All names in this whole section, except for my own, are fictitious.
I remember it well. It is really my first memory. Lying on my mother’s belly, as a little boy. Ultimate safety. One with my mother. My mother is wearing terrycloth pajamas, and I can feel the fine texture of the fabric. This may last forever. My mother’s name was Maria. And my father’s name was Hector. They had met at choir, one week before the birthday of my father’s mother, my grandmother. My mother immediately had a crush on him, and was disappointed when he wasn’t there the next week. Of course, she didn’t know he was going to his mother’s birthday. Another week later, and he’s present again thankfully and she goes up to him to talk to him, even though that’s really something, which she doesn’t do very easily. But from the start she feels very comfortable with him. And my father also with her. Since then they always hang out with each other, and it is a very charming love story how they are loyal to each other and get married a few years later. They have their first son, named Anton, in 1981. In childbirth, some things go wrong and my mother has to walk on crutches for 6 weeks to recover and suffers permanent damage to her pelvis. She is reluctant to give birth in the regular way again, so when it is my turn to be born in 1984, along with my twin sister Lauren, she opts for a cesarean section. My parents knew in advance that it was going to be twins, and were overjoyed for us. Lauren was born first. And I followed two minutes later. So Lauren and I would get to discover the world together. She is a very different type from me. I quickly give the impression that I lacked something in my mother’s womb, because when my parents take the bottle out of my mouth for a moment, I gasp as if each time could be the last. My sister doesn’t. She thinks it’s all fine. And just quietly drinks what she is offered. My father designs the beautiful birth card. And we are baptized while we are still babies.
My mother often calls me her little clown and calls me “pralleke”, which translates as something like “junior”. She is very sweet and helpful and she can be very enthusiastic when I have learned something new. She is always very proud then, and I quickly notice that. I am overjoyed when she is so enthusiastic, or smiles at me, or winks at me, or when I can cuddle with her. I become a very enthusiastic child myself, and am often very cheerful. My father I see less than my mother. He is at work during the week, while my mother takes care of us at those times. He is also often sweet, and very cheerful, whistles and sings a lot, and often calls me “Jesse-boy.” He is regularly busy with things, though, so the distance from him feels a bit greater than with my mother. But playing is a lot of fun and there is definitely affection. Especially the back scratching is a favorite with me. Being scratched on the back extensively, which my father does all our childhood. A very fond memory. And apart from that, my parents really do everything for me. That’s what has always felt like very nice. Also the moments when we are put to bed are wonderful. And whole arsenal of songs and stories came out then and we often asked for the same stories, which my father made up himself. These are very safe moments.
Yet the wonderful beginning also takes on another side after a while. Anton, my brother, was highly gifted. My parents encouraged him very much to learn things. He was once tested. And they had never seen such high scores in a child. Especially my mother got very excited about that. I realized early on that it was often about the ability and knowledge of things. “Can you already do this? And this?” the children regularly discussed with each other, and of course my brother, who was two-and-a-half years older, always came out as the best, so I looked up to him tremendously, because the smarter you were, the more attention you got, was in my head. When I wanted to explore the world a little more, my mother would often call if I came back to sit with her. She herself intensely enjoyed the attention we gave her. That safe symbiosis was very nice, but yes, at some point you learn that there is more in the world than just your mother, and you want to explore. My mother then often warned of danger. She couldn’t very well tell the difference between me, my sister, and herself. We were then one. It bothered me that at times she was so busy taking care of practical matters, and then I didn’t really feel that she saw me and my sister properly! Then again, that doesn’t have to be such a problem, because children can of course indicate with their emotions what they like and don’t like. And Lauren and I also had each other, of course. But because of this, a kind of mischief built up in me and a will to resist, something relatively normal for a young child. My mother limited that too little and pulled me back into symbiosis every time. She was hurt every time I resisted, giving me a fear that she would break down if I pursued my own dreams.
My father thought, I think, that children automatically behave well and that you never have to correct them. If he did have to correct us, he blew himself up a lot, as if he couldn’t bring out his feelings in a moderate way. He didn’t know boundaries. Instead of expressing a boundary with his mouth, you usually got a twist around your ears, or a slap in the face if you didn’t listen. Because then his anger was really building up, instead of just quietly saying “No”.
One of the first conscious memories where things really went wrong, but certainly not the first time I suddenly got to know this other side of him, was when my parents were wallpapering. There was a wallpaper table in the hallway in front of the stairs, and I was just coming to walk down, but I couldn’t get past it. I wanted attention and was blowing a whistle the whole time, and instead of my father saying, “Jesse, I want you to stop with that whistle. It’s been enough now,” my father then blew himself up a lot, and I got a nasty lecture in which he didn’t see me at all. I got scared of him because he immediately came across as very threatening, and I resisted that and then mischievously blew the whistle in his face. It was my way of saying, “If you talk to me like that, I won’t listen!” Then his features changed, and he went wild. He turned into a monster. It was totally opposite to the sweet man he normally was. I ran back upstairs. I was very scared then. He threw the wallpaper table aside, and came after me like a madman. I was almost on the second floor when the monster reached me. He plucked me off the stairs very aggressively like a total freak who had totally lost control, shook me wildly, threw me on the bed, pulled down my pants and spanked my bare bottom, which was very humiliating. After that he was gone, and I was alone with myself. He didn’t see how much fear I was getting for him. He was blind to it. Nor did my mother see how much fear I was getting for him. She was blind to this too. I still have trouble seeing old pictures of myself again, because always the fear is written on my face. I come across as a very gentle boy who looks dreamily into the world.
Another moment that goes wrong is when my brother won’t listen to my father. They are standing in the corridor on the second floor of our house. I stand watching in shock as he begins to shake my brother like crazy. My brother occasionally lets out a cry of resistance, but my father just keeps going until he listens and suppresses his resistance. That’s the fastest way to put your child in an absolute prison for life.
My sister also got her ass kicked. He didn’t just hit to indicate a boundary, he also didn’t take our boundaries seriously and forced you to do what he had in mind. When we got angry, which is a logical consequence of your limits not being respected, he would hit you in the face several times. So too with my sister, which I found even worse than when he hit me. I also had regular fights with my sister. Because the contact with my father felt so unsafe, I always needed my mother’s attention to dampen that fear. Because she supported me and comforted me, and always calmed me down when I was scared. Then she pulled me back into that symbiosis and that helped tremendously. So I had great difficulty sharing my mother’s attention with my sister. The worst trauma was when I argued with my sister myself and was angry with her and hit her, and then she would rant at me and call me a sadist (rightfully so!), and my father would hit her repeatedly in her face when he interfered. That happened several times, the last time when she was something like 15. The last time that happened was such a great injustice to my sister, though, that I still often cry a lot about it.
This kind of thing happened early in my life, but actually throughout my whole childhood. I also always felt that my father cared more about his material possessions, than about me. That wasn’t his intention, but that was the idea I got. When I got a little older, it was also a regular hassle at the table. If my sister and I had an argument and my father took sides with me, I would get angry with him. I couldn’t stand it when he said something to my sister, because I always felt she was breaking down, and I knew how that felt. I loved my sister very much, she was always incredibly important to me, and we did everything together, and also played a lot together, but we also clashed regularly. We were in each other’s way. But we usually made up, especially in our later lives. My father did not make up with us when he was so explosive. When he had an outburst, he felt no remorse. There was no talking about it afterwards either. He didn’t come back to it. No, it was a violent reaction that you just had to deal with. And I was forced to say “sorry” all the time. I don’t know what was going on internally with him in those moments. If my mother was there, she often shouted shocked “Hector!!!” but otherwise she didn’t set a boundary to him either that she didn’t want to experience that anymore. I was also often angry with her, because she was so sweet, (so with her I dared to do it more than with him) and I could not express my aggression with my father. Normally children can throw their aggression into contact with one of their parents, whereupon parents teach the child in a moderate way, that aggression is not allowed. Slowly that then gets better and better and a child learns to control his aggression, but with us it was so rejected with a lot of aggression, that aggression became the only life, that I had in me. That’s kind of a special situation. Then you have such a heavy trauma, that the aggression gets stuck in your system, because it is not allowed to exist. That’s very paradoxical, but it’s really how it works. And then it will be triggered again and again in contact with others in the form of anger. Learning to control it will then cause your father, or the trauma, to be right, and you will break down, with no way to recover and find your strength again. This is what happened to me. I was otherwise very gentle and kind, but could get incredibly angry at injustice. I would scold my mother, she would be hurt, and then my father would come and slap me around the ears or slap me around the head. I would say, “Yes, go ahead and hit again!” I couldn’t express my aggression to anyone. Not with my mother, not with my father, not with my brother, and not with my sister. So the only option was to break contact with that life-force within myself. A very big trauma. And an incredibly big blow to my trust in others and my self-confidence. So I grew up very fearful. And my parents didn’t know the cause of it, or they never thought about it. I find that unbelievable.
My father didn’t express his negative emotions to my mother either. He was also cut off from that, so he couldn’t imagine, that I was sometimes angry with my mother. However, my mother did express her negative emotions to my father, but usually it was about immature matters, small things that make you wonder: is it really necessary?
Never stating a boundary, and immediately turning into a rabid one that slaps you around the face, is a strange way to communicate, especially when it comes to very young children, who are not yet equipped to deal with that. I usually call it a parenting mistake, but you can also just call it domestic violence, because that’s what it is. There is a place for violent disapproval in parenting, but only if a child has first learned to listen to ordinary non-destructive anger. And ordinary non-destructive anger has a place only if a child has first learned to listen to boundaries. So you are in control of how far you allow a child to be derailed. Children need boundaries, otherwise they get scared. The world then feels like a big mush with too many options, preventing you from making choices and not knowing who you are or want to be. If you then also immediately pour violence on them, you thus skip two steps. And especially when it happens structurally, throughout childhood, the wound becomes a lot deeper and sometimes even irreparable.
At some point I am old enough to go to school. I don’t really remember the first day, but pictures clearly show that I am pretty tense about it. I do remember that we had a pretty teacher the first period. Later she is replaced by another teacher. In group 2 we get Miss Marga. At one point she invites all the children in her class to her house to eat pancakes with strawberries. Miss Marga eventually gets cancer, and dies, and we all attend her funeral. In grade 3 we get Mr. Richard and he makes some keen observations in the reports. That I often find myself out of touch with classmates, and seem to cling a bit to my sister. Furthermore, I tend to want to be the clown. My school performance is super. And I regularly get extra work, because I also like to apply the teaching material obsessively. Occasionally I play with classmates or they play with me. But I don’t really have the feeling of friendship. In grade 4, we get Miss Sarah, and she often calls kids “oil ball” (a Dutch delicacy) when they do something stupid. The girls she often calls “chicky” which I find funny. Miss Sarah I run into much later in my life when she’s not doing well. She thought I could skip a class, just like my brother did, but I preferred to stay with my sister. So that didn’t work out.
We regularly go on vacation with the family. When we are young, we go to Center Parcs for example, which is a Dutch holiday park. But as soon as we get older, we often go to Ouddorp, which has a great beach. At Center Parcs, I slide down a slide between my grandfather’s legs, even though I can’t really swim yet. My grandfather gets the legs of his pursuer in his back, and accidentally lets go of me, giving me a moment of fear and going underwater. That moment seemed endless. Fortunately, he gets me out of the water after that. But from that time on I was not at all great friends with water. Even our vacations to Ouddorp, of which I have very good memories, sometimes have a nasty edge. One time my parents went for a walk and I was alone with my brother, sister and grandmother. Anton is messing around so much that I become furious with him. Now that my father is not around, I dare to express myself. I get so furious, though, that my grandmother doesn’t know what to do with me. Later my parents come back and I push everything down again. My side is barely seen.
In fourth grade, Lauren and I have our First Communion. I usually found church masses very boring, but fortunately there was a regular children’s side service, which my mother did along with some other parents. Still, I often find the rituals impressive. My brother Anton even re-enacts them at home. And then we all have to come and watch. He likes to dress up anyway, because he also plays Batman. My mother made a suit especially for him. I would walk behind him without a suit as Robin. We often got yelled at (Bat-man!!!!) or they started singing the tune from the old American series (with Adam West and Burt Ward). I always hated that. I always felt embarrassed because they often thought I was Anton when I was alone. Also, Anton would brutally give tickets to children when he was playing cops, which was not appreciated.
In grade 5 and 6 at school, we get Mr. David. In grade 5 my crushes begin, which continue pretty much my whole life. It was a very beautiful girl from grade 6. And I looked back at her every time in class. And then I could go on again, for a while. But it never came to real contact. During the breaks, I hide behind a garage box in the schoolyard and keep looking back at my secret love. Her sister notices this, and suddenly she is standing in front of me with my secret love, at which point I’m completely humiliated and start stammering, “Yes, I do stand here often!” Again, no further contact occurs. Later on my infatuation jumps to other girls, mostly friends of my sister. Then I don’t have to make so much effort for contact, because it comes naturally when they play at my sister’s house. One of them lives down the street and confronts me once why I am always looking at their house when I am playing alone. I say that’s not true: a missed opportunity. With another friend of my sister’s who I had my eye on, I played footsie at one point, and shared sweets. But what to do next, I didn’t know, so that then went away by itself, because she got too close. I was always very afraid of what they might think about me. It always felt as if accomplishments were expected of me that I couldn’t meet.
From a young age, I played computer games on our Commodore Amiga 500, a computer my parents had bought from the neighbor. Surely that computer opened up the fantastic world of computer games to me. The Amiga had both beautiful graphics for the time and beautiful sound. So I made my first song in the program The Luxe Music, which of course I proudly let my family listen to. At some point I get a Sega Master System II for St. Nicholas, and then I spend hours playing Sonic the Hedgehog, Alex Kidd, Mickey Mouse Land of Illusion and other titles. With a classmate I exchange game cassettes, because he also had such a system. With girls I often looked for love, with boys I always looked for friendship and technology.
I do get bullied at school sometimes. There are definitely people who get bullied worse, but still it’s not always fun. They call me “sissy” and don’t invite me to birthday parties when they go bowling because they think I’m unable to lift the bowling ball. I already didn’t have much self-confidence, but that doesn’t do any good at all either. Especially one boy in the class I have some trouble with, because he always has a rather passive-aggressive appearance. ‘Tough’ is what people call it. As a result, he never says ‘hi’ back when I say hi to him. Yet I always keep saying hi to him. And so I run into a wall every time I make contact with him. He also calls my mother “weird”, which I found very hurtful. So in grade 7 my anger is building up a lot and out of nowhere I give him a push once, upon which we are put in front of the chalkboard by the teacher. Then I am waited for after school and he and his older brother bang my head against the wall. Still, I always try my best to be nice after that.
My whole childhood I struggle with very insecure feelings. As soon as it gets crowded around me, or I have to ride past older children on my bicycle, I get anxious. And then I sometimes lash out myself. Once I saw someone I was very afraid of, and I kicked him as I was passing him, whereupon I fell over, bike and all. Karma. He bangs my head on the street, and then luckily he stops. That kind of behavior was purely an impotent attempt to make the other less powerful, but those attempts always end in nothing. Because another person had self-confidence and immediately recovered from every event, but not me. On the contrary, I crumbled more and more and it soon became apparent that I could not trust myself.
Even at home, my urges sometimes came out accidentally. For example, without really wanting to, I threw a comb in my sister’s face on impulse, whereupon it stuck in her eye. And more things like that. My mother then always reacted in a way that made me feel a lot of shame for myself. Also when I said certain things that had some aggression in them, she made me feel ashamed. But she let my father completely have his way in his childish and dangerous tantrums. Of most times it happened, I don’t think she was even aware.
Accidents sometimes happened at school, too. Once I let the scissors fall out of my hands. They landed on the teacher’s hand and she put me on the stairs in anger. She thought I had done it on purpose. Which I didn’t. But afterwards it was clear that my aggressive impulses were not really reliably under control, and they sometimes came out accidentally, which I didn’t want at all at that moment. But yes, if you just keep pushing everything away out of survival, it will come out in a different way later anyway, even if by accident.
Sometimes I have a hard time at school. Then I feel so bad about everything I’m letting wash over me in a day, that one day I just burst out crying out of nowhere. But I thought you always have to have a reason to cry, so I then made up a reason. I supposedly had pain in my hand. The teacher came to look and saw that my hand was a little blue, but actually there was so much more going on, which I couldn’t find the words for.
It also happened frequently that my father was annoyed by things arising from my lack of self-confidence, even though he had caused it himself. A normal person would then wonder what happened or what his own part in it was, but my father presented it rather as some demand I did not meet. Then I would walk down the street very anxious, and he would comment that I didn’t move my arms when walking, for example. That was purely because I had so little self-confidence. Since then I artificially moved my arms while walking like a little robot. Later my walking style was then imitated by some people, as if it was very funny. You will then wonder why I didn’t tell him the truth, but no, I couldn’t. Because every time I expressed my anger, he became wild, so I had no contact with that part of myself. And also my mother didn’t invite me to have my own feelings.
So I felt early on that I was inadequate. While changing at swimming lessons, I also received comments in the process that my penis was smaller than most. Yeah, it is not at all strange, when you do nothing but control yourself all day, when you’re actually furious. I controlled myself so much that it completely destroyed me. So I got a lot of shame for that part of me, too. Mr. David would say, “Better a little one that rises, than a big one that refuses!” (In Dutch it rhymes). Later it would become even more terrible around this subject, but I didn’t know that at the time. In any case, I had great fear of showing myself and feared the swimming lessons every week. Another reason for that was the fact that I hated going underwater. Because of the violence at home, there was a lot of pressure on my head, which squeezed the life out of it. As a result, going underwater felt so horrible, that it was a struggle every swimming lesson, to do it anyway. I don’t understand how I eventually managed to push myself to 7 meters of swimming underwater. Never did I express my limits. Never did I get angry. It was a hell of a prison. And always I let myself be made fun of, in front of the whole class.
At home, the fears I had expressed themselves mostly at night, when it was quiet in the house, and I was awake and alone. Then I would lie in bed sweating because I had had a nightmare. Usually I would run downstairs, scared stiff, to my mother. Then I woke her up and told her I had had a scary dream. My mother then made me calm down again, and told me to make fists from my hands. However, at key moments when I was angry in daily life, and thus was figuratively making fists, I was beaten, so making fists did not help with my nightmares. However, it was meant sweetly, and should normally work. There always had to be a light on in the corridor next to my bedroom, otherwise I got very scared, much to the dismay of my sister, who couldn’t sleep when it was light. Eventually we found a solution for that.
At times in my childhood, I was so incredibly anxious and so often standing at my mother’s bedside, that my father became impatient and angry. Then he would come up with a phrase like “pull yourself together”. When that happened, I was distraught inside. Very desperate it was. Because then I was fully confronted with what I wanted to run away from. That I was a sissy, a frightened pathetic heap of misery who was afraid and weak. And that my father was full of his aggressive male energy, implicitly telling me, “I am big and strong and very aggressive, and you are small and weak and worth nothing at all!” And that was also exactly what happened when at important moments in daily life I made myself big and strong and tried to find my words to tell him the truth, and I was beaten on that by the big monster. But that was exactly why I had so many nightmares. My parents realized that I was often scared and angry and decided to buy me a punching bag so that I could “pull myself together”, but what good is that if your strength is beaten inwardly at the most important moments (confrontations)? But unfortunately my parents were blind to their own part in this, which I find unbelievable.
We were always allowed to join many clubs. We went to gymnastics and later to scouting and judo. I don’t remember much about the gymnastics classes, although there we went in some big swing with a lot of people. Participation was again mandatory, of course, and I was terrified. But then, of course, you were “overreacting”. In scouting, too, you got nothing but “man up” all over you. They tried to toughen you up with that. But making traumatized people tough doesn’t really work that way, and certainly not if you can’t take a critical look at what you yourself do as a leader. Traumatized people, on the contrary, have had too much violence thrown at them too early, so comments like “man up” they will take in as stronger than actually is intended, and so it backfires. It then makes you crumble and the little self-confidence you have becomes less and less. So I didn’t last long there. Judo was also tense at the beginning, but later it became more fun. Tournaments I hated, but once in a while I participated, and won some. My father had taught me a good hip throw, and I used it on my opponents every time. One opponent, however, figured this out, so that became a second prize for me. I was lucky that my brother also went to judo, otherwise I wouldn’t have gone myself. I didn’t do things on my own. Usually I became very anxious then. I also didn’t want to go play soccer. I was afraid I would have to take a shower and they would make remarks again, which always came back to me as very black and white and destructive.
One time a nasty little guy deliberately threw a swing in my face, on which my head had to be glued. I also have a hole in my face from when I tumbled off the couch. And one time we walk across the new construction site and I run right into a horizontal pipe, on which I also have to be stitched above my eye. During an adventure with a pedal car at an amusement park, the contents of my ankle come out through a hole (in my ankle, that is). I still don’t know how that hole got there, but that also had to be stitched. I also knock a piece of my teeth out during a game of hide-and-seek with a classmate behind a pillar. And I get glasses at age 10, which I really hate, and cap braces at age 12. I’m already not popular, but in those days it really kills your image, if I cared at all. Fortunately, nowadays it’s very different.
Every morning, when school is out, I ride my bike home. Usually separate from my sister, because she usually didn’t want me to follow her. She was very fond of her independence. If she was a little later than me getting home, I would sit at home worried, wondering what happened to her. Whether she didn’t have an accident. I was very afraid of something happening to her, and she was worried about me often. Usually I filled up the time a little by going to visit my grandmother. Then I always got some candy. Grandma was really a safe haven. She was always so sweet. Grandpa could be sweet too, and tell dirty jokes, but he was a bit aggressive at times, and never really felt well, also because of his diabetes and leaky heart valve. Then he would shout through the house, “I ain’t worth a thing!!!” I always ran for him to pour his drink. I liked that! My mother did have positive stories about him, that he really stood up for her at her school when she was young, but she also had negative stories, when he just spanked her out of the blue, as a child. So things didn’t sit well there either. Some people think spanking is part of parenting, but there are always moderate ways you can bring out your strength, which have the same effect, but in the process do NOT damage. But you have to have learned that as a parent. Anyway, I drew mostly to my grandmother because she was so sweet. We also regularly went to sleep at grandma and grandpa’s place. Grandma would always come and say a prayer when we were already in bed. I always looked forward to that, because it felt so safe. Especially the evenings when we had done fun things, such as going to the local fair, and then lying in your bed and hearing the sounds of the fair in the background, were wonderful. But also the Sunday mornings, when we were having coffee with the family at grandpa and grandma’s and grandma would fill us up with all kinds of delicious things. With grandpa, we sometimes recorded ourselves on the tape recorder. We still have recordings of that. Grandpa was always very critical of the recording quality and would unscrew the entire tape recorder or microphones if there was a hum in the recording. Sometimes he couldn’t get them back together. He also recorded my parents’ choir when they had a concert, something I later did sometimes too. Later I got an old tape recorder from him, which I used to record. And I also recorded a lot on the cassette recorder, for example, reading a fairy tale book aloud. Unfortunately, that recording had become so bad after all this time that I could not digitize it in time.
My brother, sister and I all three take music lessons. Anton takes organ lessons, and Lauren and I do an GME (General Music Education) course with Mrs. Meeren. We learn with a recorder, and also sing a lot. At the end of the course, Mrs. Meeren asks what instrument we want to play next. I say I want to play drums. But my sister wants to continue with recorder, which Mrs. Meeren finds strange. However, the recorder is just a normal instrument, only it suffers from an incredibly negative image, because it is so raped by beginning musicians at, well, those same GME lessons. But just look up professional recorder players like the Amsterdam Loeki Stardust Quartet or someone like Lucie Horsch and you will see that it is a serious instrument, that there are very expensive versions of it, and that it is not easy, but very difficult to play it beautifully. Despite Mrs. Meeren’s negative opinion, my sister still wants to take recorder lessons. I don’t dare to stand on my own and choose percussion, also because I am afraid to undertake something on my own, something my parents again don’t notice, and I join my sister in recorder lessons. It would be quite a fight against people’s prejudices, a lot of shame, being made a fool of, making a fool of myself at times, but also great performances and concerts. My sister is tough and doesn’t care about the prejudice. But I have more trouble with it, especially because I am a boy, and recorder for a boy is seen as weird by people with their preprogrammed opinions. They are mostly just sheep who listen to wolves and think that men should only play tough instruments (how little freedom and choice do you have then?), a thought I had in me myself, of course, and which was actually my first choice, because I was well aware of it, and deep down I wanted to prove to everyone that I could also be tough or aggressive. But here again I undermined my self-confidence and chose the hard way, which was about softness, which by the way doesn’t have to be a hard way for everyone, but for me it was.
Unpleasant things happen regularly at school, which always give me the same feelings and beliefs. One time one of my classmates gets some rather obvious karma. What happened, I have forgotten. But somehow he was acting nasty and then something happened. I said, “God punishes right away!” to which they all started laughing at me. Because God, that is not something most kids of that time grew up with, even if it was a Catholic school we were in. Also, one time we were playing sports, and I had to hit a softball with a softball bat. I lashed out, accidentally hitting a popular girl in the class, to which everyone thought I had done it on purpose. The reason why they thought that, I don’t know. But I was apparently again the guy who damages another, something I was just terribly afraid of. And invariably I end up in such situations again, although most times it happens accidentally. Only with boys does it happen that I do things on purpose, but only when I am very afraid of them. It also often happens that I demolish objects I get my hands on. Again by accident, never on purpose. It is clear that I have horrendous aggression on the surface, which I am not aware of, and which, because of all the events at home and at school, I am turning more and more towards myself.
Occasionally I go to play with boys in class, but I never dare to indicate what I want to do. A classmate from a lower class (it was a combination class) had a nice computer at home, and I was looking forward to playing computer games, but he had had a nightmare the previous night, and according to his mother it was because of too much computer use, so then we had to go play with the lego, which I didn’t like. I was bored out of my mind that afternoon, but it’s laughable in retrospect. Also, a boy from a lower class was being bullied, and I felt sympathy for him, so I offered to come play with him. He played DuckTales all afternoon, and I asked 10 times, but he never let me have a turn. So cool, too! But don’t think I set a boundary or got angry. I also wanted to play with someone once, who knew a lot about technology and electronics, and I was hoping we would experiment with that, but we ended up spending all afternoon playing on a sand hill, which I didn’t like. Again, I didn’t indicate what I wanted. In short, when I went to play with classmates, it was often not really a success. And I didn’t feel any friendship at all. Only in retrospect do you see your own part in this.
In eighth grade we were studying for the farewell musical with the class. There was a solo that had to be sung by someone, but no one wanted to and several boys made an attempt, but it didn’t work out. Then it was my turn, and I did really well. But yes, again in my own way. Very gentle! And in a then high-pitched voice! My parents were super proud of me after the performance in a small theater, but I couldn’t feel the same pride. No, I felt “different” again as usual. Fortunately, I received a compliment from a classmate, a girl. She had really liked it and she said I did much better than someone else in the class who failed. Of course, I always had a brother above me who could do everything much better than me, so that I was doing better than another boy and a girl saw that, yes, I grew from that. I was also in the local children’s choir then, along with my brother and sister. My brother did the organ, and my sister and I, along with the many other kids, usually sang at church services, led by my brother’s organ teacher. What motivated me to continue with this, again, were all the cute girls who were in the choir. Actually quite normal for a boy, but again I didn’t really make much contact, and it mostly played out inside me. Gentleness does not have to be a problem, although it is often mistaken for weakness. But it is absolutely not. There are gentle people who are very dangerous in their actions. Unfortunately with me it combined with great vulnerability and a lot of fear. And because of that, I did come across as weak most of the time, and I was very aware of that.
During church services, I sometimes help the pastor during masses, so-called “altar serving”. I was already not cool, but again, this was something where I went straight against the opinion of the popular masses, and which continued for a long time. The pastor was just a bit of an odd duck. During one Mass I had to pee horribly, but I didn’t dare leave Mass and walk to the bathroom. In fact, I didn’t even know where the bathroom was. It bloody felt like giving away some kind of performance again, and yes, the show must go on. So I didn’t dare interrupt. I often suffered from that. Then I didn’t listen to physical signals and just kept going as long as someone else expected me to. When the Mass was over, the pastor asked me to blow out the candles at the back of the church. I walked over to the candles, and blew, and then I couldn’t hold it any longer, and felt the piss running down my legs. Well, totally ridiculous. I biked home with a detour, so I wouldn’t run into anyone in particular… Also, one time I had to altar serve with Lauren. We got into an argument when we had to grab the water bowl, where the pastor could wash his hands for a while, in the middle of the service, and the water splashed over the edge, onto the floor stones, to the hilarity of the people in the church.
The year in grade 8 is actually a lot of fun! We get music lessons from Mr. Hans, who has the laughs, with his old-fashioned gestures do-re-mi. But he also uses the computer when making music. Something I was very interested in. At one point I ask if I can copy the program he uses, Cakewalk Pro Audio, from him, and I can, which allows me to use it on our computer. He tells me that you also need a sound card, to get sound out of it. On the 486 PC that we mostly use at that time, that’s not standard in it, as it is on the old Amiga’s, for example. He wrote down for me the brand and type of sound card he recommended, a Creative SoundBlaster AWE32, one of the better sound cards at the time. I had seen in various leaflets that it cost 549 Dutch guilders. And I nagged my parents for at least a year. If something cost 2000 guilders, I said, that’s about 4 sound cards. Finally, at the regional computer store, my parents heard that it did produce very nice sound. It played a midi file of the song Kayleigh by the progressive rock band Marillion, although I didn’t know that at the time. I was completely sold, and my parents bought the sound card, a very long card, which we could build ourselves into the PC we had at that time. The world of music that had opened up before with the program The Luxe Music on the Amiga opened up to me once again!
St. Nicholas did become the highlight of life at home. Until old age, we celebrated it. Even when we wouldn’t celebrate it, it happened that my parents still arranged presents as a surprise, which was very nice. We wrapped the presents one by one while the others watched, and that made it extra exciting, because sometimes there was an extra wrapping paper under the wrapping paper with a different name on it. Sometimes you were disappointed, and sometimes very surprised. It is one of the best memories of how my parents, especially my mother, arranged and handled things.
That year in grade 8, we do several other things outside of school with the class, such as bike rides with Mr. Janus, and we also go to camp. We also go to a war museum where I take pictures, which are very popular with some classmates, one of the few times I feel myself growing. I also put a sheet of paper in a candle during the class Christmas celebration, at which my sister shouts my name loudly and dramatically through the class! Furthermore, there are several class parties where people dance on house music and also slow dance. I didn’t like either, and usually just sat and watched others having the time of their lives. At the last class meeting where we got our reports, Mr. Janus said we were the nicest class he had ever had, but not the best! And that was true. For there were very few really annoying people in our class, something he had much more experience with in other classes. At the farewell, in front of all the parents and children, he did criticize my sister, which made no sense at all. And then he whispered in her ear, “But I know you mean well!” Yeah, say that out loud then as well! It was nauseating and my sister was really upset about it, because she took it in as very black and white. It was a stain on the farewell, especially for her. Another farewell party followed, where the class actually said goodbye to each other very harmoniously. Even though I had had the occasional altercation with one of my classmates, he too simply gave me a hug when saying goodbye. And I always appreciated that. Because I wanted nothing but harmony.
