Be longing Belonging

This story is based on fragments of scribbles accumulated by the British-Jamaican-bred, Monica Armstrong.

It’s captured amid the heat of the economic recession in England; the reason she and her family moved to the Netherlands in the hope of a better life. The years were demanding and testing and their marriage turned out not to be as happy as the couple would have hoped for; she and her husband struggled to maintain an equilibrium to no avail.

Being a mother to young children and also a partner who worked to help provide for the family, life proved challenging beyond words. Although she was often sad and wounded from within, her camouflage smiles always found a way to make her problems vanish into thin air.

With no one to share her story, pain, and anguish within those early years, she created a diary, narrating to the Queen of the Netherlands, fictively, to give herself balance and meaning while staying in a land she had difficulty calling home. Her adventures explore the memories and the soul-searching depths of her life. During the period she lived through the entire 33 years of Queen Beatrix's reign, she began to feel a sense of belonging.

But does she really belong?