Sunday Brunch
Dry Bone And The Marrow Of It All...
Lee & Lee and a tree
I’ve been away. A kind of “hiatus” where I fell off the face of the earth. Sort of. For the past weeks I’ve been staying at the house where family history lurks in every corner. The kind of place where stories breathe through the generations, the passing of time marked by the loss of a generation and each birth starting a new chapter.
I came to rest. I came to play. I left contented.
HANGING OUT IN REEK
We’ve been sitting on stoops chatting, swinging on gates, and bouncing on trampolines. We’ve been singing. Rebecca, her voice pure and bright, mesmerising my dog Stella with her Dutch rendition of Angel of Mine, and moving me to tears with it. I taught all the kids (5 in total here: Otis, Leah, Roan, Rebecca, and Amber) the personal anthems I created over the years for my three pets. It took about a week to learn them by heart.
Roan, at three years old, announced that he is ready to be four now. School is coming and he’s ready. Besides, he has been three for aaaaaaaggges so it is about bloody time.
Roan invents his own grammar, stacking tense upon tense until the world stretches out around us with infinite possibility: wisheded, wented.
“Oh there you are! I wented looking for you everywhere!!!”
We’re learning patience, reciprocity. The art of a two-way conversation. The hard lesson of waiting your turn. How disappointment stings not from entitlement but from the sheer excitement of life’s offerings. There is so much to look forward to, even if it doesn’t always pan out exactly as you wanted. Resilience is key.
And there, too, are the contradictions that make us so human. Joy and sorrow braided into a single moment. The logistics of coming and going. The grandparents arrive, and the aunt prepares to leave. Roan has a hard time wrapping his head around these events being inextricably linked.
“I wisheded you would stay too.”
Me too, darling boy, and thank you for making me fall in love with you all, in love with being “aunty Lee”.
My aunt’s gravestone and the flowers I brought from the garden
FAMILY HISTORY
The kids are the fourth generation to live in this house. It was my grandparents’ final residence. It is also where my aunt died. The last time I saw her was when I visited the oncology ward at the hospital in Nijmegen, together with my brother. When leaving we asked: “Is there anything we can do for you?” She answered with, not now but later. Later never came.
It is family clan that comes with complex family systems. I have often joked it is like the mafia, but without guns. Not entirely harmless, though. But that’s a story for another time. Suffices to say that the harmony model demands too much sacrifice and does not always serve us all…
I thought about my previous observation, here on Substack notes a while back, and how it hurt to know that the most painful part of my personal history is not integrated into the collective family narrative. For me it means that the family ties have in part become undone. The house in Reek has that same legacy vibe of the shared French holiday home in le Chataignier. The place where I could not make new memories. It was haunted by stubborn old ghosts.
The last time I went there was for the other cousin’s wedding. The tears in my aunt’s eyes because she got it. She knew what it meant and what it took for me to be there. Not needing to say a word, she knew.
It is time to let it be. In Reek we are writing new stories, now.
Time to print this on a T-shirt
WHAT IS NEW AND WHAT IS NEXT
Being with the kids, baking brownies and bouncing around, brought me closer to myself. More in tune with the waxing and waning of my energy levels, more aware of what matters to me. What I want my life to look like.
Had a great conversation with dad about it yesterday (it was off to a funky start but then we dove into the deep end without a safety harness). In need space and I need safety. I have not yet succeeded in creating a home for myself, but I am not giving up on that. During my two week study stint under the mentorship of Mirella (my former death doula) that topic came up once or twice too. “What if that theme is not going to be resolved in this lifetime, can you accept it”. As I am not patient enough to wait for my personal palace until the next round in the soul soup, I would rather tackle it this time around…
Safety and space are top priority. I have now experimented enough with PTSD inducing experiences. I am over this.
I write. Always and everywhere. This needs nothing. Just me, pen and paper or any digital device I can type on. Easy peasy.
The therapist perspective: Before cancer round 2 I had the following reasoning… generating an income is part of this life (for argument sake I am ignoring all the alternative routes that won’t require this…) and I want to generate it in a meaningful way. I do not want it on my grave stone: she was excellent at SEO. Besides, AI will step in soon anyway, making that part of any future career path redundant. My copywriting days are officially behind me (really officially as I am no longer registered as such at the Chamber of Commerce and will have to apply for a new VAT number when I start my counselling practice).
Live long or short, any speculation on the duration of my life does not seem to impact the course I wish it to take.
How do I make a plan, though? How do I decide on what is next? When I don’t know what will be, body wise? The next MRI scan is looming, sometime around May or June. Good old scanxiety is seeping in through the cracks. As I said to a friend “it is starting to take on a Damocles shape” again.
All the symptoms that alerted me to cancer the first time around, intense fatigue, brain fog, bleeding gums, and a hint of apathy, show up now on and off. I hope the being out of breath is due to allergies. That the lack of strength is down to the lingering burnout from last year. But it scares me.
Anyway. I’ve been experiencing a shift in how I connect with the world around me, and it’s been a bit quieter. That was not just me jumping on the trampoline and baking brownies. I’m learning how to adjust, how to preserve my energy in a way that serves me rather than spread it thin. Which I have done so often in the past.
I am on a different plain and need to get the lay of the land here first, explore on my own. I still find magic in the mundane, cherish the little things… but I need to reconfigure, recalibrate… I am shedding old skin…
National pride my ass: celebratory pants for upcoming King’s day
THESE SILLY LITTLE LOWLANDS
As much as I love spending time with friends and family, if I had a million euros, would I want to buy a house here? It helps to occasionally adopt an “if anything is possible” approach to open up one’s mind. Especially when experiencing some fears that I may end up as “the lady in the van” (no offence to the formidable late Maggie Smith). The answer is nope. The price - quality equation here does not add up for me.
It does for many others, hence the housing shortage. So much so that people are going through ridiculous lengths to buy a house. I celebrated my return to reading the newspaper (which I have just as swiftly removed from my daily do to do list) with an article on “buyers’ letters”. The same way you have to write a personal essay to get into a prestigious university in the US, you now have to sing all the praises of the house, the seller and yourself, all testifying of a perfect match, to be considered as a prospective buyer. I think here I could repeat the FUCK OFF banner from the previous paragraph…
Watching the news is also not something I will be spending any more time on in the foreseeable future. When I heard that research has shown increasingly more men are afraid of being falsely accused of sexual misconduct, I almost barfed. Really? That is what you guys are taking away from the current climate, that started let’s say with #metoo, blew up with Madame Pelicot and is now being fuelled by MAGA men misogyny. Ehmmmm. Interesting.
WASTING TIME
Another master class in misogyny can be found in Van der Pump Rules. For reasons I cannot yet explain, as opposed to the evening news, I did keep watching this. All the way up to season seven, when I was saved by Hayu not being available on my billing address. Otherwise I may have still be binge watching it, drinking rose (monkey see, monkey do) and there would not be a Sunday Brunch, or any books.
Lisa van der Pump, her husband Ken and their ever expanding pack of pups were my favourite characters on the real House Wives of Beverly Hills. Lisa seemed the most grounded and level headed of the bunch (not a hard thing to do considering who the other cast members were), but it was mostly her dry British wit that won me over.
Over the course of six seasons of VanderPump Rules something else crept in. The boys, Jax and the TomToms, are man children at best (with Tom Schwartz slowly regressing into more of a man baby), misogynistic asses at their worst. Stassi is the epitome of the mean girl who never outgrows the high school playground. Katie seems to be spending most of her time in denial, that is until tequila Katie takes over and all that shit that got buried deep deep down, fights it way to the surface with a vengeance. And then there is Kirsten. If there ever was a character arc suited for a case study in the “sexy but psycho” trope, it is Miss Doute. Lisa’s in her expert manipulation manages to keep pouring oil on the fire, but always leaves the burning buildings completely unscathed. Skillful, yes. Sympathetic, not so much.
One thing Lisa says still rings true:
If you brush too much under the carpet you end up with a very wobbly floor….
BEST FOOT FORWARD…
And now—back to the page. The first Sunday Brunch in a good long while. I may not have spent the past weeks working the way I had intended, it was in all aspects time well spent. Not just soaking up the sparks of the kids but coming home to myself in a way I hadn’t done in a long time.
I have a habit of doing things for others when maybe I need to do something for myself first. I am no martyr, nor a saint, it is just out of habit, out of conditioning.
I did that the first time I wanted to move to Romania in 2011, working on setting up a women’s shelter, before organizing a decent shelter for myself. I did it when I had cancer, raising funds to buy a friend a house in 2014, when I had no possessions in my own name. I was on the verge of doing it again now, opening a therapy practice before taking care of myself properly first.
I continue to study, learn and develop, but taking on clients is on the back burner. Books first.
I’m rewriting All Day a Good Day. Not because the first version was untrue, but because time has widened the view. Because the memory isn’t static. Because grief and grace have given me a new language. Because, strangely enough, I’m writing the first cancer story again, while living, possibly, the second. It is a bizarre filter to look back on those years (2011-2015), which even though it culminated in what we then saw as a spontaneous remission, I for a long time considered the most cruel chapter of my life.
Here we go again. But this time, it’s part of a trilogy. Last July, after fleeing from Valea Zalanului, I started working on No Dogs No Gipsies, in the safety of my friends’ house in Luna. In Timisoara I stopped licking my wounds and sought temporary relief in fiction. Then I resolutely shelved it all when I went to the hospital last October.
Regurgitating the trauma did not seem a healthy choice at the time. I don’t know why I feel ready now but I have started another project on Scrivener for it, adding all scene by scene. It will be second instalment for the trilogy. A friend left a comment on No Dogs the other day and it has got me thinking… “It would do you good to go back, stay there or say goodbye…”.
I think the third and last part of this book series will be the apotheosis of it all, leading up to the “therapeutic” value of what I have lived and learned, from personal experience and the knowledge of others. Even if putting it all into practice will have to wait a little longer.
In the coming weeks, I’ll share moments from the rewrite. Not chapters or drafts (not yet), but reflections, threads, and little echoes. A way to walk beside the story as it takes shape again. This time truer, deeper, more whole. Until I have returned to the wholeness of me…
Excerpt from Chapter 10:
Tuscany 2013, receiving the message my friend from the Secret Sarcoma Society has passed away from a sarcoma recurrence…
There is no place to light a candle anywhere, but I do pick up a few little prayer cards. Back at my writing table, looking over the hill I cry. It is not survivors guilt that I feel, but I do feel the urge to take it all in. Fear sucks the marrow from life, it strips joy and leaves it bone dry. You cannot live ruled by fear, but it does stop me from taking anything for granted.
THE LAST WORD (FOR NOW)
Doing the memoir trilogy first, before being of service to others, is me claiming my time, my space, and my energy, all devoted to my story. Because it is worth telling. It is brutal, baffling, and beautiful.
Don’t just suck out the marrow.
Boil the bone.
XXL
Waking up in a sweat in the middle of the night, this morning I wrote something of an encore to this brunch. Read it HERE.