"Do you want to do it by yourself?" I ask and Billie Stormzy nods enthusiastically: "Yes!" I put him down, and together we descend the steep wooden stairs that lead to the boulevard from a small hidden square next to the Kurhaus where I tend to park my bicycle nowadays. When we arrive at the boulevard, he immediately runs to the windows of Legoland. I don't know if he's copying what he saw other kids doing before - maybe his sister and her friends - or if he's attracted to the bright colours, but I decide to go and visit this place as soon as possible with him.
I want to walk straight to Beachclub De Golfslag, which is our destination today, but he has other plans. After wandering around the boulevard for a while, he insists we descend the stairs that lead to a path to the beach in between Summertime and Day by Day. Once on the beach, he wants to go anywhere except for the beach club at which I'd like to have breakfast.
That's right, breakfast. The easing of measures has gone further past week, after some initial hesitation - earlier, the government announced they might ease some measures, but everybody started to treat that announcement of intention as an actual announcement, so much so in fact that I think not easing the measures a little more would have lead to big protests. So now cafes and restaurants are allowed to be open between 6:00 in the morning until 20:00 in the evening and we can have actual breakfasts on the beach again.
While Billie Stormzy decides to lay down in the sand of the beach in front of Day by Day, I walk to neighbouring De Golfslag and pick a table. "Take a seat, we're open!" a waiter announces cheerfully. Indeed - it's only the second day today that they are allowed to open before 12:00, so I can imagine why he is cheerful about this. He's distributing menus among the tables on the terrace. As I've written before, it's remarkable how similar Day by Day and De Golfslag are. I am pretty sure they are owned by the same people, a suspicion that is further confirmed by the fact that there is a card on the table with a qr code which you can scan to register for Covid19-tracking. It has the logos of both Day by Day and De Golfslag on it.
One of the main differences between these two places, that otherwise look strikingly similar with their black furnitures among white wooden structures, is that De Golfslag has two Easter Island statues guarding its entrance - the same as Spice Beach Club, but here they are dark grey instead of the striking bright blue in which they are painted at Spice. On the soundsystem, some radio station is broadcasting DJs chatting and hit music. The sky is mostly blue, and it's sunny and warm, but every once in a while a small cloud floats in front of the sun and it gets chilly.
As I wait for the waiters to take my order, and then for the drinks and food to arrive, Billie Stormzy roams far and wide. From time to time I have to get up and retrieve him as he makes his way over the terraces of De Golfslag or Day by Day: a small boy unfazed by the going ons around him, in a world of his own, interested by everything new he sees. Just like his sister, he's a treasure hunter, picking up interesting bits and pieces from the ground. A tiny plastic lid here, a plastic cup there. I tell him the latter is trash, and he duly throws it in the bin as I open it for him. To ensure he doesn't continue picking up stuff, I give him a plastic shape in the form of an ice cream, meant to make sand cookies with but also ideal for scooping sand. It's lying around on the beach, so I guess it's okay that he plays with it. The trick works: after I've shown him how to make piles of sand with it, he stays close to where I sit, happily playing with the plastic form.
When cycling back home from the railway station yesterday I saw a poster by one of the main amplifiers of this misinformation currently active in the Netherlands, a bunch of female influencers and famous women calling themselves 'motherheart'. Their poster announces, in bold letters: "Our children. Our choice". The whole thing sickens me. First of all, the notion that having a 'mother's heart' somehow gives you the moral high ground and the right to defy science and the authorities (what about fathers' hearts?). But worse than that - which is just a variation on the notion of 'it doesn't feel true to me, so I am not going to accept it as true' that is such a dominant factor in how people decide to act these days - is the idea that you own your children. That because you gave birth to a certain human being, you have the right to choose what happens to it, even if that choice involves matters of life and death.
No, Billie Stormzy is not my child in the sense that I get to choose for him. I do not possess him. Having a child, raising a child, is for me, first and foremost, a prolonged exercise in letting go of that child. An exercise in respect, and acknowledging that the child only belongs to itself. To let it grow into being him- or herself, everyday a little bit more. When we were expecting Billie Stormzy - as when we were expecting his sister - I was excited, not because I was going to have a child, in the sense of being able to call them my own; I was excited because I was going to meet that child, meeting it as a person in its own right. The first thing I said to him after he was born, was: "How nice that you're here!" And just as with his sister, I was struck that indeed, as dependent and helpless as he was, it was still absolutely clear I was meeting an independent individual.
And it certainly does not take just a mother to raise a child - it takes a village, or rather: an entire society to raise that child. A mother's - or father's - choice for a child may actually be hurtful to that child and society has a right - the duty, I would say - to step in when that is the case. It makes me wonder, what kind of world do these people live in that the slogan 'Our Children. Our Choice" even sounded like a reasonable argument, something they felt that put on a poster would convince others? What kind of notion of motherhood lies beneath it? Possessive, entitled, manipulative, self-satisfied - it is, frankly, nauseating.
And before someone says, oh but Munan, that's because you as a man do not understand a mother's heart, let me stress that it was actually my own mother who made this clear to me when she told me: "I love you, but you're not the center of my world." If that doesn't sound like a 'true' mother to you, consider what you think is a true mother: someone who makes her children the center of her world? For whom her children are anything, for whom they would sacrifice everything? Indeed, such a mother could claim: "My child, my choice!" After all, she's earned this full possession of her child by giving up her own sense of individuality; child and mother stop being individuals and become some sort of symbiotic being who cannot exist without each other. What my mother taught me instead was that her happiness did not depend on me, and my happiness did not depend on hers - or anyone's really. I think it's a healthier way of raising a child than claiming that because the child is yours, you can choose for it - but then, I would think that, wouldn't I?
Meanwhile, Billie Stormzy has decided it's time to climb the other chair besides our table. I help him to do so and he sits there, grinning at me, feeling like a big boy. I offer some orange juice to him, but he is not interested. He mostly seems to want to grab my coffee or the glass of orange juice, but when I try to get him to drink something, he turns his head away. He's also not interested in the menu, or the card with the qr code. Then, the food is brought by another waiter, a younger guy who has an extremely relaxed air about him and seems to do everything in a pleasantly lazy way.
Apart from the orange juice, the set breakfast consists of a platter with three slices of bread, cheese, ham, a croissant, and plastic cups with jam and butter; and a small frying pan with a generous amount of scrambled eggs. To my surpise, the little one is actually interested in having some of the bread, then switches to eating cheese. All in all not much, but it's still more than what he usually has. While eating, he climbs on and off the chair. Then, when he's finished, he picks up a plastic cup with butter and throws it on the floor, picks it up and throws it away again - this is one of his favourite games: throwing things, walking after them and throwing them some more.
I eat the rest of the breakfast. The food is very much okay, but nothing special. The main feature is the scrambled eggs, which are nicely done but could use extra salt - it takes me a while before I can get the laidback waiter to bring me some. By the time I've finished the breakfast, he returns to the beach and picks up the plastic form again. Then, he tells me to do some scooping for him, apparently not interested in doing it himself anymore. He's delighted, however, when I start to build piles of sand for him and sits on my lap to watch me do so. After a while, I get up and pay. Up on the boulevard, Billie Stormzy wanders around for a long time again before I manage to persuade him to climb the stairs, back to our bicycle.
Also on Breakfast at the Beach: Jump back in time to when I visited this place with Rihanna Gaga in 2016
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