About me
My arrival in this world was somewhat unexpected, or to be honest, undesired. My poor mother was told that as long as she breastfed her firstborn, she would not be able to get pregnant. But there I was, only 5 months after she became a mother for the first time at the age of twenty. Later, she admitted rather guiltily to me that she religiously jumped off stairs, chairs, and tables in the hope it would all come to nothing, but I was as tenacious then as I am now and was born almost 61 years ago in the Netherlands.
My early years were spent on a relatively arid, lovely Caribbean island off the coast of Venezuela. As one can only do that much swimming and lounging about- there was not much else to do in Curacao those days-, I became an avid reader at the precocious age of 5 and have never stopped since. Reading is so essential to me that I will read the labels on vegetable tins if there is nothing else around.
Luckily, my father encouraged me and got me a pass to the enormous library of the local monastery. It was like heaven. I still remember the musty smell of old books and collections of magazines with titles like The Good Roman Catholic Family and Libelle. The latter being a ladies’ journal, I do not know what it was doing in the monastery library. My favourite books were the complete set of Dickens’ stories, all in leather with the original drawings. I even read an Encyclopaedia, which in those days only consisted of 6 volumes. When I tell this to my sons, they look at me with tremendous pity.
At thirteen, I started my Diary and stopped in my mid-thirties when I enrolled in a creative writing course in England. It was one of the best courses I’ve ever followed. The students of that class enjoyed each other’s company and that of the teacher so much that they started a reading circle the following year. Thinking about writing techniques made it a lot more daunting than I thought it was. Since then, I have written some short stories and poems and made a start with a few novels, but never got further than chapter one.
When I turned fifteen, we went back to the Netherlands so my brothers and I could go on to higher education and because my mother finally put her foot down and said she wanted to live closer to her mother and five sisters. She was now pregnant with baby number four, yet another surprise! This time, there was no jumping involved.
Going from a sleepy, somewhat backwards island to Holland in the Sixties was a shock to the system, but not an unpleasant one. I soon became a rebellious teenager from hell for my poor parents. I dropped out of University, joined a commune, and generally misbehaved, but was having a great time doing it.
When I was twenty-one, my father went into a coma after a massive stroke. I turned a new leaf, had a permanent job, and tried to support my mother in raising my youngest brother. Because of the age difference and my mother already having had the pleasure of raising three children, she left his care for a significant part to me since he was born. Until today, although he is a father of two himself now, I still feel more like his adopted mum than his sister.
Ten years after this life-changing event, my father died, only to be followed by my mother two years later.
Soon after that, I got married and started a family.
For over 40 years, I have worked in and around hospitals in various roles and am now retiring. My sons have both left home, so I thought it would be nice to finally try my hand at finishing that novel.
The books I like to read now are either historical novels or science fiction and fantasy. When younger, I preferred books about feminism or real-life stories. Maybe now that I am getting older, I am more in need of escapism, either to the future or to the past.
Naturally, I would like to be published and become filthy rich, but to be honest, I would already see it as a minor miracle if I could just finish something the size of a novel. After reading several books about writing and listening to interviews with writers, I got this nasty feeling that it would just be a lot of hard work and getting on with it. This is where my tenacity will hopefully come in handy.
