap that I am busy enough trying to fix the ice skates in time. Mind you, we have FOUR pairs upstairs from previous school trips, but that means only one pair fits (the youngest one) and they are ice hockey skates and she is never ever going to wear them. She wants figure skates and my temper can’t beat hers. It takes me two nights of calling, driving around, exchanging with other parents to get this done.

And all this with the next obstaclein sight:  Christmas Crafts-morning. A very nice, cosy tradition of the school, in which all MOTHERS participate. The school is transformed into a Christmas market. In every classroom there are two crafts tables where different kinds of craft-things can be made. The children can run around the school all morning and choose the crafts they want to make. Every mother signs up for a table and sits there all morning, on a toddler’s chair if she’s lucky: they glue, paint or clay, depending on the required end result (this year, it was the ‘Wooden Santa’ for me)

Now what you should know about me is that I have zero skills in crafts. I can only glue my fingers together, whatever I cut is crooked and I will merely paint my clothes. So the least comfortable position for me is to be at a craft table, trying to teach children how to do it.

But before I was seated at a table, I’d already had a very stressful morning. Apparently I missed one of the school’s e-mails that told me that all children should bring a big box to school with Christmas decoration, floral foam, nice green stuff, a wine glass, toilet rolls, jam jars, old socks … My beautiful girls could remember every detail of this instruction, but only thought of telling me on the very same morning of the craft hell. So I went through the house, moaning , whining and scolding about how on earth I could manage to fill this box. Speaking of which: where the F*** could I find two boxes? All boxes were picked up the day before.  For me, at that moment, not having oasis was one of the most terrible things that could happen in my life. ( Why me? Why me?)

We finally arrive at school with some Christmas decoration in two pretty, small boxes that used to be perfume gift boxes. It wasn’t until we went home that I realise that the boxes were meant to bring all the crafts home and that I have two girls in tears because only one of the TWELVE Christmas thingies fits in the box. So I walk up and down to the car to put it all in, leaving a trace of shattered Christmas balls that fell out of their Christmas arrangements due to my slap-dash handling.

In the car I try to it make up to them. “I’m sorry. Next year we will take a big box.” The eldest sniffs. “You think it is rubbish anyway, all the things we make.” “No, that’s not true, I think it is beautiful!” “No, you’re lying” , the second girl weeps. “Last year you said when the Christmas holidays were over: thank God, can we throw this shit away now?” I mutter something indefence, but I am afraid there is none. This really sounded like me.

The rest of the day I want to stay in bed, preventing myself from hurting my kids even more. But the next challenge is the same evening: school choir performance on the Dickens market! Needless to say I spend all afternoon trying to find clothes that fit in Dickens age. At seven o’clock the choir needs to assemble in the middle of the shopping street. It is freezing cold. Not as cold as last year, when the temperature dropped below minus five and the snow caught us by surprise. However,  the performance is exactly the same as last year: same songs, same incompetent conductor with absolutely no sense of rhythm, the same not-singing children, same horrible sound engineering, same note to myself that I should get them out of this so called choir.

During all this, I’m trying to make it through the piles of end-of-year assignments and make 60 hours a week, at least.I can’t walk my dog properly and he is eating all the furniture out of frustration and I’m trying to find excuses for why our Christmas tree isn’t up yet.

Between all the e-mails clients send me, I discover the school starts spamming:
“(From the class parents) We’d like to make a nice Christmas present for the teachers, to give them the day before the holiday. Can you give your child one euro and a piece of nicely folded paper with a Christmas wish on it?”
“We need a hand with cleaning the class rooms. Can you help out on Friday afternoon? The children are just free then.”
“Please make sure that your child clears out the desk before the holidays and that you provide a plastic bag to put all the stuff in.”
“All the lice capes should be brought home and washed during the holiday.”
“Please remember that the children need to hand in their papers before the holidays.”

I click them away, agitated and frustrated. There is another very, very big struggle to fight before this all ends. Christmas dinner at school. The day before the holiday, all children eat together at school. A few days before, children can write on a piece of paper what they really like to eat and a Special Christmas Dinner Committee selects the dishes and asks MOTHERS to cook the meals. I’m really proud that my kids don’t fill in ‘fries’ or ‘pancakes’ or ‘pizza’, but that they put down: ‘spinach quiche’ or ‘sauerkraut from the oven” or ‘Catalonian meatballs’. But you can imagine what happens: I get all the orders. So I take another afternoon off to cook (I spare you the stress related to this part), bring the warm, lovely smelling dishes  to school in the evening, go home and clean up the mess in the kitchen, cook for my husband and my youngest daughter, go back to school and collect my kids and the bowls and plates. Back home, when I unwrap the aluminium foil, I see that with the ‘left-overs’, I can invite at least fourteen people for our own Christmas dinner and keep them satisfied.
“Mama, Í liked the sauerkraut”, one girls says quietly. “And my teacher too.” And the other girls says: “There were fries and pancakes, but I only ate three of those spinach quiches. I didn’t want to disappoint you.” 
I have the firm intention not to yell and snap at them anymore for the rest of my life and I hug them, burrying my tears in their hair.

The next morning, they wake me. “Mum, it’s our last day at school. There is a play and I am Maria. I need a blue gown. And a baby doll. And what is a crib?” The other girl goes: “Yeah, you should come and watch us mum. I’m a shepherd. Have you got a real shepherd’s staff?”

A few minutes later I have cursed, scolded, yelled, banged a door and called the office that I will be, again, not present this morning.

Bonita Avenue (part 1)

Once in a decennium a book impresses me so much that it turns into an obsession. In 2002 I read ‘Captain Corelli’s Mandoline’. I mourned almost ten years (I’m a slow mourner) for the fact I had finished the book.

The mourning process actually took place in the five stages of grief. First denial: I read it over and over again, but skipped the last page. Then anger. I was angry because I couldn’t read anything else. Every other book felt like an insult to Mister Bernières prose. Friends saw me suffering and kindly suggested literature they were very fond of, but actually they put our friendship at risk suggesting I should read Paustovski or Tsjechov. In the third stage, bargaining, I set myself goals: I had to give this book as a present at least once a week, to spread the beauty. Complete depression I felt when not everyone shared my admiration, to be honest, almost no one I knew. And in the last stage, acceptance, when I had told myself maybe this was just a phase in my life I had to go through to acquire a natural selection of my friends, it happened again. I was really unprepared for this. 

I’m talking about ‘Bonita Avenue’ by Peter Buwalda. The title is not appealing at all, nor the cover of the book. I remembered a news flash about it when it had been first brought out. Somebody had torn the cover, in several book stores. At that time I thought that it was just a way of promoting this book, bringing out a rumour that mystifies the public. Didn’t work on me. If it wasn’t for a student, who I gave an instruction to write a book review to practice his praising skills, which were apparently very good, I would never have read it.

By the time I finished the first page, I had stopped reading twice. Firstly to get my highlighter. The metaphors and comparisons were so brilliant I wanted to mark them for my students (‘see, this is how a metaphor should be like’. I stopped highlighting when I saw my book turn into a fluorescent yellow sea). The second time I stopped was to cancel all the dates I had further on that week.

What makes this book so brilliant? I’m not fond of admitting it, but it has something to do with the typical Dutch scenery. What I dislike in other Dutch books, is that writers hesitate to reveal the village or city. They give hints, but they don’t want to spoil their chances for international film rights. Buwalda couldn’t care less. He recreates Utrecht in the seventies, the firework catastrophe in Enschede, the University setting of Enschede. 

The troubling part of the book is that there is nothing to hold on to. The characters of the protagonists are extremely complicated. As a reader you are hopelessly trying to cling to a person that you want to identify yourself with. But as soon as you reach that point, that person unexpectedly does something disgusting. At the same time, Buwalda manages to make you feel compassion with the one you were very sure was the bad guy. There are no heroes and no winners.

That’s not new, but the way Buwalda handles it, is. The most intriguing challenge he took on was dealing with subjects you have always considered to be a part of boys magazines: mathematics, judo, pornography. No writer that takes literature seriously would  even think of making that central themes. 

Buwalda seemed to give priority to the plot, something that partly explains my unbridled enthusiasm because for me, plot is everything. He wanted to write a book in which a successful person, a judoka, finds out that his daughter has a lucrative business in pornographic photographs on the internet. But it can’t be coincidence when he’s on the internet once and reveals this secret. So Buwalada decided to make the judoka an injured one, who changed his career into mathematics, someone who spends his life on probability and statistics. So the plot imposed requirements on his characters. This had very radical consequences for his book. He had to make him a top mathematician, one who won the Fields-medal, but how can you do that when you’re not a mathematician yourself? So Bulwalda had to write at least two scenes that could convince the reader of the mathematic intelligence of his protagonist. 

A not unimportant part of my adoration is Buwalda’s own obsession. He knew that if he wanted to have impact as a writer, he would have to give his life to it. In an interview he reveals that he shut himself up for four years and wrote almost manically on this book. He had got a payment of forty thousand euro’s in advance from the publisher  to whom he had shown his outline. That’s is not much of a four years living. When he had finished his twenty one chapters, he printed it in a nice font and started to read. It was terrible. It was no good at all. He panicked, called a friend and said: ‘I really need your help.’ But the friend refused and told him he just had to go through this phase by himself. So Peter started to rewrite. He graded every chapter. There was only one chapter that deserved a 6,5 (out of 10), all the others scored between the 2 and the 4. And then the big recovery started. Peter worked his way up until all chapters had a 9 or a 10.  It was only then when it was good enough to hand it over to the publisher. 

Deep down, during the rare moment I allow myself to look at my deepest ambitions, this is the life I long to. Arrange myself a life in which it is possible to withdraw myself from the social pressure and create literature. Instead of that, I arranged a life that is full of pressure and obligations, apparently because I don’t dare to make the sacrifice and release all safety belts. In this book, the reader is embraced by the sacrifices Buwalda made, by his unconditional devotion to make every word of his story the best one possible.  His book leaves us with a terribly paradoxical feeling: a great relief that the scenes of terror are finally over and a deep feeling of depression that it is already over. 

Peter Buwalda won two debutant prizes. He was in the running for three prestigious literature prizes but didn’t win. In contrast to my experience with Bernières, I started to read the books that were obviously better than Buwalda’s, according to the jury. Maybe in a few years, when I look back, I can mark this period in my life as the ‘anger stage of the grieving process’ but I developed a complete and coherent conspiracy theory on literature prizes and why Buwalda didn’t win. That will the subject of my next writing task.