We are in the kitchen. My mother is slicing an onion. She can still do that perfectly, having been a cooking teacher for years and her motor skills still working fine. We make perkedel, small Indonesian meatballs with a sweet soy sauce. She no longer knows how to do that, so I do it for her. The small Ikea kitchen in the terraced house where she has lived with her friend for a few years now; a friend she doesn't really love anymore and who doesn't want to take care of her. But now that they are old, it is hard to change things, especially now that my mother has Alzheimer's disease. She asks, "Where did you learn to cook so well ?". I reply that I learned that from my mother. With big puzzled eyes and with a moment of clarity she replies: "Oh yes, I used to be able to do that too". I spend at least one day a week with my mother. I go with her to doctor's appointments and am at all meetings with her case manager. I take better care of my mother than she ever took care of me.

The first time my mother chose to care for herself was in 1974. We had just moved to the big city and my mother was done with motherhood. My little brother was 13 at the time and I was 11. She wanted to work full-time and found a job as an education worker for women and young people. She also went back to school, the Social Academy. The household chores had to be divided more fairly. My father, a somewhat awkward but well-intentioned mathematician with a job at university, was quite willing to do the dishes and learn how to operate the washing machine. She wrote extensive instructions for him, but it didn't really help. Even when cooking, he fell back on the cookbook for everything; and if it said to cook red cabbage for 20 minutes, he did so, never longer and certainly not shorter! He didn't understand why she insisted on working, she didn't have to do it for the money, he earned enough anyway. Nor did he really want to listen to her stories about people who lived such a completely different life than he did.

She has a box of jewellery. Mostly jewellery she inherited from her mother. Now that she has Alzheimer's, she handles it a bit carelessly. I notice that her gold watch is gone. "Oh, she sold that," her friend manages to report. I suggest I keep her jewellery for her and put it in the safe at my house. She wants absolutely nothing to do with that at first. After some haggling, I am allowed to take them anyway. The next week when I am with her, she is very angry with me. You stole my jewellery. I want them back immediately. So I bring them back with me. The jewellery moves with her, first to the care home, later the nursing home. Things get lost. At some point, she is so gone that she doesn't remember me taking the jewellery, which is left, to put it away safely.

That house in the provincial village where we were an average family: boy, girl, dog and cat. Rabbits in the garden. On holiday with the tent in the small Renault four. Camping was my father's passion and life. My mother was less keen on it. She had endured enough primitiveness in the camp. However, she didn't talk about it, not even to him. In fact, we rarely went on holiday as a family. There were always others with us, perhaps to mask the silence between my parents? Good friends, another family, estate camps and later whole groups of people, "the Group" six or seven families, large groups of children, all in tents. The atmosphere of all together around a campfire, as if my parents had not grown up and continued to sing their songs studentishly with guitar.

It is summer, I take her in the car, away from the nursing home for a while. We drive to the village where we lived when I was little. At the café in the middle of the village, we have a cup of coffee with a wedge of apple. She looks around interestedly. "That's where the bakery was" she points out. I think she is right, but I don't remember it as well as she does. We also buy her some new shirts. She has been losing a lot of weight lately. I have her debit card with me. While checking out, I forget her PIN. I say: "You do the ATM". I don't really expect that to go well. But yes, without hesitation. the motor memory is still more or less intact.

At Christmas 1973, they dropped a few bombs on us. We were with several families in a big house in the Ardennes. After the Christmas holidays, we were told that the parents of such and such, and the parents of such and such and the parents of such and such (all lodgers in that house) were getting divorced. Mum and dad were not getting divorced, but we were moving to the big city. A big 1930s house with seven bedrooms was bought. I didn't want to move, I whined that I wanted to stay at my old school to finish sixth grade there. That was not allowed. I had to go to a new scary school in the big city.

10 years later, I heard that my mother had had an affair with the principal of the school in my village, who was also there in that house in the Ardennes. Therefore, we had to leave quickly. We moved in the summer of 1974. Before the summer holidays I had to pack up my room, I was 11. I had to get rid of all my toys, take them to the kindergarten in the village; my tea set, my cooker, my trolley of dolls. I was only allowed to keep one doll. The rest were given away without pardon. I cried. "I was a teenager now": my mother said. Teenagers don't cry. Teenagers don't have toys. Teenagers had a record player and a desk to do homework at. I got that too. Years later, I understood that my mother too was robbed of all her toys when she went into the camps. She was only allowed to take one doll with her. She was 10 at the time. She carried that doll with her for the rest of her life.

We are sitting in the restaurant of the department store the Bijenkorf. It was there that we agreed to meet for coffee and cakes and catch up, we don't see each other often. She has come by bus. She doesn't driving a car very often anymore, eventhough this was once the joy of her life. I notice that she tells the same story three times in a row, and point this out to her. She defends herself with the excuse that she doesn't experience much anymore these days. I advise her to go and see a doctor; it looks like more than a little forgetfulness. She,  being afraid of doctors after being sick in a Jap camp, preferes going to her herbalist , who convinces her it is a mineral deficiency. Three years later, it turns out to be Alzheimer's disease. Neither she nor her friend wanted to know for a long time.

Years later, I understood that my parents' relationship then, in 1974, had long since ceased to be what they had both imagined it to be. They had met in 1953. She, 21 years old, had just moved to Amsterdam with a grammar school diploma in her pocket. Because of the jap camp, nothing had come of school for a long time and she started first grade at 15. He, 25 years old, orphaned and traumatised by the war in the Netherlands and his mother's suicide.

They were each other's anchor, not in love but fond of each other. She soon moved in with him at his apartment on the Nieuwe Herengracht in Amsterdam. She brought stability to his student life, making him go back to college and slowly but surely pass his exams. She studies Spanish in the meantime.

She calls me. "I have decided to go to Indonesia and not come back! That's my country, I don't belong here"! She begs for my approval or consent. It is too late. Alzheimer's disease is not to be messed with and certainly not to emigrate. In her "childlike" fantasy, everything will be fine again as long as she is home. I do understand.

She was born in 1931 in Semarang on Java. Her father and mother were Dutch, true blandas (white people) who married in Amsterdam in 1929 and took the boat to the Dutch East Indies on their honeymoon. He was a chartered accountant and ran the East Indies branch of the accounting firm in Semarang. He drove all over Java with his driver, checking the accounts of the plantations. In 1933, she had a baby brother. The big house with the rear gallery, the babu who sang Nina Bobo to her. The djongos and the kokkie who was chased out of the kitchen by her father on New Year's Eve because he wanted to bake the "oliebollen" himself. The kebon (gardener) was also a driver. He was Muslim and she liked the praying on a rug. In the mornings, he took her and her little brother to school by car. Walking was considered too hot and was unfit.

Twice a day she was given clean clothes. In the mornings, after having washed with a traditional "mandi" a nice dress for school and white patent leather shoes were put on. When she came home in the afternoon, she went to eat first, then sleep, then mandi again and had clean clothes to play in. In the evening, a nice clean white nightdress and a softly singing babu until she slept. When it got too hot, they would go up into the mountains with the all the staff in two cars. There she and her little brother swam in mountain lakes and played tag with the native children. There was a story about a tropical bird that was shot every night but still sang again in the morning. This was a kind of ghost story that the Djongos read or told. In 1935, another sister was born. Her mother was homesick and wanted to see her parents in Holland. So the family went to Holland on leave. At least, her mother with the three children and the babu, as the youngest was only a few months old. Father came six months later. They were in Holland in the winter of 1935/1936. They stayed with relatives; Grandpa and Grandma in Friesland and Grandpa and Grandma in The Hague. They visited lots of relatives. All the trees were dead because there were no leaves on them. The food was awful and it was so incredibly cold. She hated it! She was happy when father came and the whole family got on the boat to return home in August 1936.

She moves to a care home. Her friend can no longer cope with living with a patient with Alzheimer's. She is scared and angry. She doesn't understand why she should leave. Neither do I actually, but I am not sure how to deal with the girlfriend's whining. There is little understanding between us, there never has been any at all. She has never lived alone for long. We try to furnish the room as familiar as possible. With her own things, her own Indonesian trinkets. It is 30 degrees outside on moving day. We get Chinese spring rolls. It feels like letting a teenager live on their own. I turn off the gas supply to the cooker just to be sure.

After the camp and after Singapore, the family, that is, her mother and the three children went on a ship to the Netherlands, this time without a babu. They arrived in the winter of 1946/1947 and were accommodated in a boarding house in Zeist. Her mother was tired and emaciated; she was basically unable to take care of her children. Silent timid children who did not understand where they had ended up. In the cold, distant Netherlands where they were actually not welcome. They were called peanut because they spoke with weird ss sounds. They were four years behind in learning. Her mother did not manage to get them into a good school in Zeist. After a few months, father joined them. He took one look and decided they weren't going to stay there, in Zeist. He did take his three children to a shop to buy skates and take them out onto the frozen water. Dreadful she thought, so cold.

Father arranged for an apartment in The Hague in no time. He arranged a housekeeper for his wife who was still too weak to do anything. He also went to Paris by train to buy a car, as they were not available in the Netherlands so soon after the war. He returned in his Renault. He arranged for his eldest daughter to be admitted to the first class of gymnasium at the van Maerlant lyceum in The Hague at 15, despite her learning deficit. In 1953, she took her final gymnasium alpha exam, she was 21 at the time. She went to her exams with painted nails and lipstick on. T

he night before her maths oral she was tutored by her maths teacher. He went over the material with her. The next day, he asked the exact same questions as the night before, and she passed with flying colours. My mother never demonstrated any adolescent behaviour. In the camp there was no room for recalcitrant behaviour, after that there was no one to fight with. Her mother was too ill, her father too detached and besides, what would she do without those parents. Her father held things together, something she badly needed after the traumas. Traumas that, by the way, were not talked about. "My children did not suffer" her father would say, probably to keep his own guilt under wraps. As a result, my mother had no idea how to deal with adolescents and, as a result, I became what you might call a superpubesque.

She lives alone in the care facility. She doesn't actually know how to do that. Things get worse and worse for quite quickly. She no longer knows how to wash herself. Friend takes the dirty laundry to wash it at home so that she does only keep clean clothes. She also doesn't know how to make coffee or change a bed either. The carers do their best, but it is already clear after two months that they cannot provide enough care in that home. It takes a few months before a place in a nursing home becomes available. Months in which one of us goes to her every day to help with washing, with eating, with putting her to bed. She is like a small child in her room. Afraid to be alone, constantly sad, constantly lost in her own apartment, in her own head. Friend still does not admit how bad things are with her and how much care she needs.

When I was little, my mother sewed many of my dresses herself. Many mothers did that. However, my mother tended to make the same dress for me and for herself. Sometimes in a different colour and of course in a different size, but with that I was always a little copy of my mother. She purple, me orange, the same kind of necklaces with it, she with tights I with tights, she with heels I with good Renata shoes. I thought that was terrible. She could only see me if I was "just like her", which I was explicitly not and did not want to be. Even when I was well into adulthood, my mother liked to emphasise that we were the same. That was always uncomfortable for me. The last time I argued with her was in 1994: She wanted to be a larger part of my life. I said, "Yes but Mum, I want to have contact, but I don't need you". She became furious and jumped up. Before storming out the door, she shouted, "A camp child never says she doesn't need her mother". "But I am not a camp child" I said, "you are". After that, I never argued again. It was pointless.

She is huddled up in her wicker chair in her room in the nursing home. Around her are snippets of photographs. She has recently started working on these assiduously. Her photo books are rather systematically torn into very small shreds. I managed to save the oldest books with some childhood photos of her, there are not many of them. Only the photos sent to the Netherlands at the time were saved during the war. She also broke her doll. I take that one home with me to prevent further deterioration. It is just before Easter so I put on a CD of the St Matthew Passion. She starts beaming and singing. We sing along together. She used to sing the Matthew in the choir, high soprano, together we went to another sing-along version.

The second time she chose for herself was in 1978. At that time she left, away from my father and away from us. Announcing: I'm in love with a woman and I don't want to be a mother anymore. You stay with Papa and I will leave. There is more to life than being a wife and mother.

The divorce was neatly arranged. She was given a lot of money and considered going back to Indonesia for good. But she did not dare to do so at all, afraid of her own traumatic memories of the camp. So on the pretext that she had to stay in the Netherlands for the children, whom she was not taking care of, she bought a small house in the town where we lived. That summer, I went with her to Paris for a week. I was 15. She loved showing off such a great daughter and "showing off " together. She told me she had met someone. The woman she had left my father for had soon realised that my mother had way too much unsolved issues and had broken up with her. But now there was another woman who liked her. She said she felt more comfortable with women. That was because of the camp she said. Men were scary, you couldn't be yourself with them. I asked if she had been scared of my father. "No, of course not" she said. I didn't understand, but kept quiet about it. That was always better with my mother.

I want to visit Mama again. Mum's grave? I ask. Yes that is what she means. On a beautiful spring day, I drive with her to the Land of Maas and Waal. In the village is the old cemetery under big oak trees. That is where her mother is buried. We walk past the little farmhouse where her parents lived. In my memories, of course, it was much bigger. Then we drive along the Waal dike and eat a pancake in the Veerhuis. She tells stories about her mother, that she could knit so beautifully and that she learned English by reading Gone with the wind and looking up every word she didn't understand.

I was lying in my bed in our house in the county village. I was about eight years old. My father was playing the piano on floor directly under my bedroom, Mozart sonatas. It must have been about eight o'clock. Then I heard my mother's soprano. Du Holde Kunst in wie viel grauen Stunden, " An die Musik" by Franz Schubert. I can still see them before me when I think back. She with one hand loosely on his shoulder and the other hand on the piano. A light on the score, utter harmony. When exactly that harmony between my parents subsided I can't remember. After the divorce, my mother always spoke of my father with some disdain. She said she wanted to leave when I was four. I never knew whether any of that was true. They wrote letters to each other in the year after the divorce, letters of reproach presumably. I was engaged as a postman, until I refused and told them to just put a stamp on it and pos. It wasn't exactly a fighting divorce, but things never worked out between my parents after that either.

A sunny day at the nursing home. People sit in the shade in the courtyard garden. A patio with lots of greenery and flowers, but enclosed so that people cannot leave. There is lemonade and fruit. I peel the apples and give everyone a piece. I start a song. Dikkertje Dap... sat on the stairs. Everyone joins in, they know it, the Alzheimers as I call them. Hansje Pansje beetle on his fence.... My mother beams when she sings. I think let's make it a little harder and start on Schubert's Ave Maria. "That should be higher" says my mother. "That's right, but I'm an alto, so you do it" I say. And there she goes, flawless and high, wordless because she has forgotten it, but every note in place. One lady hums softly along. At the end, my mother gets applause. She beams and makes a neat reverence. Until a week or two before her death, my mother will continue to sing.

I was an angry and scared adolescent. Afraid of life and angry at my parents who made that life so extra complicated. There was a big difference between my parents' reactions, though. My father was there. If I was scared, woke him up in the middle of the night, he was there. He patiently listened to my fears, stroked my head and promised me he would always be there for me. There was a time when I had a serious argument with his girlfriend. He chose me unconditionally. Whether that was justified or not.

My mother was not there. If I called her in tears, she would ask:" Now what ?" Or she would unplug the phone. I was not comforted, I had to stop whining. I had to understand that she also had her own life and that she was entitled to it. Besides, in the camp it had all been much worse so what was I whining about. I couldn't stand that. By definition, my mother's grief and fear and pain were much greater than mine.

My mother cries. She doesn't want to be here, not in this nursing home. She wants to go home. She just doesn't know what she means by that anymore. Indonesia is the most likely option. When asked if I can stand that, I say that I have known for a long time that I cannot make my mother happy. Her dementia doesn't change that. I don't even know if that's true myself. It's sad to see, but I don't feel responsible.

When I was 19, things went wrong. I didn't sleep much, if at all, was always scared. I broke up with my boyfriend, and fled home to my father. With therapy and attention, I got my life back on track. I went to college, met my husband, also moved back into my room. My mother was pretty invisible at the time. There was contact, but for instance, I only told her about my new love after six months. Her reaction: "Can't you ever find a normal man?". When I had a fallopian tube haemorrhage when I was twenty-two, she did call, but she only visited the hospital once, with new nightdresses. After all, she was afraid of hospitals, I had to understand that. I didn't tell her that the gynaecologist said I probably couldn't have children. It was the same message she had received many years before. I was, however, allowed to recover in her house. Then I could look after the dog nicely when they were on holiday. We did, it was better than living in student rooms on the second floor.

It is evening around 10 o'clock. I get a call from the caregiver on duty at the nursing home. My mother has fallen. She has gone wandering down the corridors and has a wound on her head. It is not serious and they were able to take care of her themselves. However, they cannot get her to calm down. She is in a total panic, war, war she says. I drive over and she sits totally dejected in her wicker chair, in her nightgown. She thinks I am her mother, and I put her to bed like a little child. Hum a lullaby: sliep seft myn bernstje... The Frisian lullaby of my youth. The roles are definitely tilted. From then on, she usually thinks I am her mother, sometimes her sister. In any case, older than her and much wiser.

In 1992, my mother took the plunge and went to Indonesia, alone! She went to Java for six weeks, to Semarang and Jakarta where she lived and past the places where she had been in a camp. I took her to Schiphol Airport with her friend. After those six weeks, she flew on to Hawaii where that aunt from Indonesia had settled after the war. Then across the United States by train from Los Angeles to Chicago. It had taken her almost 50 years to gather her courage. She talked about it at length, she was so elated. Her father and her brother looked surprised. According to her father, the East Indies as he had known it no longer existed and so there was no point in going there. Perhaps he was right, but then he had not been born there. The following year, she went with her sister. She also loved it. In the following years she went every year. First alone to Java, then to Bali. Once she asked me to go with her. I kindly but firmly said no; 6 weeks with my mother was asking for trouble, arguments, old sorrows, etc. Once we went to London for a long weekend. On the way back on the train, we got into a fight on the last 20 kilometres, and we had both tried so hard. My brother did go with us once. Her friend also refused to go with her. The tropics were not for her, far too hot. My mother hated that. In 2008, she went with my brother for the last time, who felt like he was going out with a child, and to some extent that was true.

We are having a sandwich in town, close to where I live, so she doesn't have to walk so far. Suddenly she asks:" What was that like for you?" The fact that we were getting divorced? I tell her that I was angry with her. That she didn't take care of me. That she should have. She tells how powerless she felt, how alone. She says, "I'm sorry". It is 2008, thirty years after she left. Maybe she can speak up now because my father is dead.

1998, I worked in The Hague a hectic job, on the train every morning at 7, never home before 7 in the evening. My mother complained that she saw me so rarely. I suggested she travel with me to The Hague so she could visit her sister there. On the train, she told me that her friend wanted to end the relationship. And that she, my mother, had started a relationship with a woman in Amsterdam, a woman with a camp past. She was afraid she would be alone otherwise. She didn't want to change again, to have to figure it out for herself again. She was crying, in that crowded train. She asked me what she should do. I jumped into the role of counsellor, I am a psychologist. I advised her to talk and start doing something again. By now she was retired and really did nothing but wait for her friend. We said goodbye at The Hague railway station. All day at work, I was angry and moody. She was not leaving her friend. I don't know how they worked it out or resolved it. The Amsterdam woman remained a good friend.

We are out walking in the forest next to the nursing home. It's spring, leaves on the trees. She asks, "Why doesn't your father ever visit?" I am dumbfounded. She never asks about that. I say, "He's dead". She is startled and bursts into tears. Why didn't she know that? She is genuinely sad. I suddenly see that she did love him. In the months that follow, she still regularly asks about him and why he doesn't visit. It is pointless to keep repeating that he died so I say, "I will ask him" and at some point even, "He is coming tomorrow." There is a moment a few months later when I visit and she says happily, "Your father has been". I don't respond but I gather from her subsequent story that my brother, who looks like my father externally, came to visit yesterday. For me, it is good to know that despite her anger and dedain, she still loved my father.

I was visiting her, friend was off to work, sometime in the late 1990s. My mother was retired by then. Friend had just had her second grandchild. My mother didn't like it. She thought she actually deserved a grandchild too and why hadn't I provided one for her. I never told her that I probably couldn't have children. Not even at that time. I blamed it on my desire to have a career and on my husband who already had three children. She seemed genuinely sorry. I said, "Yes but Mom, if you had known, you wouldn't have started having children, would you?". She agreed.

A place has been found in a nursing home. An emergency location on the outskirts of town, far from girlfriend, also quite far for me. But she is welcome to come. She lived in the nursing home for about six months. There she was angry and scared. Meanwhile, it is winter and slippery on the day she has to move out. She gets a small room, a bookcase, a wardrobe, a bed a table and two chairs. Also something on the wall. We unpack quickly. First we unpack things, then she arrives with friend so it looks cosy. She has been looking forward to it. She is a bit disappointed, but in good spirits she introduces herself to everyone, using her first name. She hasn't wanted to be addressed as mrs for a long time. The "living room" where she is assigned is not terribly cosy, but she still likes a cup of coffee. I'll come tomorrow... I say and we leave her to the carers. Here's to hoping all will be well.

In 1979, my father got a new girlfriend. I ran amok so much that my mother finally allowed me to live with her, at least temporarily. My father paid me an allowance, which I then passed on to my mother. They thought that was a more logical solution than alimony, even though I was only 16. My mother worked, and went to the Social Academy. She got her degree in 1980, the same year I got my HAVO degree. She had her girlfriend and often went to the women's house. The second feminist wave was in "full swing". I wanted my mother to love me so much that I went all in. I played truant a lot. An acquaintance of my mother saw me on the street while I was supposed to be at school and briefed her about it. My mother chastised me but did nothing. When I contracted Pfeiffer's disease, I was sent back to my father because she had no time to take care of a sick child. Neither did my father, of course, who worked all day. I was home alone almost whole days for weeks in a row.