Your mother also said that it’s best not to talk about your feelings while she was stooped over her stove. Or maybe she didn’t say that at all, and just let the silence sit in the kitchen for a moment until you understood and she was able to get the gas stove going by whipping at the burner with her dishtowel until the flame exploded in a controlled burst. She likes to hang her dishtowel on her apron when she’s finished, looking pleased when the stove ignites so quickly while you and everyone else in the room looked so disturbed at the thought of this little old woman blowing up her house. All rickety old wood and drafty corners, hand-made lace curtains hanging stagnant at the windows, everything flammable, but she maintains she will never leave this place unless she goes feet first. She repeats “feet first, feet first” all the time, peppering it into conversations just so her children--you especially since you visit the most-- understand what she means. Her morbid obsession is just a joke, she says, and if you can’t laugh at this, then you will kill yourself with all this seriousness. Dead. She means it.
Maybe she does mean it, but because everything else is a joke, perhaps you will laugh at this and not take her seriously. Yet she is too serious not to take seriously. When she speaks about Holland, she turns, gravely serious, towards her portrait of Queen Beatrice, and thinks, but usually says aloud, “God made the world, but the Dutch made Holland.” And she is right, even though people may call it the Netherlands now, but they’re probably a bunch of Krauts if they’re saying that shit. No one but the Dutch will understand what it’s like to fight against the North Sea as it sloshes around the farmlands, or what could be farmlands, and they have built up the dikes to move the water out and it’s exhausting work and yet no one ever recognizes how hard the Dutch work. No one except the Dutch and that is what your mother means when she looks upon Queen Beatrice with such reverence. The Queen is the only one who understands.