We are the fortunate ones.
We have come from everywhere. We have come from nowhere. We will go where we are wanted. We will go where we are asked to go. We will submerge ourselves to create something new, something good, something better than the past. Dive deep under and never surface for air. We are mothers, we are wives, we are expats, far from home, far from our mother countries.
Still, we are fortunate. Our children are healthy and strong. They are two years old, seven years old, ten years old. They run. They dance. They shout. They lean against walls and practice their bored expression in preparation for their adolescent years. They go to forest kindergartens, exploring field and fen of the Bavarian countryside where they are growing up. They go to private bilingual schools, the very best, a European education steeped in English so we remember that we are not from here, they are not from here. We will not forget. But our children will grow and be successful. They will be international. They will be better than we ever had the chance to be.
We wanted this. We chose this. Some of us had miscarriages, one, two, three, before successfully giving birth. Some of us went through years of IVF treatments. Most people will never know these things about us. Most of us don’t even know these things about each other. Most people see us exactly as we portray ourselves: tidy, happy, fulfilled, with rosy-cheeked children.
We are far away from our own mothers. We are happy about this. We escaped them. Flew the coop. Went as far as possible. We didn’t want to raise our children the way that we were raised. We didn’t want to shame them, to blame them. Now we are alone. We would celebrate this but we can’t go out in the evenings, because we have no Oma nearby to mind our children. But we have each other for support. We tell ourselves this when we day-drink together before the school pick-up. The bright orange of the Aperol sliding down our throats like borrowed sunshine in the steadily shortening days.
This is our job. We make the kids’ snacks each day. We shop at the organic store only. We buy all-natural, gluten-free, never pre-packaged. We are optimists. We cook every night. We talk about our dinners with our friends as though it is the highlight of our day, keeping our families fed. It is the highlight of our day. Should we have careers? We left those behind when we left our mother tongue, our mother country, our mothers. Our career is in front of us, now, swinging madly in the playground, playing Ring Around the Rosie, falling down, falling down.
We wash their scraped knees. We bathe them every night. We use organic soap bars only, for the body, for the hair. Nothing packed in plastic, ever. We embrace this latest challenge, though it means we have to go each day by bike to three different grocery stores. Pedaling through snow on dark winter mornings, past the proud stone villas, past the bakeries, across the tram tracks, slipping on the icy streets. This is our job. We will save the planet. We will save the oceans. We will save our kids and their future. Their collective future, their individual futures.
When they were babies, we swaddled them and put them in cloth diapers, the modern kind with snap closures, Velcro closures, waterproof linings, cheerful colors, adorable prints. We washed the diapers daily and hung them to dry. Electric dryers waste energy. We do not waste energy. We use our own energy instead. And we laugh to think how the very same technologies that allowed us women, us mothers, to go to work, to pursue a career, to Have It All are now the technologies we must foreswear, because they will ruin the planet. So, while we are still free to Have It All, we must be willing to work for it. Hard.
(Do our husbands have these conversations? Not that we have heard or overheard.
But we are secondary characters in their lives, after all. They are virologists, archaeologists, architects. They are musicians, journalists, professors. Their work is their passion, their passion, their work. We fell in love with them for this passion, and never understood that we, too, would become an afterthought. We could leave. Some did leave. But the leaving didn’t leave them better off, we thought, nor the kids. The kids.
So we stayed.)
We pack the kids off to school each day. We make sure they have their pencil cases, their books, their sport shoes. In the spring, their sun hats, their mud pants. We help them learn how to remember these things themselves. On days they forget, we return to school to surreptitiously drop the forgotten items in their cubbies. We will not let them fail, or fall. We monitor their homework. We help them choose their extra-curriculars. At least one sport, at least one musical instrument. The more ambitious of us choose chess, coding, meditation. We make sure to fill their lives. Their lives are full to the brim. Their lives overflow with hope and ambition.
Our own lives are as bland as plain, low-fat yogurt.
Most of the time, we forget that we were ever anything else but this.
But we were. You were a poet. You were a rock star. You were a witch, chanting incantations in the woods late at night. You were a flamenco dancer, an Alpine ski racer. You were on your way to earning your Ph.D. We were on our way.
Evenings, we find ourselves curled up in a ball, sobbing, sobbing. Kids in bed, lights out, husbands out, husbands always out, following their paths.
Mornings, we laugh. We say it’s the hormones. We say we’re getting older. It happens.
We slide through darkness and try, try, to move toward forgiveness.
We go to the beer garden, down by the shore of the Isar. The kids play, down along the rocky river strand, throwing white stones in the black water. The sun’s long rays stretch horizontal. The river glitters and flows, its depths unfathomable. This river has swallowed children not much older than our own. Children who were learning their independence, who thought they could swim those depths but got pulled under. So we watch our children with an eagle eye, even while we drink, and laugh, and talk about the Summerfest, coming so soon, coming before we even know it, another year gone. The children by the water run and laugh, laugh and run, stopping to pick up stones, flinging them into the water, comparing the sounds the different sizes make, competing to see who can throw the farthest. Their innocence, we think. Their freedom. We want to sweep them up, to tell them to enjoy this, to hold on hard. But they would laugh, push us away: Silly mommy, stop being silly. And they keep on running, joyful in their innocence, this world that is their own entirely, never ours, no matter how long we may live here. For the children, this is everything, and everywhere, this is their mother country, the only place they’ve ever known. They can’t remember, can’t even imagine, would never want, anything else but this.
We sigh and we smile, wearily, wistfully, as we slide our way through the darkness, waiting to emerge.
