Ella

We don’t see each other often, but it’s always good when we see or speak. She is one of the most empathetic women I know, and I have incredible admiration and respect for the choices she makes in her life.

Tell us what you’d like us to know about yourself:

I got diagnosed with diabetes recently. I have always been chubby and was bullied for my weight when I was a child. For twenty-five years I wore black but when I had children, I started to wear more colorful things. I thought lots of times: “When I lose weight, I may buy that dress or get that tattoo”. I never lost the weight because of loving life and simply not wanting to be on a diet all the time. I gradually grew to love my body the way it was and is. Then I freely started to buy colourfull dresses and got a flower tattoo on my arm. But with recent diabetes comes the diet, the need for losing weight and I want to be healthy so I will start to lose weight soon. But thinking of that made me sad: now I finally love my body and now it will have to change. I really hate those “I-am-unhappy-because-I-am-fat-before-pictures”. And I wanted to honor my body for where it has brought me until now. For the fun we had together, the children it carried, the fries and ice-cream I enjoyed with it and for simply being mine. So I called Denise to ask her to preserve it the way it is now: “soft”, as my children describe it. Worthy, beautiful in all it’s (in-)perfections and chubbiness. And after the pictures, it may change.

What Do You Do for Work?

I work as a psychologist specialized in schema therapy. For me, psychotherapy, in the end, is about being gentle and kind to yourself, to almost train yourself daily to not harshly judge yourself and others. To know yourself and accept yourself the way you are and from that notion make the needed changes in how you do and see things. The work enriches me daily; I may see and meet people at their purest and most vulnerable. To be trusted with that I consider a special gift. The kindness and wisdom of my clients teach me to love myself, with every curve, bad habit or weirdness that I have.

What’s the Biggest Risk You’ve Ever Taken?

I was raised in a religious family and am a Christian. When I reached the age of 30 without having a loving partner to have children with, I started thinking about what to do when I would not find one in time to have children. I talked to patients of mine that were over 40 and had missed the chance to carry a child and become a mother. I did not want to find myself that way in a decade. I thought about it for a couple of years and talked a lot about it with two of my best friends and for me, of course, God. I also tried to find out what it would mean psychologically for the child I wanted so much. In the end, I took the plunge and I asked a dear friend of mine, who is gay and therefore could also not have children easily if he wanted to donate sperm and maybe take a father role. A little more than a year later, we lived in two apartments beside each other, and our oldest son Luk (short for “Luck” in Dutch) was born. Later we were blessed again with twin girls. In the beginning, we got lots of responses: people that were very happy for us but also people that considered our choice to have a child to be immoral and sinful in the eyes of God. That was a difficult time for me; being so happy with our son but people around us judging and waiting for it to go wrong. I remember a lesbian friend of mine told me: “when it isn’t new anymore, it will pass”. She was right. Nowadays I do not always realize that we are a little different as a family. I also do not feel that judged anymore. I do think that we probably are still judged by others but being older also thaught me to see that it is something of them. They need it maybe? I do not. I feel very blessed and am very proud that the father of my children and his partner want to be a rainbow-family together with me, our children and the dog.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?

Strangely that is not my career. Not that I am a rainbow family mother or that I can support myself and the children. Those things do make me very happy and fulfilled. But I consider my most outstanding achievement that I learned to listen to my heart; to dare to take what I feel as a guideway to what I need and where I want to go or not. And I realize that that is not only what I achieved but I also consider it a gift that I was able to; to have the right people around me, to be able to live in one of the wealthiest places on earth, to have health, my religion, love and all those other things that money cannot buy.

Strangest recent middle-of-the-night thought?

“OMG, I think there are two of them”. Considering that I was four and a half weeks pregnant and could not know that I would have twins. And then it turning out to be true a few weeks later… That was the strangest thought.

What Would You Tweet to Your Younger Self?

You. Are. Loved.

What would you say is the strangest thing about becoming an older woman?

I do not feel older. I still feel 17 but am very happy that I do not feel 17 anymore. I now know a little bit more who I am, what I need, how I want to live my life. I am not so sure any more than when being younger and learned to appreciate doubt, sorrow, and rain. I consider that a good thing nowadays.

What Scares You?

That life is not all rainbow and jellybeans. I realize more and more that life is vulnerable. That our wealth gives us responsibility for the less fortunate. That sometimes there is no justice at all. That people die too young, too unloved or too terrified. God does not solve everything and politicians do not either. That I can do so little. I sometimes long for that age that I did not see these things; and that it could just be rainbows and jellybeans.

What’s the one thing you most hope for personally in the coming year?

I used to hope for a lot of things. Nowadays that is different. I want to embrace life in all its diversity. What comes that comes. Good or bad, it will be there and I am not alone. I am loved. That is more than I ever hoped for.

What’s your age?

42

Ella is wearing a dress from Loud Bodies

Makeup by Mitch

Hair by Lonneke