“There is a life before and after Zandvoort”, Lenna (now 42) begins her story. We drink coffee at her house. Her son Benjamin is sitting on the couch wearing headphones. The seagulls fly in front of the windows, the beach is just around the corner. In Zandvoort she has rebuilt her life. Here she reinvented herself.
Abandoned in a monastery
First we go back to 2002. Lenna wants to look for her biological mother and is going to travel through Indonesia, the country where she was born, for three months. Her Dutch adoptive parents will accompany her for the first two weeks. The journey begins in a monastery in Jakarta. It is run by a Dutch woman, Sister Lemmers. She helped Dutch adoptive parents during their trial in Indonesia.
Lenna is lucky, an uncle of one of the nuns is visiting the monastery who works in Lenna’s native region. He will inform you. Within three days he reported again. “Three women said they could be my mother, but one woman’s story matched the details only we knew. We even looked alike.”
Whole village turned out
One calls the quick search the hand of God, the other a coincidence. A meeting is arranged. “It all went way too fast. We had only just arrived in the country and were already driving into an inhospitable area. On unpaved roads, past wet rice fields and kampongs, small villages with dilapidated houses.”
After three hours they are there, but there is no time to get acquainted. The whole village has turned out to see her. Women, children pushing the car. They cry, scream. “I want to get out of here, I thought. What am I actually doing here?!” Sister Lemmers gets out of the car and shouts: ‘Move, move! Which one of you is Lenna’s mother?’ People point to a woman in the back. “Very honest? I didn’t feel anything. Tears came when I hugged her, but that was more because I realized what this meeting meant to her.”
Hysterical meeting
Brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, grandfathers, grandmothers, everyone is greeted and hugged. There is laughter and crying. There’s a lot of hysteria, Lenna recalls. “My mother gave me up because she couldn’t feed me. Two children born after me died of malnutrition. I was still alive and felt the impact that had on this woman.”
Not much later, Lenna is sitting with her parents and sister Lemmers on the floor of her biological mother’s house. The floor is rammed earth. The walls are a few suspended bamboo mats, curtains hang over open holes that serve as windows. “The toilet was a hole in the ground outside the house. The house almost fell apart. There was one cupboard and there was a mattress on the floor with the plastic around it, otherwise it would get dirty.”
In the three months that Lenna travels across the country, she sees her biological family four times. “Each time I got more information.”
‘You are also circumcised’
Four years later, Lenna goes back, she is on holiday with her boyfriend at the time and visits her native village again. “My biological mother invited me to the circumcision of my seven-year-old half-brother two weeks later. Or, well, she asked me to come and pay for the circumcision.”
That’s what Lenna does. “I knew boys were circumcised in her culture.” During the banquet after the circumcision, they sit on the floor in her mother’s house. The conversation is about circumcisions. ‘In the Netherlands, boys are sometimes also circumcised,’ Lenna said, ‘but that is often for medical reasons. It does not happen to girls.’ “My mother laughed and said something in Sundanese, the language spoken in western Java. Sister Lemmers, who came along to translate, said: ‘She says you were also circumcised as a baby.'”
“I was completely… From that moment on…” Lenna takes a sip of coffee and continues. “I just froze. My biological mother acted like it was the most normal thing in the world.”
Born and circumcised under the tree
Sister Lemmers sees that Lenna is paralyzed by the news and continues to ask. “She asked where and when this had happened. My mother pointed to the tree by the water opposite her house. There, by that tree, you were born there and you were circumcised there.”
Girls are circumcised on the 21st day after birth, says her biological mother. That was tradition in their kampong. A piece of the clitoris is filed off and a piece of the inner labia is removed. That also happened to Lenna. “That night I had a hard time falling asleep. My and my boyfriend’s sex life was not optimal. I was always in pain, cramps, I stiffened when touched. This explained everything.”
‘I didn’t know what to do with it’
After the conversation with her mother, she doesn’t think too much about the impact of the message. “We were on vacation and it was too big. I didn’t know what to do with it.” That will come later, when she is back in the Netherlands and goes to her doctor. He refers her to a gynecologist and a psychologist. At the gynecologist she looks at herself with a new look for the first time. There’s scar tissue around her clitoris. There is now an explanation for the cramps in her stomach, the stitches in her pelvis and the tight feeling in her thighs.
Her Dutch parents are also shocked by her discovery and ask the pediatrician who checked Lenna at the time if he had not seen anything. “He hadn’t looked between my legs, so he didn’t notice anything. My parents told me I didn’t want to be changed as a baby. I screamed and kicked everything together. I was potty trained quickly, just before I was a year old. Now I think that makes sense: I just didn’t want people to come near it.”
‘We didn’t talk about sex’
Lenna never realized she was circumcised. “Girlfriends sometimes also had pain during sex. I was not looking for that.” The more she thinks about it, the more she gets into trouble with herself. She calls in sick at work. “Everything came out, anger, frustration, powerlessness.”
“My boyfriend had no idea what to do with the situation. ‘It’s your body’, he said. We didn’t talk about sex. There was a lot of love and we hugged a lot, but now I needed more. A conversation partner, a shoulder.” Partly because of his strict religious upbringing, according to Lenna, he cannot handle it well and the relationship collapses.
Recovery and Acceptance
“I lost everything. My femininity, my relationship that fell apart because of this and our house, which we had to sell because of it.” She moves back to her parents in Haarlem and eventually finds her own upstairs apartment with an older couple in Zandvoort. “I really wanted to be alone and work on myself.”
That first year at Zandvoort is all about recovery and acceptance. She goes to a psychologist and a sexologist. She joins a choir, volunteers at various events and finds another job. “I did everything I could to get to know people. They knew nothing about my past, so I didn’t have to talk about it. Within a year I was settled.”
She decides to try again with her ex. “Because there was still love. But after a year I can say: love alone is not enough. We had grown apart too much.”
41,000 Dutch girls and women circumcised
According to the Pharos foundation, 41,000 girls and women in the Netherlands have been circumcised. The World Health Organization (WHO) distinguishes three forms of female circumcision. In type 1, part or all of the visible clitoris has been removed or only the skin fold around the clitoris has been removed. Type 2 is partial or total removal of the visible part of the clitoris and labia minora, with or without removal of the labia majora. In type 3, the vaginal opening is narrowed by cutting and stitching together the labia minora and/or labia majora, with or without removal of the visible part of the clitoris. This is the most drastic form and causes the most health problems.
Bron: Pharos.nl
Sexual revolution
Then she goes on a journey of discovery, a kind of sexual revolution. “I wanted to find out what I liked and what I didn’t like. The gynecologist had seen that there were still nerves around my clitoris, so I could come. Domination isn’t really in me, but this time I wanted to control myself during sex and discovering what worked for me. Every week I went home with a different man. I communicated clearly what I wanted and they always went along with it. These men taught me what I liked and what I didn’t like. When I look back on this period, I sometimes think: oh, how bad. But actually it was also just a lot of fun. “
After half a year she falls in love with one of the men in the cafe. After a while they move in together and have a son, Benjamin. He’s eleven now. Circumcision has no effect on natural childbirth.
Dating is complicated
The relationship with Benjamin’s father ends after seven years. Since then, Lenna has survived as a single mother in Zandvoort. “I am more confident and I am now open about what happened to me. Although I still find it difficult to discuss such a sensitive subject when I meet new people.”
That also makes dating complicated. “I told a date after we slept together that I had been circumcised. He was shocked. It is such a loaded subject that lingers, the next meeting everything will have a different meaning. That happened now. He was afraid that he would hurt me It wasn’t him it was my physical attitude I’m looking for love but find it easier to have a one night stand now and then I just don’t say it I’m in control and I can enjoy sex.”
Hundreds of comments
Since Lenna lives in Zandvoort, her circumcision is no longer a secret. She has the platform ‘Being intimate‘ was founded, for women who are looking for a better form of intimacy and sexual connection. Because of the international day of Female Mutilism, she shared her story in the Haarlems Dagblad. There were hundreds of reactions from women who recognized themselves in this.
“The fact that female circumcision is prohibited in the Netherlands does not mean that it does not happen. We live in a multicultural society and it is still a tradition in many communities. Dutch girls are taken on holiday and come back circumcised.”
‘It changes your life’
Lenna can tell her story because she was adopted. “I have no family that I can offend by being open and honest. My mother has passed away, I have known for a few years now. My half-brother found me on Facebook and sent me a message to tell me.”
“By sharing it I hope to create more awareness, especially in families where female circumcision is still a tradition. I hope they decide not to have their daughters circumcised, because circumcision changes your life.”
Sunday interview
Every Sunday we publish an interview in text and photos of someone who does or has experienced something special. That can be a major event that he or she handles admirably. The Sunday interviews have in common that the story has a major influence on the life of the interviewee.
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