I have been working on a new part of the project for days now ... but somehow I feel stuck. I had been reading letters my mother had written to me in 1987 while I was a youth holiday camp in England. The idea was to make a video based on those letters.
But suddenly I got lost in the process, not liking my voice reading was one issue, not feeling the letters, another. There is a sense of loneliness in them, and I tried going with that, but mainly they lack something I cannot put my finger on. Feelings. They lack feelings.
My mother wrote a lot of letters to a lot of people and she was a good writer, but there is nothing in them that tells me how she was doing. She is describing her day, where she went, what she did. Preparing a family trip to the US, a visit from my uncle with his family from the Netherlands, whom she called and where they went for Sunday lunch .... but I am not getting anywhere near her, I cannot feel her in those words. She sounds normal and distant.
And then she wrote to me in English. Why? Because I was in England? It puts even more distance between her and myself.
I was miserable at that camp (everybody else seemed to be having a great time though) and I was probably looking forward to hearing from her, but I don´t really remember much about that ...
I was 15 at the time. She was 49.
49. That´s not really old, is it. But she looked old then. The illnesses had taken their toll. I cannot imagine how she felt. She had already been through so much. Endured so much. And what I always wonder, why didn´t she try to change everything. Or was it too late already?
Was she protecting me and my brother?
Mom in 1987. The jacket she is wearing was actually mine.
