How little we know...

Yesterday was my father's birthday. Had he lived he would have been 106, worthy of a mention in a local newspaper and a visit by the mayor—the Queen, or under current conditions the King, no longer sends birthday wishes to those over one hundred years of age.

Thinking about my father I suddenly realized how little I know about him. I lived in his house for some 20 years and saw him occasionally thereafter, but about the years before my birth and after I left the house I know virtually nothing. He studied economics in Rotterdam but dropped out... when and why I don't know. I have a photograph of him sitting on a horse, posture of a cavalry officer—he dreamt of becoming one, I was told but never was enlisted. His horse riding days were cut short by his father for reasons unknown to me and he never managed to learn how to drive though the family was wealthy and possessed several cars. With a friend he had started an insurance brokerage firm. I met him in his office sometimes when he took me for lunch. And when it became obvious that I was interested in girls he told me that there were girls to bed and girls to wed. The last time I saw him he was in a rehab-centre sitting on his bed in light blue adult nappies, trying to put his trousers on. He didn't know me anymore, asking my mother whom I accompanied on the visit: Who is the gentleman with you?

His father I might have met ten or twelve times in my whole life, and his older sister less than that, I called her "Madam" when meeting her for, what I thought, was the first time when I was 12 or so. Grandmother had died long before I was born; even my mom had never met her. She had a colonial background, I was told, probably a bit mixed in lineage, but that was not talked about as it was considered a blemish in their societal stratum.

My mother, on the other hand, had kept diaries since she was 12 and had kept them all. When living in her beloved Dordogne she re-read them and worked them into 110 typewritten pages of her life, that is, her life till she was pregnant with her first child, my sister. We found this document among her papers when she died at the ripe old age of 98. I took it with me and translated it from the original German into English to make it more accessible to my five children who do not have enough German to be able to appreciate it.

When I think about my mother I always wish I could have read it earlier, when she was still alive. It is a window on her past and a clear indication that as an adolescent she had been lost and lonely, misunderstood and forced into a role she did not want. She was sent off to keep her grandmother company. The grandmother who still lived in the 19^th century and who did not allow her granddaughter to follow a secondary education that would have given access to university. Instead she was groomed in social skills for an early marriage.

During the last decades of her life she often mentioned to me that she had not been a good mother; my vehement denial she would gratefully accept, but it did not convince her. With the hindsight provided by the diaries, I can see that most of all she had craved to be loved... If only I had known, how much more could I have shown her that I did love her and that she was a great mother?

Knowing-not knowing is of course not single directional. The question can also be asked: how much did my parents know about me, or my sister? I was a difficult adolescent, for sure. I hid from their view, did not express myself, except in opposition. And I stayed that way long after puberty.

This unprovoked rambling is partly the result of realising that a long time ago my father had passed away, and that I had never really known him. But it is also caused by some questions about my previous blog where I mix up periods and people and a bit of fantasy; is that true, how come we never knew, was the gist of the reactions.