I slept through my 40th prescription. There were times when I stayed awake until after twelve, even until the moment I was actually born, at kitchen tables and in pubs, nice and weird with wine. On those evenings I ran the hours after my start. The contractions caught at eight o’clock during the news. Around two o’clock I arrived, born in the parental bed, in the house where my mother still lives today.
The story of a birth – how you are born – is a first benchmark. I rehearse the stories of my children – in the bath, your father caught you – regularly in my head, because I know that you are trying to derive something – your character, your life course – from your arrival. “The midwife was still wearing her coat when I came out of it,” a sentence that I have often heard Willem say about his birth. Stormy, always hurry, maybe even somewhat impatient. It is true with him, just like my mother’s hours of contractions are right with me.
But I slept, because I am wise, and only woke up when my oldest son, 9 years old, started, came to get me. I looked at him, that beautiful boy, between tablecloth and napkin. Soft cheeks, but also shoulders that are already starting to become slightly wider. Someone who already understands a little bit of life, got up with his father an hour earlier to prepare the kitchen birthday.
Downstairs 100 balloons wobbled against the ceiling. There was 40 years on every balloon. The photo cake with 40 candles was on the table in complete lighter. The whipped cream was melted by all that violence, a bubbling white slurry, and flowed over the photo. “Very in your face, perhaps,” Willem muttered. I blew out the candles, we created the whipped cream soup of the cake, underneath a serious, very mature photo of me that Willem likes to call “absolute Susan Sontag-Class,” but half melted, so I looked like I was in total horror panic.
I wasn’t that. I was okay. A decade of three children, always getting tired, worked out, sometimes choking in all the injustice that young women are granted, battle with myself, struggle with the people around me, chaos in my head and in my house, exhausted ecstasy and deep sadness, my father died, my body was too big and time to get over, or the things would not be calmer. For a while. It just happened to me, I thought, that I am no longer so afraid of lurking disaster, that I can sometimes lean back a little and trust the things that come and go. “The art is to stay quietly on the riverbank until your enemies come by,” a smart man once told me. I had tried, but I am not suitable for it, too restless, too bad sometimes. But, I came in, while I saw my children eating their cake, I no longer have any enemies.
Then my mother called and told me that the women in our family only start the transition around the age of 54, so that was also good news.
The children had to go to school. They each tied a balloon on their bikes and went out of the street with their father. I closed the door, looked at the havoc and felt – against all expectations – born again.
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