Born to be alive

Photographed by Lida Chaulet

She was not breathing when the doctor put her tiny, warm body on my belly. Although I felt so relieved that the labor pains were finally over I could not feel really happy yet. Almost panicking I could not quite understand why the doctor did not do anything to help her. I knew that newborns do not need to breathe right away as long as they were still attached at the umbilical cord but that has been cut already. I had dreaded to go to this hospital to give birth because both my grandparents had died here. The first child was born at home, the second in another hospital, closer to my home. But due to complications I had no other option than going here. The labor was induced, four weeks before I was due to deliver. The pregnancy was peaceful at first until the doctor called to tell that the blood sample was indicating that troubles were expected. Regular punctures and blood tests had to be done and soon it was clear that the delivery could not wait until the end. The seriousness about it was freaking me out. I was terribly nervous when the time had come to go to the hospital. Only a few days before I was knocked out with a nasty stomach flu and I still felt very weak. The choice of this hospital had made me very superstitious and I was afraid to die there too. The infusion did not do very much until the membranes were cut. Then the pain had washed over me like hell. I was so tensed that I thought I would never manage to give birth but you cannot withhold such nature force, of course. But soon after I did it, I was so afraid that she did not survive all the stress. Silently I begged her to take a breath. Almost hesitantly I said that I was worried that she was not yet breathing. At last he took her over from me and disappeared in another room. What seem to be ages was actually a couple of minutes before he handed her over to me again, this time breathing on her own. My third child, a beautiful girl. After the normal routine we could hold her a little while before she had to be brought to the baby unit. She had to stay at least one night because they expected troubles with her blood but I had to go home. This was the strangest feeling ever, to go home with an empty belly and a Polaroid picture of my baby ‘as proof’ for her little brother and sister. The next morning they called us that everything was alright and we could come to pick her up. As soon as I entered the room where we had left her the day before my heart missed a few beats when I saw her incubator was empty. Rather panicked I scanned the room before a nurse pointed to a crib where she was. I picked her up and held her close to me, happy tears running down my face. I will never forget the way she sniffed my face like a little animal, as if to be reassured that I was really her mother. 

My little girl grew up to be a beautiful young woman. A very clever, pretty girl she is. Sometimes very serious about difficult issues and most of the time just a sweet and happy child who loves to think deep. As soon as she went to high school she loved the lessons of religious studies and social science the most. She was very much interested in Buddhism and for a short period of time she was a devoted vegetarian. She loves to read and that was what she does a lot. You could always find her reading a book. Harry Potter, Narnia but also more ‘heavy stuff’. She loved to read hanging almost upside down in the big chair. When she had to go to the bathroom then she often could not stop reading and walked, mesmerized by the story she was reading, with her book in front of her eyes to the bathroom. Wherever we went, she took a book with her. She participated in model United Nations conferences at her own school and other regional schools. She was the winner of an annual national speaking competition and her English is fluent. But most of all she was a strong willed adolescent who knew already what her mission in life was. To make a difference. Although her dreams about her future career varied a little over time, at first she wanted to become a reporter in war-zones, then she wanted to work for the UN, and now it is “something” for NGOs, the direction was stable anyway. That is why she chose her present university study: Liberal Arts and Science. The main subjects she is studying are Political history, International relations  and Conflict studies. 

A few days ago she entered a contest on Facebook from the Dutch ministry of Foreign affairs. The contestants have to make their point about UN related topics and the first prize is to join the delegates to the UN-Top coming September as a young reporter. The first statement she made was of comparing ice-cream consumption in the Netherlands against starvation in the Sahel. She did that with an unusual (sexy) picture of a girl holding a melting ice-cream. With votes from friends and relatives she soon became second in the race. Last night she made clear her second statement with a picture of an empty toilet-roll, to compare sanitary facilities in Western countries against places in the World where people lack any sanitary facility. She said she wants to postpone writing a bigger article because she does not want to make people go bored with the subject yet, because she is allowed to make four statements in this first round. I cannot wait to see her next statements. If you feel the same, she will be thankful for your votes here: https://www.facebook.com/NederlandendeVN/app_301201333298390?app_data=/inzendingen/ronde1/samantha-maat-afbeelding-1340487272/

XL

Although we are glued to each other a little too much these days because of the paper I am working on for the bachelor project, I still love my computer. Excel is my favorite application, I realized that when I was making the appendix for the paper. However the appendix is still seventy-eight pages large, compared to the enormous amount of data we had gathered from the thirty-six participants, it is neatly slim. Even more important, it looks smooth and provides all the information necessary to give insight in how this research was carried out. I am almost tempted to attach a copy here so you could judge for yourself.

When you first force yourself through the basic rules of Excel you will learn how well the build-in functions will work for you. I particularly like the “if” functions but yesterday I have learned the convenient function of merging several cells with text. And the easiest thing, compared to Word for example, is that you are able to hide the columns you do not need to appear in your final report.

The analyzing of the data needs to be done with SPSS of course and although I am quite used to that now and even have a student copy at home it is not as elegant as Excel. In particular it consumes a lot of memory and it is a heavy burden on the processor sometimes. But I could not do without this statistical software either. Statistics, after all, are based on mathematical calculations of chance. Although we have learned to do that manually in the five statistic courses we have had, it is very time consuming.

While writing this down it suddenly dawned on me that I am almost at the end of the undergraduate study of Psychology. In a private Excel file I keep record of the marks and credits I have gathered so far. At this very moment I have got 132 ECTS (European Credit Transfer System)  out of the required 180. The 2 is extracurricular from a Summer Course “Big Science” I have done last year. Most courses provided 5 ECTS each and this year I have done also two 10 credit courses. The bachelor project paper will be good for 20 ECTS and the last exam I will do this school year is also a 10 credit one. That will bring the total this year of 162. Coming September I will do a minor “Brain and Cognition” of 30 ECTS and hopefully I will graduate in December 2012. Collected 12 ECTS more than I should have and meeting the entry requirements of more than one master course. I like to have a broad spectrum of choices, however, I do also realize that I am longing to work in my job more than the part-time hours I am giving it now.

One ECTS is good for approximately 28 hours studying, including contact hours for lectures and workgroups. On average that means 1,680 hours a year. Excluding the Summer break that results in 40 hours a week. Compared to commercial education it is not expensive, however I do not receive any kind of scholarship like younger people in the Netherlands do. The tuition fee is approximately 1,700 Euro a year, without books and other materials. I have done commercial courses before for only ten days each for the same amount of money but now I have less hours left a week to earn me the money. After three years now I am ready to admit that it is heavy sometimes but I do not regret a single minute of it. How on earth did I wander from being satisfied about the completed appendix to a slight complaining of the amount of work the study as a whole involved?

Maybe it is because I have a build-in “if” function as well. To analyze my past. What if I had been to college when I was eighteen instead of being in my forties and single mom of four. Than I could have been rich by now but I would have missed the advantages of having four encouraging great kids. I am also trying to make the right choices in the present, like, what if I choose this master education or that. Will that then bring me to the career I dream of? Even though Excel seems to be without limits for the extend of a  spreadsheet it sure is restricted to 256 columns and 65,536 rows. My limitations go far beyond that although it may cost some memory and processor capacity when I am doing a heavy job.

  

Slimy creatures

Wherever you go this Spring you have got a real good chance to hit a snail or a slug. There are tons of them slowly crawling on paths and sidewalks  and as much of them splashed out because you cannot always avoid stepping on or riding over them, unfortunately. Especially the stepping on bit is a rather disgusting experience, I can assure you. The snails with the coiled shell give a nasty crack but the slugs who crawl shamelessly naked pass out in an even worse manner: like a huge piece of old and used bubble gum, however not as sticky as that. It does not matter knowing that they are very destructive for the plants in my garden, such a lethal step will leave me feeling guilty anyway. However you can buy poison for snails in garden centers, I would rather not do that. Because I am a softy. I cannot easily kill any other animal than a mosquito purposefully. Whenever there is a spider or a bee or wasp in my house I catch them carefully to carry them out and release them. Although, to carry out a frog I would need the help of a more braver person. Thankfully that has happened only once since I live here.  You would have laughed your heart out seeing me and my girls standing screaming on the sofa when a lost frog wandered in the living room. However, they do make me jump sometimes too when I am weeding the garden, jumping unexpectedly out of the plants where I had my hand just a minute before. The frogs of course, not my girls. The girls do like to jump too but only on the trampoline in the backyard. The region underneath that trampoline turned unintentionally into an incubator for frogs. When we built that thing in we lowered it half the size of its legs. The groundwater resulted in a pool most time of the year which makes it a perfect frog environment. And frogs, contrary to snails, are protected animals, so you cannot even expel them unpunished. That is, unless you let some other animal do the nasty job, a cat for example. I do not like a cat as a pet, although I think they can be really cute, but they like to reward you with their prey. Not my favorite reward a half-killed mouse or frog on the doormat. So I think I just have to live with the presence of the frog population in the backyard, hoping that they will like it enough to stay under the trampoline, invisible to me. And as for the snails and slugs, well I will keep on carrying them, if possible, carefully onto my hand scoop to the compost container where they can live happily for another two weeks before the container will be collected again. That is a much better perspective for them than being splashed, I guess.

Although there are people, other than biologists, who genuinely like the creatures I described above, as far as I know that means served on a plate.  The French and Belgian cuisine are rather famous for their respectively served snails, better known as ‘esgargots’, and froglegs, which seem to resemble chicken meat a lot. Not for me though, I am a much too picky eater. I would not even want to try it. The same for oysters, although they seem to have huge aphrodisiac effects. Only thinking of sipping the slimy parts out of their shell is enough to make me lose my appetite completely. For food and for sex.

That is exactly what happened with the course I am studying now. Sexology. I needed the study points when I enrolled for this course but I was not particularly interested in the subject since I had seen some lecture slides beforehand. The photos of severely disrupted penises made my stomach flip. So I enrolled but I did not go to the lectures, which were on the ungodly hour of 9 a.m.  I had enough on my plate with the bachelor project so I put the subject away in the far corners of my mind until the exam date became really close. Coming Tuesday. On the ungodly hour of 9 a.m.

I started studying the subject last Thursday night, after having taken my exam on Emotion and Cognition. Way too late to do it properly, I admit. However, not uncommon for students in general. Surprisingly the book does read well, it is not only very nice written but it does teach me quite a few things I did not know before. Like for example that the sexual revolution from the 70’s was not the first in history. The Victorian age was preceded by the Romantic. That is visible in art of course but it really hit home to me reading that because it means that progression is not so much linear but more parabolic.

Also interesting is the establishing of sexology as a science. Is it hard to study psychology scientifically,  sexology is even harder. There are of course many cultural differences, but also many economical and political issues that influence it. Common sense is full of myths about topics like differences in sexual behavior between men and women but even in more serious issues like birth control and sexual transmitted diseases. It was only in the 70’s that homosexuality was no longer considered to be an illness in the DSM. I am not even half way, and even shocking material like two boys twins where circumcise for one of them turned out badly, and the doctors decided to make him a girl, that is about gender identity for your information, cannot stop my determination to try to read as much of the book as I can. It will help me to get a much broader perspective on a subject which undeniably affects us all, although passing the exam is my main goal for now. 

Myths

Once upon a time there was a girl named Europa. She was loved by Zeus, who abducted her and carried her off to Crete. They had had three sons who became judges of the underworld after they died. Europe, the continent, was called so at first time by Ancient Greeks. A rural, divided part of the World for many, many years. Still, despite the Union established after World War 2. There has been a nasty war recently in former Yugoslavia and political characters like Italian Berlusconi and Dutch Wilders make themselves caricatures with their behaviour. The current question whether  to cut off Greece from the Union or not, dubbed as “Grexit” made me wonder about contemporary civilisation.

Scientists suspect it won’t stop the crises spreading to other countries from the eurozone, like Spain and Portugal when Greece will leave the Union. All European countries are connected through loans and that seems to be the fundamental flaw of the Union, scientists say. The article in New Scientist speaks about “predatory” traders who take advantage of weak economies. Were there not also greedy traders who interfered badly with the prizes of food somewhere on this globe? Are predatory traders human?

Once upon a time, not very long ago, there was a European family. Husband, named Aristoteles, wife, named Penelope, and their average 2.2 kids. Both parents worked. They had a loan for their house, a loan for their car, and creditcards for occasional things like vacation. Life was good on them and they did not worry too much about financial matters. Then, unexpected, things went wrong. The man died in an accident and he had no life insurance. The woman, shattered with grieve, could not manage to pay the loans. She had to sell the house and the car and still it was not enough to pay off the debts. When she turned to the bank for another loan they refused it. She lost her job. Desperately she went to a loan shark. At first she seemed to cope with the weekly payments but in the end she was broke. She and her kids line up every day for free soup.

Greece is a beautiful site for holidays. White, picturesque houses contrasting with the azure blue sea. Nice weather. Lots of historical objects. Very view seem to want to spend their holiday there this year though.

Penelope is a beautiful woman. Long black hair curling over her shoulders, contrasting with her bright blue eyes. She is friendly and always willing to host a party. However, there are not many friends left to party with.

I do not know what to think of being a European. A union in my mind is “one for all, and all for one”. If I had money to spend on vacation this year, I would go to Greece. I have never seen it anyway and it may turn out not so beautiful if we will wait too long to go there. Crises is the best predictor of riots in a democracy as young as Greece, after all.

Santana jams his guitar with Europa in the background. As the last heavy notes fade away I stare out of the window to the grey Dutch sky. I am short for words today. Earth’s cry and heaven’s smile. When will we learn to behave civil? Is there any common ground in Europe?