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Shrinking parlours, stretched minutes

18.1.2017

Translation: machine translated

In everyday family life, many concepts as we have known them up to now are completely unsuitable. The previous concept of time and space, for example, can be safely discarded.

Whenever my son started screaming as a baby, I always thought of the bath pillow I had once seen at a friend's house: Mao had been depicted on it, and my child looked disturbingly similar to the totalitarian ruler in his rage.

Not entirely unlike the pillow, my son also had the ability to expand many times over when the time was right. When he was upset, he seemed to turn into a huge, red balloon of anger that soon filled the whole room. But perhaps it was also the flat that shrank in such situations; in any case, there was no longer a corner to retreat to in one hundred and twenty square metres, one's own home, a backdrop in a David Lynch film in which the ceiling slowly lowers and walls move menacingly closer.

And then, from one moment to the next, it was over again. The furious creature that had just reached into every nook and cranny of the house collapsed, bang, to its adorable fifty-three centimetres. I looked at it for a long time, at the milky white skin, the long eyelashes, the way its chest rose and fell and finally came to the conclusion: It wasn't him. Impossible. This little angel can't rave. Maybe there were hallucinogens hidden in the millet biscuits I'd bought at the health food shop, maybe there were mind-expanding substances in the breastfeeding tea, but in any case, mum must have imagined her son's outburst.

It's like this when you have children: of all the models and concepts that prove unsuitable in everyday family life, space and time are among the first that we can give ourselves. You could swear that the child has just been screaming for three quarters of an hour, but you look at your watch: Ah, seven minutes. Eight hundred metres to the supermarket with two toddlers in tow? An ambitious distance for which you need to be thoroughly prepared. But then showering undisturbed as a new mum feels like one of those weekends you used to have to travel to Vals for. And at some point, you look at the calendar and think, bang, four years gone. It's crazy being a parent.

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Ümit Yoker

uemityoker@gmx.net

A passionate journalist and mother of two sons who moved from Zurich to Lisbon with her husband in 2014. Does her writing in cafés and appreciates that life has been treating her well in general. <br><a href="http://uemityoker.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">uemityoker.wordpress.com</a>

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Shrinking parlours, stretched minutes

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