Wrecked

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Anytime he makes her laugh, I feel happier than I was at my own wedding. I think it’s because he’s not even her father. I don’t laugh with them, though. It’s childish humor, and only children get it. I telegraph my feelings with a put-on frown. It makes it even funnier for the child when the mother distances herself from that type of humor.

All three of us eat very quickly. Too quickly. I’ve read that you should chew your food thirty times before swallowing. But when I’ve tried it, I find it disgusting. The food turns into a thin mush that no longer bears any relationship to whatever it was I originally shoveled into my mouth. So far nobody in our family has had any stomach trouble, despite us all wolfing our food down. I’ve tried a few times to teach the kids to chew their food thoroughly, but when I don’t do it myself there’s really no point. So I don’t bother anymore. I can’t do everything perfectly. Just nearly everything.

We hop up immediately after dinner and put everything in the dishwasher. I think it’s bad for the environment that we use it daily. But my husband and others have told me that even though the dishwasher uses electricity and water and pumps out soap, it’s actually better for the environment than washing dishes by hand. I just can’t get that through my head. But I go along with it anyway, even though I don’t believe it for a second.

Protecting the environment drives me insane. A lot of the things you’re supposed to do seem illogical. I’d really like to have everything explained in detail sometime, so I’d know how I—and how we—should act at home going forward. I definitely don’t want to be one of those people who does nothing just because nobody else is doing anything. And I don’t want to fool myself, either. There’s a tendency to convince yourself of all the things you’re doing for the environment when in reality—with the things that count—you’re making things worse. This thought is unbearable. For the most part, ways to help the environment are about limiting yourself, sacrificing—you just stop doing things that other people don’t think for a minute about doing. The point is not to take yourself or your luxurious lifestyle so seriously; instead you live more simply in some areas. But making these sacrifices takes an iron will, because nobody checks up on you. Unfortunately there’s no such thing as an environmental inspector who can come into your apartment and take the dryer away because it’s both pointless and terrible for the environment. Nope. Our dryer is sitting right there. We just can’t use it. Laundry has to be hung to dry or else we are wasting energy.

The dishwasher is loaded. After each item was placed in the dishwasher, Liza said, “Okay, finished.”

And we said, “No, you’re not finished. There’s this still, and that . . .”

With kids, there’s somehow never one big task that needs to be taken care of. Any big task is divided into lots of small tasks, and after each small task is accomplished they’re ready to call it quits. Parents have to keep pushing children so that later in life, when they have their own place, they won’t live like pigs.

My parents didn’t manage to make it stick with me. My own parents fucked up royally when it came to the most important things parents need to instill in their kids—understanding money and maintaining a clean home. I wonder how they would justify that now. I doubt they’d ever accept the blame for it. Of course, I can’t ask them at this point because I’ve cut them out of my life. I’ve decided my parents don’t deserve to have children. I’m thirty-three now, and I said good-bye to them at twenty-nine. I don’t mean literally. I never said, “Good-bye, I’m cutting you out of my life now.” I just broke off contact. Forever. That means I don’t go to see them on their birthdays, I don’t send cards. I won’t be at their funerals and I won’t visit if one of them gets testicular cancer. (I think my mother has balls, too.) I won’t visit their graves. I simply no longer have parents.

Even to me it seems like something of a taboo. I’m constantly plagued by feelings of guilt. We’re all brought up in a society where even hard-core atheists are taught that you should honor your parents and so on and so forth. But why should you honor your parents when everything they did to you was bad? I constantly try to convince myself that life without my parents is better and that they don’t deserve me as a daughter. At Christmas it’s just unbearable. Even as anti-Christian as I am, I get painfully sentimental and feel in my bones how bad it is to celebrate Christmas as though I have no larger family unit—that is, without the older generation. It seems so wrong that I often break into tears, but it’s still no reason to change anything. My decision is final: I will live without my parents. It’s my right. Anyone is allowed to leave anyone else if they find out that person is bad for them. I have to keep telling myself that to calm myself down. I learned it from my therapist. Otherwise I sit around thinking what I’m doing is monstrous. Especially when I think further and imagine the same thing happening between my daughter and me. Awful.

Frau Drescher has convinced me, however, that I can’t take my daughter’s grandparents away. Despite the fact that I’ve decided they were bad parents to me, they could still be good grandparents to her. I doubt it, but fine, if she says so. Family! I have only one, so I’m by no means an expert. So I listen to her. Against my will, I arrange meetings between my daughter and her grandparents, my ex-parents. Other people have to help with the exchange, because in my pigheadedness I’ve decided I never want to see them again until they die. And not even then.

They pick my daughter up at her father’s place. I won’t take her to her grandparents. Yeah, yeah, Frau Drescher. I get it. Life is tough.

At Christmastime I have to hide from my little family the fact that I really miss my parents. Not necessarily those parents, but parents in general. The parents of one of my friends always say to her, “Whoa, you got fat!” when she comes home for Christmas. I told her just to stop going, but she still heads home for her annual dose of humiliation. I can’t understand it. But it’s possible that in her case it has something to do with an inheritance. If my husband hadn’t popped into my life and made any inheritance unnecessary, I’d probably still see my parents regularly, too. I definitely think money keeps a lot of screwed-up families together, forcing children to humiliate themselves.

I was heavily indebted to my previous husband. The first thing my new husband did was pay off all my debts, and I’ve never been able to completely cast off the feeling that he bought me from my ex-husband like an old camel. I think it’s true, I let myself be bought—because I badly needed security. I was such a mess mentally from my trauma that I couldn’t have dealt with a life weighed down by debt. Georg was able not only to fill the financial role of the father but to fill the mental role of both parents. Naturally Frau Drescher thinks this is too much pressure to put on my new husband, and she’s probably right again. But I’m still working through that with her.

I get my daughter ready for bed. For seven years it’s been the same routine, like in prison: bathe, brush your teeth, go to the bathroom. For me, brushing your teeth is a matter of life and death. I think that only low-class scumbags ever have kids with bad teeth. Especially bad baby teeth. That’s just not acceptable. You have to drastically reduce their intake of sweets. And you have to make sure they brush their teeth at least once a day. For a good long time. I’ve developed some nasty tricks to ensure proper oral hygiene despite the natural opposition of my daughter. I use the same trick that people typically use to impose moral behavior—they invent a god and say that he sees everything, so you’d better be good.

When she was still little, I talked to my daughter constantly about the tooth trolls named Cavity and Bacteria. They are children’s book characters invented by the German government or something in order to get kids to stick to a good oral hygiene regimen. It’s pure scare tactics. The book explains that the tooth trolls feed on bits of food left in your mouth and that their excretions burn holes in your teeth. I told Liza over and over, “If you don’t brush, Cavity and Bacteria will come with their hammer and sickle and bludgeon holes in your teeth—and those holes will hurt, which will mean you’ll have to go to the dentist, who will have to drill into your teeth before he can fill in the holes.”

The comparison to God is not so apt, though, since Cavity and Bacteria are real, basically, and there are real consequences if you don’t brush. With God there are never any consequences. God doesn’t see everything or punish anything—because there is no such thing as God. Liza has so thoroughly internalized the importance of brushing her teeth that sometimes, when it’s really late and I am inclined to lay her sleeping body in bed fully clothed, she wakes with a start and goes to brush her teeth because in her paranoia she thinks she’ll wake up with loads of holes in her teeth. All the better. She’ll thank me one day—or probably not. When friends of ours with kids the same age tell us that their children have cavities, I act as if it’s totally normal. But in reality I’m thinking, Oh, God, what a terrible mother she is! I get off on the fact that my child has no cavities. All because of me and me alone! Ha!

Then we go into her room and I lie down next to her and read. Right now we’re reading Gulliver’s Travels.

She asks, “Mama, why are you whispering?”

No idea. I have to think about it myself. Why indeed? “Um, to make it more suspenseful?”

“Stop it.”

I continue reading, without whispering. Then I stop at an awkward point and allow myself to be persuaded to read a little further. I learned that from Jan-Uwe Rogge. You should be hard and follow through on things, but once in a while you should also show children that they can convince their parents to change their minds, using charm and a good argument. They should learn to convince people, to change their minds. Liza learns that from me.

After reading, I sing the two songs that I’ve sung to her since she was nursing. Just so she has constants in her life—something I never had. The first song is “Sleep, Children, Sleep,” and the second is an English children’s song called “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,” which is about a sheep that takes its own wool to various customers’ homes. No idea what lesson it’s supposed to be teaching.

Finally I lie next to her in bed until she falls asleep. Our apartment is like a dungeon. There are only a few windows onto the street. The previous owners did all kinds of renovations in the building, almost certainly illegally. There’s just no way they would have gotten permits for all the things they did. Long, narrow hallways, miniature rooms without windows. Because some rooms are in the basement, it’s like a cold rabbit hole. People always get lost, even Liza sometimes. It’s a very intestinal apartment—as if the rooms and hallways are part of a giant, subterranean colon.

I’m also slowly beginning to worry whether the apartment makes us happy or not. When we moved in, newly in love, we didn’t care about the apartment’s backstory. Now that the honeymoon phase of our relationship is over, the story of the previous owners bothers me more and more. When you’re first in love, you think you are immune to anything bad in the world. Once daily life has begun to encroach on that feeling, you notice you’re not so unique, as you so arrogantly thought at the beginning. And then the things that happen to others suddenly make you think, too. In the case of the previous owners, she had money—she was in banking—and he was an ordinary worker. She started to waste away. He did, too, for a while. Then he got a liver transplant and was suddenly healthy and lively again. Then he left because he couldn’t stand her anymore.

And we moved into their apartment without even thinking about it for a second. If it were a movie you’d think, Oh, boy, there’s definitely trouble in store if you move in there. Or maybe you’d move into a place like that if you didn’t know about the history. But never with all the information at hand.

Liza lies down and acts as if she is ready to go to sleep. As a good example, I’ve closed my eyes and am breathing deeply, in and out. I learned to breathe that way from a masseuse—it’s a way to stave off panic attacks. You fall asleep better that way, too. It makes you feel as if you have your life under control. Crazy. It also shows how poorly you breathe otherwise, during the rest of the day. I listen closely to her breathing, to see whether it’s changed from the way it is when you are falling asleep to the way it is when you are deep asleep. But suddenly she speaks in the darkness.

“Mama, is Hitler still around?”

“What would make you think of that?”

Oh, man, please fall asleep. This is bad.

“At school, one of the kids said to another when they were fighting, ‘You’re as bad as Hitler.’”

“No, don’t worry. He killed himself a long, long time ago.”

“Oh, good. In that case I can fall asleep. If he hadn’t have killed himself, would he have gone to prison?”

“Of course he would have been put in prison. He killed so many people.”

“Mama, do we know anyone who has been in prison?”

“Why?”

“I’d like to visit someone in prison sometime. I want to see what it looks like in there.”

“No, unfortunately not. Maybe someday.”

I would love to take revenge on the newspaper publisher who capitalized on my family’s car accident to earn dirty money selling our blood and agony to voyeuristic readers. If I didn’t have a husband and child, I would have founded a terrorist organization immediately. I’ve sworn that as soon as my child is out of the woods, I will kill myself—which I want to do anyway—and take those responsible with me. If I get up the nerve. If the plan works and I don’t die, I’ll be put away for the murder of at least three people—as well as whoever else happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time—and you’ll have someone to visit in prison, my child. Maybe I won’t accompany them to the grave, because I couldn’t do that to my daughter or, to a lesser extent, my husband. But in any event I’ve already written in my will that Georg should seek out another woman immediately, that I want him to. He always seems to need absolution from me. He can even get together with a blonde woman with big breasts. It’s not like I’ll be around to see it happen. And it’ll happen sooner or later anyway.

Liza is breathing more deeply. I can make out her long eyelashes in the dark. It’s really funny the way every mother thinks her child is the most beautiful. Despite the fact that this can’t be true. Holding my breath, I pry my finger out of the vise grip of my daughter’s hand. Getting my finger out of her grasp while holding my breath is like giving birth. The child doesn’t want to come out. She stirs. Of course. That’s why fingers are constructed in such a complicated way. As an alarm system for when I try to escape.

She opens her eyes. Always the same sentence: “Mama, a little bit longer.”

“Yes, but let go of my finger, or else I will wake you up again when I leave.”

Always the same. Stuck in a loop, everything repeating itself. Not like the chaos I grew up in. I take my finger out of her hand. Then I lie down next to her again, but a little farther away, with no bodily contact. I know that she will now take four normal breaths and then begin to breathe deeply in and out, at which point she’ll sound like an old drunk man. That’s the sign that she’s asleep. Finally. Suddenly she shudders, but I’m familiar with this. Behind her eyelids she’s either falling or running into something. Free fall or, worse still, a collision. The same thing happens to me. And my husband. Right before you enter a deep sleep, boom, you shudder because you’re having a scary dream. I need to ask Agnetha about it—what it means and why our brains do that to us. I absolutely have to ask her that before I die.

Liza is finally asleep. I can go. I’m free, free from childcare. My shoulders start to relax. I feel like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. Kids look their cutest when they’re asleep, so innocent and smooth, like newborns. Why is it that people always hope to have kids and then, when you have them, you’re happy when they’re asleep or somewhere else? And this thought makes you feel guilty every time it pops into your head. Sometimes I use the opportunity to work on my stomach muscles—lying silently with my legs stretched out, I raise myself without using my upper body. I use nothing but my stomach muscles and I raise myself slowly, without lurching. If I’m sitting down, I cross my legs Indian-style and stand up directly from that position. Then creep out. Extra careful on the wood floor by her door—it creaks if you step on one of the planks. I let out a deep breath outside and then dash up the stairs.

Georg notices the tension in my face. “What’s up?”

The same question every night after I’ve put her to bed. “I can’t stand it when she won’t let me go. It’s a nice feeling to be needed, but there’s something awful about it, too. You know how it is.”

“Maaaaaamaaaaa!”

Fuck. She’s awake again. I run back down the stairs and snap at her. “What is it?”

Naturally I think she’s going to complain that I left too soon, that she hadn’t really fallen asleep. She often claims she hadn’t completely fallen asleep, despite the fact that I could hear that she was already deep asleep.

She looks at me worriedly and whispers sleepily, “The other door is open a crack. Can you close it? It scares me.” And then she adds, “My bum itches really badly.”

I’ve done it again. So short-tempered, such raw nerves—typical of me. Once again I have to apologize to my child.

“We’ll take care of your bum in the morning. How about you bathe early tomorrow before school? That should take care of it.”

How do you teach kids to wipe their asses thoroughly? I feel that even at thirty-three I could be better at it, so how can a kid master it? I don’t want to turn into a neat freak and constantly talk about hygiene. She shouldn’t be disgusted by her own body. She should be free. More so than I am. Nobody ever talks about the art of cleaning your bum. Nobody taught me. My mother, Elli, didn’t. We’re all Elizabeths in our family, all the women anyway. Which is the only gender that counts in our family, unfortunately. Each Elizabeth tried to bring a trace of individuality to the name. Even if we all have the same name, at least each of us has her own nickname. She told us that she never crapped and never farted. That made a big impression on me as a child, and I felt disgusted with myself because I couldn’t manage to keep myself from doing those things. She told us that her waste evaporated into the ether, through her skin, I suppose. She had learned that from her own mother, Liz, our deranged grandmother from Camden. She acts to this day as though she is the rightful queen of England. For which the name Elizabeth is perfect. She also has never taken a crap or farted. How nice for her. You can’t expect to get any help in normal human functions from those two. Just have to teach yourself.

You also can’t bother anyone else with such a nasty subject. Which means you just have to get creative and try to guess how other people do it. Earlier I would just wipe once, regardless of what came off on the toilet paper, and then pull my underwear back up. I just didn’t think about it enough. These days it goes like this: I wipe once, twice, and then I look to see what the situation is on the paper. Usually there’s still something there. So I wipe until the paper shows no sign of anything. I’m sorry, Greenpeace, but I use a lot of sheets of toilet paper that way. But at least it’s recycled paper! Which is once again about sacrifice. Everything that’s good for the environment entails sacrifice. Back when I still didn’t care about the environment, I used the thickest, softest, whitest toilet paper I could find, sometimes it was even dyed light blue. Like a typical English girl. But I made the switch and will never go back.

Once I can’t see any signs of anything on the paper with the naked eye, I do two rounds of wiping with spit. Just to be safe. Because commercial wet wipes are out of the question on both health and environmental grounds. They take a lot longer to break down than regular paper and are pumped so full of chemicals that you don’t want them near your body anyway. Better not to use them. Most of them are manufactured by the worst companies, too. I spit on a few balled-up sheets and rub myself good and clean with the saliva. Then I repeat it to be safe. Wiping with wet toilet paper creates those horrible little clingy minirolls of paper that you have to pull off with your fingers. With my fingers and some water from the sink, I get rid of those. Then I use a paper towel to pat everything dry. Done. Shipshape. And the entire process thought up and perfected on my own. I’ve never talked about it with anyone. What a crazy world. You have to figure everything out on your own.

I should have anticipated the problem with the door to Liza’s room. I’m familiar with this fear of hers, and closing that door is part of the bedtime routine. I almost never forget. Liza has two doors in her room, and the one that connects to our room has to be shut, or else she’s afraid that someone or something will come through it. She sleeps on the floor. Her room is designed to look like an ocean, with a pirate-ship bed. She could sleep in the pirate-ship bed, of course, but she doesn’t want to. She always sleeps on an air mattress placed on the blue tiles that represent the seawater. If you lie next to her, you also have to lie on an air mattress—otherwise you’ll slip beneath the sea. And ever since I’ve had to lie there every night, I have noticed that you feel oddly helpless lying there on the floor, totally defenseless. From that vantage point, the door does look gigantic and imposing, especially when it’s slightly ajar.

I’ve often worried about all the various and ever-changing children’s fears Liza has. She’s scared that snakes live in our apartment—poisonous snakes or the ones that strangle you. She’s scared that a tiger lives in our back garden and will jump into her room through the window. She’s afraid of burglars. And of people who abduct children. She’s scared of ghosts, witches, wolves, foxes, badgers, skeletons, lizards. But only at night. Never during the day. Frau Drescher says these are inner fears that children project outward. Children are afraid of the inner evil inside themselves. When they get upset at their parents and secretly wish the parents were dead, they immediately feel bad and project their evil thoughts instead onto evil animals that could attack them and hurt them. That way they remain innocent and can feel like victims instead of culprits.

My initial impulse when she first started to express all these fears was to tell her that all the business about animals in the house and garden was ridiculous. There are no ghosts, my child. Not a single person in the entire world has ever seen a ghost—at least not a person with all their marbles. But my therapist told me that is the completely wrong approach. If all I do is to constantly tell the child that all her fears are absurd—to tackle the whole thing with arguments based in reason—she’ll just stop telling me her fears at some stage. But she’ll still be just as afraid. She’ll just carry her fears around with her silently; after all, the fears are ridiculous and she won’t want to make a fool of herself. So she’ll have to get over her fears all on her own, even as they become greater and less easy to control. As a good mother, I took this to heart and immediately changed my approach. Which is to say, now I take her fears seriously. By the way, it’s something that I’ve noticed in the relationship with my husband as well as in the raising of my daughter: that the most obvious solution—even one rooted in good intentions—is usually wrong and just makes everything worse. When I look deep inside myself for a solution, I find that I’m completely off base when I go to reassure myself with advice from professionals. That’s why I think everyone with a child or a husband or a wife should go to therapy. And if you can’t afford it, at least read a handbook.