My Conversion to becoming a Writer
At eight I was a devout little girl that swallowed hook-line-and-sinker what I was taught in my parents’ small congregation of ultra-Christians. By age 12 I had lost all belief in fairy tales including the bible. Until then, Jesus had seemed like a magician, who would give you everything you wanted, if you prayed long and hard—sort of like my favourite uncle. God, on the other hand, was more like a distant father who left the day-to-day business of dealing with the small stuff to Jesus, just like my dad did to my mom. I had never really understood the idea of the Holy Spirit and took it to be a back-up, who kept followers out of trouble after Jesus had gone to heaven, and who meant to inspire them to continue without the Man-God around. Children already believe in ghosts and fairies, so the resurrection of Jesus and an official Ghost doing ‘magic’ was not a stretch to us. How gullible one is as a child. I was always safe at night, but dutifully knelt by the bed anyway, citing the little rhyming prayer for protection, but believing in monsters I also looked under the bed before getting in.
The rules of not stealing and always telling the truth to my parents were easy. Until it wasn’t anymore. When all other kids in my neighbourhood went to the children’s movie—an annual presentation for the entry fee of one guilder—I stole the money from my mother’s purse. The film had not even started when she pulled me out of the audience in front of all the children in the hall and dragged me home. Grounded in my bedroom I cried loudly, convinced my mother treated me unfairly. She didn’t get that my belonging to the group was my ultimate need. I learned not to tell my parents about everything my friends and I were up to. If I stayed silent, it was as if nothing untoward had happened.
My peers taught me how to blend in and share. As the provider of the printing kit I got from a rich auntie, I was the would-be publisher of The Seven Star newspaper, its name in reference to a pentagram; we just liked that symbol. My veto on more kids joining the club led to my being ousted as an unfair dictator; they didn’t need my printing kit to be a club. I understood: might doesn’t make right. Duly chastised, I was allowed back into the club, a grateful child.
The verdict was still out whether the words of adults could be believed. That changed with the celebration of Saint Nicholas, for short Sinterklaas, when he came to visit with his helper at our home to hand out gifts on December 5th. I was getting more observant and the thought was taking hold that I had heard those voices before. Afterwards, I commented to my mom how much the voice of Sinterklaas’ helper, Black Pete, sounded like my brother’s. “Is that right? I hadn’t noticed,” she said. The next day I discovered in my parents’ bedroom the book of Sinterklaas, from which the bishop had read to us about the good things—and especially the bad things—everybody had perpetrated over the year. The old man had been shaking his head, and his hands shook too, just like my friend Phyllis’ father, who I now understand had Parkinson’s disease. Then the penny dropped. I ran downstairs and asked my mom: “Was Sinterklaas Mr. Klaassen? And Pete Gus?” She laughed. “What makes you think that?” I told her. She then admitted that Sint and Pete were not real and the charade was intended for creating funny gifts and writing cheeky rhymes for each other in this darkest time of the winter.
That episode started off my seven-year-old former self to becoming an independent thinker albeit in incremental steps. It was the start of my loss of trust in anything that sounded magical or miraculous. I started to scrutinise every statement of any adult and also stories in books, and definitively in the bible. I scrutinized the rules and started seeing the hypocrisy among people in our congregation. I noticed my parents’ thoughtless prejudices and easy judgments about people who were somehow different or who were not of our ‘class’. Jesus’ messages in the bible and what people within our congregation made of it in daily life were like day and night. I discovered two kinds of people: those who were kind—like Jesus—and those who just wanted to be part of the club. I wasn’t sure yet where I belonged. My road to conversion started with discovering that my parents can lie, and be unfair too.
As soon as I could read, I had started reading fiction under the covers with a flashlight after bedtime, reading everything I could get my hands on. Especially interesting were the books of my eldest sister—eight-years-older. I read Lady Chatterley’s Lover at ten years old. Angelique of the Angels gave me a great, but not realistic education about power exerted through her beauty and smarts, and through sex of course. Although sex education was the taboo then, I started to understand love, physical attraction, and the beauty of equality between the genders from books. The idealist in me was taking shape, in spite of observing my elder sisters going through their adolescence and my parents’ responses to it: extremely controlling, almost as bad as the father in the Rapunzel story. I only now understand that my parents’ need to control their children may have been their way of dealing with trauma, in the aftermath of having lived through the dangerous war years.
As I explored my own sexuality with a number of boyfriends, I got sidetracked and started failing in school at the same time. At my Christian high school, gender-discrimination of students was the norm in the 1960s. The worst of the faculty was my chemistry teacher, who demonstrated his bias by calling every girl simply ‘Dora’, but he loved the boys and knew them all by name. Girls were to get married anyway, so had no right to claim his time. As soon as I opened my mouth to chat with my neighbour, he would send me to the principal. My father met this teacher on accord of my low grade but wholeheartedly agreed with him that discipline was required, giving free rein to this misogynist to continue his practice, which leads ultimately to my week-long suspension from school for incorrigible behaviour—talking in class. The VP wanted to pray with me. I politely declined the favour. My parents never knew I had been suspended. Independent enough, I wrote my own letter to the principal. From then on, I started skipping school seriously, walking the fine line of school failure.
In my last year, I ended up with an interesting boyfriend, four years older than me, who was unemployed—a poet. The first time I can away from home was shortly after I went on the birth control pill. That godsent little pill had recently been introduced to the women in my country and was free for members of the Dutch Society for Sexual Reform. My mother had found the pill package in my room and went berserk. I became the proverbial adolescent running away from home under the influence of a ‘bad’ boyfriend. I did manage to graduate and left home that summer and moved to Amsterdam together with my unsuitable boyfriend.
As an adult with years of living behind me now, I participate responsibly in the society like everybody else. I still like the world of imagination very much, and I do miss the magic of believing. I have become obsessed most of all with acquiring factual information. I simply have to research the facts and must know what is going on in the world. I work hard to match my decisions to the facts, constantly checking my beliefs on its integrity by reading a number of newspapers and online news channels. My escape from all this reality is to write stories, making it all up: disasters and happy endings, all created from what is contained in this vast archive in my head.
As a child, I could believe in tales and I enjoyed imagining the worlds described in books. Writing fiction takes me back there. It allows me to take all I have learned, mix it up and create a new narrative and assign imaginary people with the roles that must be played as I designed them. I can use all of my gifts: two cultures on two different continents and several languages—the reason some friends have noticed that they cannot verify what I know. I have heard more than once: “You are making that up” when I related a fact. “How do you know that?” requires me to be accountable about what I know, and I gladly explain.
Writing became my new passion as I began writing stories in creative non-fiction about the people around me and their adventures. It opened the gate to sharing my world view. My first book was about that. After that bundle of short stories, I started to create fiction, “making it all up”. Before I could fall into the abyss of feeling useless after retirement, I was well on my way with my second novel. My third novel—a story about World War II—is now finished in two languages. I consider myself well on my way to becoming a novelist. Life is good. Creating is the life-giving force that allows me to live many lives, all within one lifetime.
