Tag: Family

A Fun Day

My passport is expiring soon and I was offered two choices; for a renewal, I could either go to the embassy in London or return to the Netherlands and do it at the airport. A quick investigations of those two options showed that doing it in the Netherlands was about three times as expensive, but it would afford me the opportunity to go and see my family, which I had not done since early December. So I booked two tickets, one to fly round trip to Amsterdam on the same day so I could submit the application, and a second for a weekend the next week in which I could pick it up. Today I went to submit the application.

I got up super early in the morning, drove to the airport, flew over and had a pretty smooth time submitting the application. The only snag was that the passport photos which I had made in England were not in the right format (despite the photographer assuring me that it would be valid for Dutch passports.) The lady who helped me apply told me that my photo was rejected because of my “cage fighter ear”, which I thought was funny. Luckily I could get new ones made at the airport, which took five minutes, and are actually better photos, despite getting very little sleep.

I took the train into Amsterdam, met Moulsari, my brother, his new girlfriend Kataryna, my friend Mounir, and Ruurd and my sister for a big, steak lunch. Had a blast. Ruurd and my sister dropped me off at the airport. The airport was quiet. I breeze through security. Flew back to England and drove home. I’m pretty tired, but I’m feeling good about it. It was such a fun day.

Next week I fly back on Thursday evening, pick up my new passport on Friday and fly home on Sunday. I’ll have a bit more time, and if it’s half as fun as today was, then it’s worth the time and effort.

Generational Trauma

When my mother got very ill in 2007 I spoke to hear a lot about family. She shared a lot of things with me that she had never shared before; about our family, about our heritage, about her upbringing, and some of the troubling things she had to endure. Some of the things she shared explained some of her very fundamental traits. What was remarkable is how aware she was of how the damage she sustained had influenced her attitudes and behaviours.

Life has not always been kind to my mother. Part of that unkindness was because my grandmother had been ill-equipped as a mother due to life being unkind to her. My grandmother did the best she could, given the post-world war circumstances she had to survive in. She made choices that, in hindsight were probably not the wisest, but she made them in order to survive. Stress makes your planning horizon shorter, and when the stress becomes institutionalised it turns into trauma, often locking you in that short term thinking. Her trauma impacted how she raised my mother the best she knew how, but like so many others who suffered trauma, could not keep herself from traumatising her daughter.

My mother’s life was not easy, but it was a hell of a lot easier than my grandmother’s. So the trauma, which was passed down from one generation to the other, became a little less. She was able to sooth some of the pain and heal some of the trauma and make better choices for herself. Better, but not always good. Her horizon expanded a little bit, when compared to my grandmother’s. She did the best hat she could in raising her children. She set me up with slightly less trauma, to make slightly better choices and therefore a slightly better life.

It is undeniable, however, that I have traits and display behaviours that are dysfunctional, which I can trace back to my mother’s dysfunctions, which in turn I can trace back to my grandmother’s dysfunctions, which in turn are linked to the things she had to do (the person she had to become) during the war. This is what I understand to be generational trauma. With a bit of luck you can diminish it with each generation, but if you are not that fortunate, you pass it along to, or even exacerbate it for the next generation.

Two weeks ago one of my friends, a person I have known for decades, made a heartless comment when we were discussing the Netherlands considering apologising for their role in the transatlantic slave trade. He mocked the idea that such a move would make any difference and cynically joked that he wanted an apology for WWII. At best he suggested that generational trauma does not exist, at worst he suggested that even if it did exist, he wasn’t suffering from it (which I doubt) and therefore nobody should be.

He’s well aware of me, my life and I’ve shared things with him about my family, their struggles and my own. His comments and callousness really hurt me and I’m not entirely sure what to do with that.

Family History: A Dream About My Mother

This morning I woke up from a very vivid dream. I had spent the day with my mother, going around Hoorn and visiting the sites. We talked about history, of the town, of our family and of ourselves. She filled in gaps, cleared up misunderstandings, put things in context and explained things that I was sometimes too young to understand. Then we had a meal together somewhere in the harbour of Hoorn. It was a good day.

There are so many things that are unclear about our family, about our origin, about the feuds and the fights and about everything which has had an incredible impact on my personality. So much understanding has been lost regarding the generational trauma which has been passed down. Gypsies, Jews, the war, Rotterdam, Katendrecht, poverty, Hoorn, a big family, a secret, second family, physical abuse, sexual abuse, death…

It’s unfortunate that I don’t have the relationship with the few remaining family members of my mother’s generation where I can go to have conversations about some of the things which have happened during my childhood and what caused them. I miss having someone who can augment, correct, corroborate and validate some of the history; like a tribal elder.

It’s a Meijer Thing

Years ago, Eva sent me a t-shirt that said “It’s a Meijer Thing, You Wouldn’t Understand”, which was brilliant, for obvious reasons. It was something like this one:

And today I came across an even better one which reads; “I Can’t Keep Calm, I’m a Meijer”, which is fantastic!