Wrecked (10 page)

The entire family said things to me like, “But your mother loves you so much.” Yeah, I said, she loves me too much—she won’t let go of me. She wants to dictate and control everything. I’m only allowed to be the way she wants me to be; otherwise I should just not be at all. I told my relatives, “She wraps her arms around me, and if I try to create even a little space between us so I can be myself, be somewhat independent, and take a step away from her embrace, I look down at my body and see that her embrace has left me battered and bruised.”

“But your mother loves you so much. She was such a good mother to you.” Yeah, yeah. When you were around she played the fun, creative clown, the unflappable, child-loving mother.
But when we were alone with her, she let out the overburdened beast. She just ran around screaming. She was always on edge. It happens with so many kids at home. I have trouble not falling apart with just one child! But I don’t fall apart, and as a result I think I’m a tiny bit better than my mother—for one thing, I don’t hit my child. I’m sure she convinced herself that she didn’t ever resort to corporal punishment back then, that she never hit her children. But she did. It goes like this, in case someone wants to re-create it at home: you hold the child’s arm tightly in the adult hand, and then, with all your might, you send a sort of jolt through the child’s entire little body. You use the whole body as a sort of whip—you push the small, easily dislocated arm, then swing it powerfully in the opposite direction. The child’s body almost rips itself free of the arm, and it hurts the child so badly that he or she can barely breathe for a quite a while afterward. I can still remember looking at my mother in disbelief after she did that to me. I could never understand how my clowning mother could do that to me.

My relatives think I’m lying when I tell them my impression of my own mother. They simply can’t comprehend that she has two faces. I learned that from my mother, too: if I’m going to get upset, I always maintain total control of myself until I’m alone with my husband, at home. Home sweet home. And as soon as the door is closed, I fly off the handle. Sometimes he won’t notice for the course of an entire evening that I’m furious. I save it up until we’re alone, so nobody else sees the real me. That’s something my mother did to us children, too. The punishment often came long after we did something bad—when there were no witnesses. The avenging angel exercising perfect self-control.

At our home we just give threats. If you don’t do this or that—usually brushing their teeth before going to bed, since we don’t have much more serious problems with our children—then there’ll be no bedtime stories. It’s worked so far.

And when I give a threat like that, which is not very often, I have to follow through. Then we start an ugly game between mother and daughter. I hate to have to do it, but I stick to it even when tears start to flow, because I’ve learned from books on child rearing that kids only change their behavior when they know their parents’ threats will carry real consequences. In fact, I think children like it when people do as they say, regardless of the context. Of course, it’s possible that I just imagine that because it’s so horrible having to follow through on threats. It sometimes causes me bodily pain when I hear her in bed crying because she wants to hear a story from her mother and can’t have one only because of a threat I made. It makes me feel schizophrenic. Often I just want to give in. As a mother. Or as a stepmother.

I often used to wish that my stepson, Max, would die in a plane crash. But so far, luckily—or unluckily, not sure which—it hasn’t happened. You see how well wishes function. I always thought that if we couldn’t get along, things would take care of themselves through a plane crash. Naturally I would help my husband through the tragedy and eventually divert him from his pain. And my daughter would help him get over his loss, as well. It would make his life simpler, too. Sadder, sure, but also simpler.

I think my desire for the death of his son is strong because I’d like so badly to get rid of Georg’s ex-partner. She regularly
presses his you-left-me buttons, and I’m always watching him to see whether he’ll fall for it. We can never be free of that—or at least not as free as we’d be if we’d had our children together.

With my ex-husband, I always hope he’ll be in a plane crash, too. Even though my daughter would lose her father, she’d get over it at some point. And I’d no longer be tied to him in this uncomfortable way just because we have a daughter together. This eternal guilty conscience, this awful and familiar pattern you always fall into—therapy-speak for repeating the same mistakes you always make in relationships.

Sometimes I even wish Liza would die. I know how it is when something awful happens to you, when you’re hit by a devastating stroke of fate. And how nice it is—the attention you get, the sympathy. You can nestle in that and do all kinds of shit without anyone noticing or getting upset at you. I think you can get hooked on that unnatural level of attention you get from people and that look of concern they all have in their eyes.

You get carried around like a hero because they think,
Look how brave and strong she is
. It’s nice to be able to be brave, to show you are strong. When else do you get a chance to do that? Exactly—only when fate deals you a blow. And because after it happens once you are always bracing for the next time—which will probably never come—you begin thinking it might be better if it came sooner rather than later. That way you no longer have to wait around dreading it.

Ever since the accident, my mother doesn’t want to hear anything critical of her. She just closes her ears or hangs up the phone, just like my best friend. That’s the advantage of such a horrible stroke of fate. You’re liberated from any criticism. But I have never figured out what the terrible blow that
liberated my best friend was. The two of them just want to be cut slack. Which is why, despite their megatrauma, they don’t go to therapy—they can’t take the criticism they would get there.

My mind and my vagina are ready for an affair. I picture the two cousins in
The Tin Drum
as my model of a nondestructive affair. They meet up regularly, nobody notices—well, okay, nobody except maybe the Jewish tin drum salesman a little bit, and the woman’s son, Oskar. But otherwise the affair works great. I don’t care whether it’s incest or not. Cousins are distant enough that it’s not disgusting. Neither one of them wants anything more than they get. They meet up regularly, have wild, intense sex, and go their own way again. They both understand that they don’t want to screw up each other’s life. Neither represents a ticking time bomb to the other. Neither of them says to the other, “Be together with me now!” Balance is important.

In their case, things go well because they have a familial connection. In my case, I’ve decided that I need to choose a man who, like me, has a lot to lose. Preferably one with a career, perhaps even a high-flying one, one that keeps him somewhat on the straight and narrow. Someone in a stable relationship, ideally married, with children, and still together with his wife and kids. I don’t want any chance of it developing into a grand love affair, like what happened between me and my husband. I want to be better for my child than my mother was for me. Meaning not constantly leaving men, moving, and living a whore’s life. All of which later screws with the child’s head. I always say,
I am the sum of all my parents’ mistakes
.

My parents’ mistakes have already subsidized Frau Drescher buying her own apartment. She once asked me during therapy whether, since my husband and I often pay for sex, she
also represents something that can be bought. And I answered, “Well, we can’t exactly pretend that our relationship has nothing to do with money, Frau Drescher. I’m not
that
crazy.”

In any event I’ll stay with my husband until I die. But I’d like to get to a point before I die where I can sleep with another man openly, not secretly—be permitted to sleep with another man. The way hippies did. And not just with one other man. With other men. I’d like to do so with as little guilty conscience as possible. I imagine that the guilt I’d feel from doing it secretly would ruin the whole thing for me. I don’t want that. I’d like to be there freely and, when I finally have another cock inside me, to be able to think,
I’m allowed. I have the coolest husband in the world, and he permits me this
.

In my fantasy, my affair would never put me under the kind of pressure that would make me leave my husband. Or move out of our home. I just want to meet a man—and he can be even older than Georg—in a hotel room, have wild, intense sex, and then go home. At home I would hope to have a tiny feeling of guilt even though Georg had given me the okay and, as a result, fall even deeper in love with him. Sometimes a bit of guilt can make things more exciting than they were before. Because you no longer take everything for granted.

I would try to rinse the sperm of the other man out from inside me, even though that’s not something my husband would expect. Then I would sleep with Georg and my heart would melt from gratitude. And all because I was allowed to have more freedom than ever before and yet still retain all the benefits of our relationship. That would be so nice. Please, my dear husband, please allow me this, allow us this. You must let me go so I can come back of my own volition.

I have to be honest: this formulation originally came from Frau Drescher. Anytime I fantasize about sleeping with other men and sometimes other women, which I do constantly, as if I’m possessed, I feel guilty afterward. I’m nicer to my husband as a result and snuggle up to him. I always imagine he can see from the blush of my cheeks what I’ve been thinking about. But he benefits from it, even when I’m cheating on him in thought only. What would it be like if I did for real? My therapist asks me whether I could just keep the fantasies as fantasies—thoughts instead of deeds. I don’t think I can do that for long. That’s not the way I’m wired, or at least that’s what I say now. Earlier I had hoped for absolute loyalty from my husband. How do you reverse that? Changed my mind! After seven years! Haha. And now?

In my previous relationship, it was easier because I could take care of my husband. But I fell in love with my current husband because he was so strong. So it’s tougher for me now, because unlike in my previous relationship I hardly have anything to take charge of or care for. Just a child and two inseparables—our pets. Two parrots with red cheeks, also known as peach-faced lovebirds or
Agapornis roseicollis
. No man to look after anymore. That leaves just myself to deal with, which is insufferable. If I could figure out a way to take charge of myself, I’d be able to divert myself from my own depression. But as it is, I get broad-sided by myself. Georg is strong and doesn’t need any help, unfortunately. And I have clearly taken on the role of the kook in our relationship, which is only heightened by his feeling of superiority. But I don’t believe he’s as healthy as he makes out. It’ll soon come out one way or the other in his therapy. He isn’t going there to get over his fucked-up crazy family; nope, he’s going there to be able to get along better with me.

The only thing I could help with—or at least show empathy for—is his back pain. But he won’t let me do anything on that front. He understands that one of the reasons I no longer wanted to sleep with my ex-husband was that I took care of him all the time. When you constantly look after your husband, eventually he becomes your child—and you don’t sleep with your own children. At least most people don’t. And if there is one thing in our relationship he doesn’t want to lose, it’s sexuality. It’s our firm belief that when that goes down the shitter, everything else also goes down the shitter sooner or later.

I hold my sticky fingertips against my butt hole and then up to my eyes. I knew it! I’ve caught four of the little bastards on the first try. On the Internet it says they come out at night and cause bad itching because they try to spawn on the anus. To spawn they need fresh air, just like us. Disgusting! I feel sick as I watch them dancing like they’re on speed, listening to techno. Man, are they weird animals. I feel under attack—I’m a host for parasites. I hate being a mother: this is exactly the sort of thing it entails. Liza got infected by some little fucker at school, then gave it to me. Right, or the other way around. Who knows what happened?

I put down the lid of the toilet with my clean hand, sit down on it, and flush. Okay, let’s think it over. There’s no way I can sleep with this itching. I want to stay up the whole night—don’t want to get these fucking things in our bed. Suddenly my daughter’s final words of the night occur to me: “Mama, my bum itches.” She has it, too. Shit, shit, shit. Are you allowed to send a kid with worms to school? If she doesn’t go to school,
I can’t work tomorrow morning. And in any case we can’t go to the brothel. Fuck. Because of the child and because of the risk of infecting someone. I’ll give them all worms. Actually quite a funny thought. Phew, what a relief! Thank you, dear nonexistent God, or rather, thank you, Mother—we’re monotheistic in our family, after all—thank you for the worms! I can’t go to the brothel. And when I notice how happy I am about this, I realize what a burden these outings are on me. I’m going to go out there now and tell him we can’t go to the brothel. Super.

Still, the fact that I have worms horrifies me. I envy my daughter, just lying there, sleeping, even though she almost certainly also has worms. There’s no way I’m going to be able to fall asleep. I feel an intense need to be consoled by my husband. He should commiserate with me and help. Mind you, what could we do now, at nine thirty at night? No doctors’ offices are open. And you don’t go to the hospital for this.

I squish the squirming worms against the yellow wall. They burst like pimples. I take some toilet paper and wipe up the mess, wrap the tape in the paper, throw the clump into the toilet, and flush again. It’s probably bad for the environment, but there’s no alternative. I wouldn’t know where else to put four dead nematodes that have come out of me. The environment is just going to have to deal with it—it’s an emergency.