no band
Jordi Filali (34) has been allowed to see his son for three months. He is happy that, almost three years after birth, he is finally getting the recognition he hoped for, but the sadness remains. “We share no history together and I don’t feel like the father of this boy at the moment,” says Jordi. “I was not allowed to be at the birth and two days later I was only allowed to see him under supervision once. It is very hard to realize that I have no connection with my son.” It was immediately clear to Jordi when he heard that he would become a father: he wanted to divide parenthood equally. The mother opposed that and a long lawsuit followed. “All this time I felt powerless. I couldn’t do anything, just wait and hope.”
Project Sidelines
For Kim Erkens (38), initiator of the online project Sidelines that will be launched just before Father’s Day, it was difficult to see her good friend Jordi struggle. Kim and Jordi met about ten years ago at the Rock Academy and were in a band together for years. “I felt powerless as a friend. We live quite far apart and mainly had telephone contact during the period when Jordi was fighting for a visitation arrangement with his son. Of course I tried to ask the right questions and especially to listen to him carefully, but I couldn’t do more.”
Risk
When Jordi asked her to write lyrics to music he had made for a school assignment, Kim knew what to do. She had to do something with his story. “Because that is very personal and sensitive, I took quite a risk. Of course, he could also have thought, “What the hell have you done with my story?” Fortunately, the opposite turned out to be true. He heard it for the first time and immediately said: ‘How nice that you can put my feelings into words’. That got Kim thinking. Jordi is not the only man in her environment in this situation. It is estimated that 80,000 fathers (and 16,000 mothers) in the Netherlands do not see their own children (unwanted). What if she could expand on this and give more rejected fathers the opportunity to use music to express their emotions? The Sidelines project was a fact: a website with portrait photos of fathers and a music track that they made themselves.
Out of the shadows
“Some of them are professional musicians, others amateurs,” Kim says. “They were allowed to do it as they wished. Most fathers started working on their own, because it is of course very personal, but mutual collaborations also developed. That was nice to see. With this project I want to bring out the shadows of rejected fatherhood and give these men a voice.” “Although some of them have little or no contact with their child, they are all proud fathers. Unlike most women, many men are not used to expressing their feelings among themselves. They don’t give space to their emotions and often bottle up their frustrations. I noticed that in conversations with Jordi, but also with other men in the same situation. By combining their emotions in a song, they are better able to give them a place.”
Debt
Kim deliberately wants to stay away from the question of guilt. “Although I think it is unfair that fathers are often automatically placed in a perpetrator role, that is not what this project is about. It’s about what they feel and experience, not about fighting a battle through music.” Jordi addresses his son in his track. “I describe in my issue: ‘Every day I wonder how you are, who you are, what you are’. I express my powerlessness, my despondency. For three years I wondered what kind of person he would be and now that I have a visitation arrangement, that is basically unchanged. I still barely have a picture of him and I still have a mountain of questions that I can’t answer for the time being. Because I don’t have a bond with him yet and notice that he really doesn’t see me as a father, it still hurts every time I see him. We need to get to know each other better first and I hope we can do that.” “The fact that Kim pays attention to rejected fathers with this project has meant a lot to me. It is important to show this side of the story: that we are fighting for parenthood, but also fighting the sadness and powerlessness that comes with it.”
Listening ear
Erkens: “It was quite intense to work on this. I really had to make sure that I kept enough distance, but at the same time I could offer a listening ear. It’s not a mild subject, it’s such a determinant in the lives of the men I worked with. I hope other fathers who have been rejected by Sidelines see that they are not alone. That the music of fellow sufferers offers them comfort, that would be nice.”
Look for the project at sidelinesmusic.nl