Girls can be dragons of adolescents. With a lot of bombing, hitting doors and gross words. Marlies van Weert (38) from Eindhoven admits: she really wasn’t easy. “But I am his only daughter,” she says about her father. And that she finally made up for him turned out to have been a very good choice. Especially now that she has to miss him.
“As a teenager I was a bit tricky,” says Marlies. She had her so much like so many girls of that age. In a bubble against the rest of the crazy world. A bit misunderstood, a bit in trouble with yourself. And especially your parents often learn that.
Her mother sometimes had a lot to endure, but father Frans was not always spared either. “I had my own life and my own opinion, but often it was not about anything. That I no longer wanted to go on holiday with my father, for example.”
But in the meantime she always had to call her father if there was something. Quarrel with Mom? Need a bike? Get a driver’s license? “Oh child, come here, I’ll get you,” he said. “
“Afterwards I think to myself: if only I did that differently.”
Yet they also had a lesser time, in which the two had no contact with each other. “By something trivial,” she admits. They both have a learning disadvantage, so that things sometimes come in a little differently. “He didn’t understand what was going through me,” says Marlies. “I think I could stand a little more independently on my own two feet than he. But afterwards I think to myself: if only I had done that differently.”
That’s how it often goes, with wisdom afterwards. Eventually Frans’s twin brother decided to lend a hand. “He then gave my contact details to my father, without knowing it,” says Marlies. “Then we had a good conversation and picked up the thread again. I will remain his only daughter.”
We cannot determine how the wind in life sometimes blows. Just like you can’t choose your family. Or your genes. Maybe you get blue eyes, black hair, you have freckles or the same crooked pinks as your father. But for Marlies, that inheritance was, among other things, a learning delay.
“We never talked about it that way,” she replies to the question if she was also feeling a sort of connection with her father. “I didn’t notice it that much. Yes, the family had to do his finances and in recent years you noticed that he was a bit more confused. And he found devices like the TomTom difficult. But we were mainly talking about cows and calves.”
Marlies didn’t always find it easy to discuss things with her father because she was afraid he would worry. But they found their way in that. It was good. “We called every day. He was not only my father, but also a kind of friend.”
“Goddamn, Dad had gotten that, I thought then.”
They found each other in music. “Abba, Tom Jones, Elton John, but especially Elvis. That was his idol. Music was his life,” says Marlies. That makes it extra special that after his death in 2019, without realizing it, they are the song in one breath I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You learned from her head. On her new instrument: the saxophone. “Goddamn it, Dad would have been given that, I thought then. Then he would have been super proud.”
They shared the same love for Efteling. Frans was crazy about roller coasters. “The harder, the rather,” laughs Marlies. In the meantime she has a subscription to the park herself and she often thinks about him when she walks around. She would have liked him so badly with her. “I think it is such a shame that my father did not get that I was still in the baron, even though I thought it was so scary for years. Even then he would have been very proud of me anyway. He was really a proud father. And I his only girl.”
Frans van Weert died on July 4, 2019 from the effects of lymph node cancer. He turned 69.