My Head on Your Belly

Listen to your heartbeat and feel that it is, alive. Yes, it hurts me, don't want to think about it how it would be to become father again. I would love you and lay my head on your belly for days. Nothing else, darling. 

Haven't touched a woman for 15 years, you're just too sensitive now. Just leave me alone for a while, have no other desire than to become your husband. Just be with you the way I am. Find it difficult to surrender myself, as I have lived alone for so long without love and affection.

Just my head in your lap, close my eyes, then I look deep inside, how my life has gone, how it is possible that I ended up with you, whom I love so much. That feels warm and familiar and pales my bitter cold when I think about the previous missed opportunities to enter into an honest and sincere relationship in good faith.

Not that I have entered into many relationships, more the fact that it was not given to me to continue living with them and to grow old together happily. The love and attachment. About happiness, but also together with the one you were with, the deep valleys of the darkness of overcoming together where we could find the light of connection again.

It is not easy to leave the life of the woman with whom I fathered two children, after a relationship of 20 years, of which 15 years of marriage after my children were born before our marriage. The church was probably not happy about it. At the time that we moved into our first house, a flat on the 4th floor in Presikhaaf Arnhem, I received several letters asking if I would like to return and received invitations to the Holy Mass in the church where I was adopted as a little boy.

My ex and I actually didn't like it at all, and we ignored love and the church and kept faith as such out of our lives. My children were not baptized and adopted, as my parents were.

My brother and sister were all raised Catholic, just like me. I can still remember the celebration surrounding my adopted status in the Roman Catholic Church very well. Both the church service and cohesion. And in the afternoon the big party that my parents had organized. It was in the month of May before Easter and the entire Hol family was present in the garden, which my father had prepared all winter and spring. All the tulips and daffodils were in bloom.

The Rikken family, my mother's side, was only present briefly. My mother was actually one of the few in a family of nine children who had adopted Roman Catholic doctrine. It was a wonderfully beautiful day and in the garden of the house, at Fokkenoordhofstraat 44. where my parents moved after my birth, on the Klerendalseweg in Arnhem, directly opposite the Menno van Coehoorn Barracks, fortunately had a very large, deep, elongated garden.

My favourite aunt from Amsterdam was there, together with Uncle Jan. A brother of my father. They were my godparents. I liked to go there as a child and with aunt Lily I experienced the old Amsterdam as a child. The flea market on the Rembrandtplein or the Waterlooplein near the Station. Together we looked at the city and tasted it, and then we went to the Dam to eat an ice cream.

Uncle Jan was always working and ran a Gal en Gal liquor store and then came home in the evening. Aunt Lily and Uncle Jan were wonderful people. Aunt Lily always made my favourite food, boiled kohlrabi with a porridge. They had not been able to have children themselves, and I think I was the child they missed so much. When I was there, it was always a party, and we went everywhere. In the summer, Aunt Lily and I often took the train to Zandvoort together and lay in the sun or strolled along the boulevard.

I was little dicky and could do no wrong to them. These are perhaps the most valuable memories I have when it comes to my dearest family. Aunt Lily and Uncle Jan also had a friend who often visited them. Peter and I looked up to him. Graduated from the University of Amsterdam, something with the Dutch language area as a field of study, Wow. I thought that was great, but as a child I didn't think I would ever be able to achieve that because I had failed in the 5th grade of primary school in the summer of the year ... let's see

Sometimes Aunt Lily or in the evening with Uncle Jan in his car, we would drive to the mansion somewhere on the Prinsengracht, where he lived in a flat. It was like a library to me, so many books he owned.

I never saw or spoke to Peter again later. The last thing I heard was when my father had an argument with him after Uncle Jan's death, my father was the first beneficiary and Peter wanted to tow Uncle Jan's car out of the estate. My dearest Aunt Lily had already passed away two years earlier. She was completely cancerous and had only had a very short illness. Bang, gone just like that, Doc.

When I heard it my heart broke and fell into a deep hole. I thought, how is that possible, Aunt Lily had never been ill before and was a wonderful woman full of zest for life with a wide circle of friends. They were also acquaintances of Henk van der Meijde. They did go there for a weekend when Henk had some friends over.

My aunt Lily and Uncle Jan were simple, but hard-working people and lived for decades in a 4-floor flat in Amsterdam East against the motorway that later became the ring road. Yes, it was a wonderful time to be in Amsterdam as a child. Away from my mother who abused me and the sadness I still have about it now.

Just try to tell me honestly what my childhood was like now and put it in the barrel on your chest. Let me be, it feels painful yes, such sweet and warm, sincere people who were actually the dearest to me of all my family members. My cousin Charles, a child of a sister of my father, must have known Peter too. Charles also often visited aunt Lily and Uncle Jan.

I don't really know what became of him, what I do know is that my father and I sometimes drove to Prinsenbeek where the family of my father's sister lived. My father then tended the garden at Uncle Piet and Aunt Marie. They had 3 children besides Charles, the oldest was a Peter who I knew briefly as a nephew, and a daughter Lilianne who unfortunately committed suicide because she could no longer bear the shame of the debts. She, like me, could never talk to anyone about it.

I left without leaving a single word in 2007 and survived. But my dear niece Lilian died due to debt problems that if she had talked could have prevented her from ending her life so tragically at a much too young age.

It was a very tragic circumstance in the family and I wished the parents, my aunt Marie of Lilian and Uncle Piet, in my thoughts all the good that was left behind when I later experienced it afterwards. It is actually incomprehensible that something like this can happen that by removing attached family ties you still give yourself a lot of pain and as now sincere tears later in life.

Just let me be, we still have a whole life to talk together and to be together. How it feels to be alone and locked up for so long and to live a celibate life, makes me afraid that I will never touch you because the love I feel will hurt me so deeply inside that I think I will want to protect myself because of it and maybe reject you because of it.

If life is more important to you than love, I will probably choose myself again. I just want to be honest and sincerely tell deep inside what I feel, how I think and how we could solve that together.

Lots of love, Bernhard