The children were on holiday in May, I was doing the last steps of the tax return in the attic: a difficult combination. I was in a television format, in which the participant drives himself and his environment to the edge of an abyss. Grandma, the friend’s mother, tried to keep everything running smoothly in the living room. I heard her sing and read to her, but their minds were elsewhere. Their dear father struggled upstairs with receipts, printers, bank statements and envelopes and no one could stop their good intentions. Whenever I was almost there with adding numbers, a toddler or preschooler stood in front of me, making me lose count and I was also not allowed to eat and drink because of dental surgery in the morning.
I tried to be friendly, I allowed them to stay in the attic.
“I’m just messing around,” said Leah van Roosmalen (5) as she pulled a box of crockery from a shelf. Lucie van Roosmalen (6) hit her head against a crossbeam, it had to be connected. Downstairs, grandma and Frida van Roosmalen (0) were babbling to each other. She said it honestly: “They are unstoppable. You exert an almost magnetic force on them.”
I called my tax lady about four times that it was still an hour later, until a hard deadline followed. At the end of the day I drove between Lucie van Roosmalen and Leah van Roosmalen in the back seat of a Nissan X-trail of a cousin of the girlfriend, who was willing to take us urgently for a small fee to a farmhouse in the head of North Holland. The sun was shining, I called the friend who had fled to her office so that we could all walk through Krommenie together, as far as I’m concerned. It might have taken me weeks, but the job was done, despite all the children.
We parked the car, I walked over a gravel path to a front door.
Just before ringing the bell, I suddenly realized that I had forgotten the two Albert Heijn bags with papers. The girlfriend didn’t answer. Grandma said she was carrying two bags of waste paper to the dumpster with the baby. She wasn’t back yet.
We tore home.
Long story short: they were still there, on the litter box.
I knelt and felt like saying ‘Lord, how tall you are!’ to call.
Lucie and Leah van Roosmalen cheered along, saying that it was the best day of the May holiday so far.
Marcel van Roosmalen writes an exchange column with Ellen Deckwitz here.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of April 27, 2022
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