The Personal Element

I am so sorry

Almost impossible – Assignment

My mother died in 2000. I was there when she passed away in her bed minutes before I watched her deliriously from the morphine grasping with both hands in the air as if she was seeing something, or someone and wanted to be there, make it her own.

Then she looked at me, not straight at me but I could tell she knew I was there, and then she said: “I am so sorry.” And instantly I knew what she meant and I replied, “Oh mom, it’s okay.” Then she started dying.

I shouted to my father and brother in the other part of the house: Come here, quick, she is going!
We sat there, all three of us, and watched her blow away her last breath.

What was it that she meant to say? What was it that I immediately understood when she told me: I am so sorry.

I am so sorry I never loved you! That’s what she meant. And I knew and I forgave her, that instant.

Because that was the truth of our complex relationship all those years. She never loved her firstborn child. Me.

I have always known in the back of my head, I have always felt that there was something essential missing in our relationship. Then and there I knew what it was. It broke my heart and mended it at the same time.

Why did she not love me? Why was she incapable of loving her firstborn? That’s what I had to find out, that was my quest.

Of course, it must have had something to do with her past being in a Japanese concentration camp at the end of World war 2 in Indonesia, where she was born. She took that war trauma back to the Netherlands as an 11-year-old child facing a new life in a different country The Netherlands.

It must have something to do with her complex relationship with my father who was dominant and overbearing at best, who raped her during the interlude between their engagement when they were apart for a few months. He forced himself upon her and that was the start of my birth as their firstborn. She told me years later.

It also must have something to do with her younger brother Frits who was a soldier in West-Guinnee during her pregnancy and was coming home, only to have blown to bits on a land mine on his way back.

All that trauma must have been so overwhelming on a beautiful Indo-European woman back in 1961 that it overshadowed the joy of becoming a mother. We never got a chance!

15 minutes contemplation
I don’t know why but I have a hard time focussing on the different kinds of essays by the writers that are presented so far. It’s difficult for me to grasp their significance by only reading snippets of their work. I find that I am skipping chunks of text and reading on.

So, I concentrate on the prompts and exercises.