I have a video of Willem and I sitting in the car after the ultrasound and he calls his father in Den Bosch to tell him that he is having his first granddaughter. “Our dad”, Willem sighs, “it’s a girl.” His father is silent, Willem is sobbing and says “I can’t stop crying”. There is an ‘oh boy’, from his father, a few times bewildered ‘oh Willem’, and a whispered ‘great’, and then Willem hits the steering wheel softly a few times to grab himself together. “Okay,” he says suddenly, firmly. “Dad, you have to remember that none of it matters.”
But in a family with an old father, a mother who died too young, three sons and seven grandsons, that one girl does make a difference. In fact, it was the first thing Willem brought up, at the bar, as he firmly placed his glass next to mine. The abundance of men and the dead mother, then only a short time away. And how she always laughingly said that he would have five daughters “because that is your punishment”.
In the months leading up to her arrival, I watched him, as all parents-to-be do, try everything. His avowed aversion to fathers who blow that they will protect their little princess from all men. His own intention to call his sons and daughter all ham steaks and bags of fries, without distinction.
The tiny mille fleur dress he brought home and held pensively in his trembling fists, muttering that he really didn’t want her to end up wearing just “stuff with ruffles.”
But while he was overcome with happiness, as the pregnancy progressed, my heart grew colder and colder. In myself, my mother, my friends, I see how complicated the relationships between mothers and daughters are. Almost without exception there is misunderstanding between the generations, unprocessed anger and sadness, breaches of trust and other time-consuming squabbles. As if the option ‘securely attached, full of support and understanding for each other’ simply doesn’t exist, forget it women, you will suffer.
In the last few weeks before her arrival, I had become so afraid that I would disappoint her, or be unable to love her as uncomplicatedly as I loved my sons, that all I could do was sit cross-legged on the bed, brooding.
But children won’t be stopped and that’s how she got up quatorze juillet born, little Cléo, the biggest baby of the three. And from her entrance I have been completely overwhelmed by her.
Cléo with her domineering look, her long brown curls, her corporeal smile, her chubby cheeks, her resolute ‘no’, her long eyelashes, her bulging belly forward.
I am so proud when she, with her father’s cross feet, stomps to the kitchen to demand gingerbread in a shrill voice. Or if, while her brothers linger on the plateau, she behaves without scruples heads first crashing down slides, her mouth a determined line, eyes serious and dark.
She is, I think, one force of nature. Very occasionally I see the adult version flashing through the larval fat. I admire that version immensely. I hope that later she will be bolder, braver and happier than me. I hope I don’t fall through the ice as a mother.
“It is a girl.”
No, it’s our Cleo.