A glowing review

One of the twins looked a little upset when they arrived home from school yesterday. Anxious to know that he was alright, I picked him up and carried him up to my room. I then sat him down on my bed and asked him how his day had been, in reply to which he didn’t punch me in the face for snooping. Instead, he eventually divulged details of a school bus dispute with a couple of older girls.

From the dark recesses of my brain, I managed to dish up a whole lot of rambly advice on what to do when others tease you. Maybe he just tired of listening to a speech that must’ve reeked of after-school special, or maybe the modules I took in ‘Peacekeeping and Conflict Resolution’ are more practically applicable to daily life than I ever realized, but either way, he soon looked a little happier.

(As did I, consequently… In fact, him being upset is probably far more traumatizing to me than it is to him.)

To lighten the mood, we then decided to make some tea… because, you know, tea solves all problems. Tea is the best. I love tea. Don’t you love tea? I sure do. Pursuant to this appreciation, my mind momentarily succumbed to the sensory memory of the soothing fragrance of green tea. It was during this brief episode of absentmindedness that my six-year-old little brother suddenly uttered what may be the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.

“You are easy to love!”

Stunned, I snapped out of the tea-trance and asked him to repeat what he had just said. Maybe I’d misheard him. Maybe he was actually talking about Star Wars. Anakin Skywalker, most likely.

“You are easy to love!”, he said once more.

What a wordsmith, eh? In that moment, my heart not only melted, he also rendered all future misdeeds instantly forgivable for the next 17 years at least. What’s that, sweetums, you skinned our rabbits and made a full fur Russian Cossack trapper hat for your arts & crafts project? You knocked an elderly man unconscious with his own walking aid? You torched the entire southern hemisphere? No worries, Trina still loves you.

Looking into his giant, blue eyes, I considered the power of words. It’s funny, isn’t it, how they have the power to both crush and heal us…

BED MAMA

A charitable and kind-hearted woman, my mother has an uncontrollable habit of inviting people into our home. Sometimes for a few days, sometimes for weeks or months. For her next birthday, I’ve therefore decided to gift her with her very own B&B sign and hang up directions around the nearest motorway exits. 

Maybe I’ll name our haunt ‘BLESSED BEDS OF DIETERSHEIM FOR BRAVE BEINGS & BUNNIES’. (She loves rabbits, but I won’t get into that again.) Or simply, ‘BBDBB’. Another option might be the more succinct ‘BED MAMA’. Either way, there’s clearly still a lot to consider, not the least of which is whether I should be enabling this behaviour at all. My mother’s firmly stuck in the ferocious maw of addiction. It’s an illness, really, albeit a benign condition.

Taking her anywhere carries with it a risk of returning home with some random hobo in tow. I distinctly remember arriving at Munich airport with her a few years ago, only for her to sniff out a Dane in need of alternative lodging arrangements within seconds. It was like watching a bloodhound tracing a scent trail. Her strong maternal instincts act as a compass, or GPS even. The airport girl ended up staying with us for over half a year. My mother disputes this version of events, but who are you going to trust? Someone in the throes of ADDICTION?

She has so many guests that it’s impossible for me to keep track of. What I know of is just the tip of the iceberg, for sure. A few weeks ago my sister mentioned some guy’s name  in conjunction with our parents’ home in Munich, and though I did anyway, I needn’t have asked who he was. Entirely unsurprisingly, he was some lodger who had been sourced through a Facebook group for Danes in Munich. Who knows how many people have come and gone this way… The mind boggles!

It’s just as hard for her to stay on top of, as it is for me. There is simply no way the human brain is wired to remember so many dates and names. As we were driving back from Denmark on Saturday, she suddenly remembered that we were expecting someone the following day. “Ohhhhh, yeaaah…. Right… Bert* will be arriving tomorrow” Err… WHO? WHY? Where did you find this one then?

(Bert, to answer my own question, is a familiar face. My mother will sometimes do this. She’ll lure people back whenever the house is feeling particularly roomy.)

I enjoy teasing her, but her overdeveloped hospitality gene makes me love her even more. It’s a symptom of her unassuming kindness and eternal readiness to help other people. And, you know, sometimes our lodgers are quite the source of entertainment - need I mention this guy again?!

*Bert is not really called Bert. Obvs!

The twins were in a fantastic mood when my mother and I arrived to collect them from their school bus yesterday. You could tell, because when they get excited about something, coherent sentences are replaced by a torrent of intelligible, slurred words. Or let’s put it this way: my comprehension of Swedish is better when it’s not spoken at the speed of which a teenage boy closes down his browsers when his mother walks in. When they get excited, usually reciting something from Star Wars, their stories sound a bit like this to me:

“Sldjfiaiej[afs…. STAR WARS…… sdfjsiodfjsoeja… STAR WARS!!!!! Srfserser……. OBI-WAN KENOBI.”

Anyway, Gustav managed to communicate that he REALLY wanted to tell us something. (Which was also partly obvious from his tugging on my right arm for attention, and just generally looking as if words were about to physically pry apart his lips to escape in an unstoppable stream.)

I wanted to tell him to breathe deeply first, but I didn’t think he’d care much for my unsolicited counsel. I wondered what could possibly incite this next level hullabaloo. Was he going to give an oral presentation on how to combat Chinese cyber theft? Or was he going to prove the Riemann Hypothesis????? I looked at him with baited breath.

“A little dog found money on the floor and asked his nan if he could have it”, he started off, alluding neither to cyber war, nor prime numbers.

“His nan then told him not to pick things up from off the floor”, he continued.

“The little dog then asked if he could pick up the banana peel lying on the pavement, and her answer was no different this time.”

“Shortly afterwards, the old lady tripped and fell to the ground.  ‘Will you help me up’, she asked. The little dog then said ‘I don’t pick things up from off the floor’” my brother concluded, with barely controlled glee.

Rapturous laughter then ensued. The boys were in stitches. I thought it was pretty funny too, mostly because I hadn’t expected a punch line. Rather than telling a joke, I thought maybe some vicious brat of a fellow school bus passenger had convinced him of the existence of talking dogs. I briefly envisaged having to be the one to refute this magical, wondrous notion, and then accidentally winding up blowing Santa’s cover. And that whole tooth fairy narrative. And then he’d tell his brother, and I’d wind up having to pay for their therapy sessions for years to come.

“Gustav…” I said and looked at him concernedly. “That’s not very nice of the dog not to help his nan.”

My brother then looked at me as if I were a complete ass-clown. “But it’s NOT real. Dogs don’t talk. Don’t you know that?”

Hanging around small children, folks, is both educational AND fun.

Dear Ollie,

Today is your 18th birthday. Sometimes I think you could be at least a decade older than you actually are - not because of your deep voice or your affinity for pipes, but because you have such an old and wise soul.

You’ve always been like this. I remember your first day of school, looking as pensive and deep in thought as you do now. And then I’ll think of all the times (around the age of four, admittedly) when you’d steal mine and our sister’s dresses, play with our dolls or let us put make-up on you. While you’ve always been a smart kid, boring you have never been. Cheeky, rather. And mischievous. Around the age of three you had an interesting habit of throwing other people’s property down the trash chute. I particularly remember the havoc caused when you targeted a certain kid’s dearly beloved stuffed Tiger. I think he got on your nerves .And then there was the time when you chucked out our mother’s mobile phone, presumably in an act of defiance at the overuse of this device. Most of the time, however, you’d just throw plants off the balcony for sports.

Back then, our mother had to dress you in alarmed clothing to keep track of you when shopping in H&M. These days you’re a little more docile, and you no longer cross dress, but it only takes a bit of older sibling teasing to provoke that cheeky grin that takes me back to our childhoods. Growing up with two older siblings - both girls - must’ve sucked sometimes (and I apologize for no doubt having been a pest at times). I just hope you know how proud I am to be your sister, and I will hazard these statements knowing that my imminent death by firing squad likely awaits: underneath that hard exterior is the sweetest boy and brightest mind. You taught yourself HTML age 8 to design a website about your favorite band, and learnt fluent German when you were ten. These days you know more about politics than I ever will with a 2.1 degree in the subject, and I genuinely think (and hope) that that says more about your intelligence, inherent inquisitiveness and willingness to learn than it does about me. If you ever doubt yourself, just know that I’m not. 

All my love,

T