Review: I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together by Maurice Vellekoop

Maurice Vellekoop’s I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together is not an easy read.  It’s the story of a gay man navigating life, from his earliest childhood days growing up in a very conservative environment to trying to figure out the dating scene as a young man, and finally just trying to figure out who he is in light of all the other people in his life.  It’s not that Vellekoop was ever unloved but more that he didn’t know how to love himself and others.  You look at all of the people in his life as he shows them in the book, particularly the big influences like his parents or the gay college professor who all obviously love and care for this man but who all fail on some level to relate to him and show him how to navigate his life.  In that way, Maurice is a man set adrift to find his path, to find out who he is without a map to provide the support that he needs.  Each of these influences silently wishes Maurice were more like them instead of the person he is.  This leads Maurice to question every choice he makes.  With this memoir, Vellekoop explores these years where he was searching for happiness in an honest but regretful way; not regretful that he was gay but that there wasn’t any kind of model for him to follow.  He had to spend so many years in the relationship wilderness and it’s not until he makes the effort to focus on himself that he even begins to find some kind of happiness.  

As he’s telling the story of his life, Vellekoop is always establishing the context for the timeframe he is focusing on.  He’s very aware of the time and the framing of his life— his youth in the conservative Christian Reformed family, his time of exploration of what it means to be young and gay in Toronto, his time in New York City that should have been the best times of his life, and his retreat back to Toronto.  Vellekoop knows it is important to understand where and when Maurice is.  It’s easy to track the chronology of the story but it is that connection to where Maurice is in his maturity and growth where the external settings become part of Maurice’s internal development.  These are parts of his story and they’re important to Maurice’s growth as a person so just as he’s deliberate about his portrayal of the men and women around him, he’s just as deliberate about where he is living at each stage of his life.  

By anchoring Maurice in both time and space, Vellekoop defines his self-portraiture character by those settings. It creates space for Maurice to explore his life and himself— he has to live in these places and these times to find out who he is. Vellekoop recognizes this and uses this spatial rooting to make connections between his characters and his audience. These places represent real stages of Maurice’s life so this isn’t just some nebulous story occurring regardless of setting as many autobiographical comics do (for better or for worse.)  There’s the movement through time and space that makes up the stuff of life in Vellekoop’s exploration of his life.  

This forms the space for Vellekoop to dig into these different relationships in his life, some of which are deep-rooted while others are fleeting connections that are more building blocks for Maurice to learn about himself.  It begins with his parents and his siblings in suburban Toronto.  There’s an expectation about what a family like this should be like, from the hard-working immigrant parents to the thoroughly suburban kids, of which Maurice is the youngest.  In his parents, we can see all of the expectations that a parent has in their children, the love, and, sadly, the disappointments.  And these are confusing enough for kids but are just magnified when by Maurice’s exploration of gender and sexuality that’s there from the beginning in innocent enough ways— the friends he has and the toys that he wants to play with. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with any of this but young Maurice looks to his mother and father for love and guidance.  And when he doesn’t find those things in the ways that he expects them, it just adds to his confusion.  

It’s mostly thanks to the hindsight that Vellekoop has after 40+ years but there’s some recognition that it’s not that his parents didn’t love him because he was gay or anything like that but that they just didn’t know how to show their love.  It’s there but that’s not something that Vellekoop can even come close to acknowledging until years later.  His father, a Dutch Protestant immigrant, is more closed off than Maurice or the rest of the family needs.  His mother, also an immigrant, tries to be the good housewife and mother but even she feels like these are roles she needs to fulfill more than who she is.  So starting with his parents, there’s this internal conflict we see about trying to conform to some kind of idea of what it means to be a suburban family.  And this conflict carries over to their children as we see this bubbling up over and over again as Maurice searches for peace.  

This cycle often repeats itself in the people that Maurice meets to the point where it feels like it’s the only way that everyone Maurice knows is that way.  There’s a lot of love in this story as well as a lot of pain and it’s understandably hard for Vellekoop to reconcile these conflicting feelings.  He visualizes it throughout the book as two spirits sitting on each shoulder— a cherubim-like version of a young Maurice and a deformed blob— each whispering their worldviews to him.  While these spirits resemble an angel and a devil trying to lead him, that’s too simplistic a view of them.  These avatars do more than just simply trying to lead Maurice down the paths of righteousness and damnation; they represent more his feelings of self-love and self-worth.  They’re an externalization of his internal desires.  They still whisper to him, lead him, but both of them are steering him to a place of protection from the world around him.  They both want to shelter him from any kind of pain.

I’m So Glad We had This Time Together is the work of an artist trying to make sense of his life.  It feels like we need to go through all of this pain with Vellekoop to come out on the other side with a clarity of self. Vellekoop ends his book with steps toward self-realization and a sense of self-worth that’s not present through much of this book.  It takes the journey of a lifetime for Vellekoop to arrive at this point in his life where he can look back and see how he’s gotten there.  He takes the reader with him on this journey; we’ve grown with him and it feels like we’re also at a good place by the end of the book or at least a better place.