are defects in nature, too. Mother Nature has her forests and her deserts. Mieke was more a rather arid place.
For a long time Mieke has wanted to keep a diary. Now there’s only one thing standing in the way and that’s Mieke’s sense of duty. As the product of an overly Catholic, old-fashioned upbringing, Mieke has to give herself permission to do something that has no immediate purpose. Writing down your thoughts in a large notebook doesn’t really do anybody any good. But Mieke excels in convoluted arguments: she finds secret ways to fool herself into thinking that not only should she write such a book but that it is even her duty to do so, for posterity. And that, fortunately, takes all the pleasure out of it. Once again she feels safely constricted in her corset of duties, and under this compulsion she begins keeping a close eye on her daughter, searching for funny remarks and spontaneous (or not so spontaneous) slips of the tongue to give her diary more colour. For an outsider, such an addiction to duty might seem agonizing, but once you’re addicted you discover what an exceedingly pleasant and engrossing way of life it is.
Yet sometimes she secretly hopes for a little peace and quiet. Stefaan or Elvira ought to insist that she put on the brakes once in a while because she does everything she can to keep active, to demand the most from herself, and occasionally to reach so deeply into her reserves that when she gets up in the morning she’s already dizzy from a whole night of brooding about what has to be done the following day.
Mieke begins her diary like a friendship book, the kind that young girls used to circulate among themselves. What word should she use to describe herself? Say someone asked her who she is. What if her name just wasn’t enough? What if someone were to say: okay, fine, Mieke Vandersanden-De Kinder, but who are you really? How can you define yourself in a way that’s more or less conclusive?
She would never answer ‘a woman’ because she’s no feminist. Feminists are angry women who want to be men. That’s wrong. The world would be in terrible shape with only men in it.
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