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There is a nappy-changing table at Bucheggplatz

30.9.2017

Translation: machine translated

Once they're bigger, the little ones, I once thought. When they no longer roll off the changing table, no longer get tangled up in cords, no longer wiggle carelessly onto the street, then I won't have to worry anymore.

Just before I fall asleep, scenes sometimes form in my head without being asked, all with the same heading: "It could have ended like this." I then imagine, for example, how I would have forgotten to buckle my boy back into his seat at the petrol station that afternoon. He would have climbed out of the car and crawled carelessly towards the exit. A few steps further on, someone would have turned the ignition key and pressed the accelerator, overlooking my child. I once woke my husband up at night crying because in my dream I had looked through the clearest water into a sea bed that was gently cradling our son's pyjamas.

I used to think that they would be bigger by now. Could stand, could walk, could wait, luege, lose, run.

But the car that my child can run over will eventually become the car that my child drives himself.

I worry today that he will accidentally put a cigarette butt in his mouth, tomorrow I fear that one day he will do it on purpose. The damn peanut that my baby could choke on, it turns into the poisonous berry that my son doesn't know how to distinguish from the fruit of the elderberry bush, it's shaped like the pellet that some of your daughters hold out in front of the club toilet, the tablet that she can't go back to sleep without.

The bathtub. Becomes a paddling pool, becomes a pond, becomes a river that tugs, becomes the sea that hurls waves at jagged rocks, becomes a lake that doesn't go a metre deep at the point where the son takes a header.

And we never once left the child unattended on the changing table. One day, our hearts are racing because we see our daughter pushing her bathing stool to the balcony just in time to check on the baby downstairs on the third floor. And then at some point you stand tiredly at Bucheggplatz, your gaze goes up the concrete cylinder that connects the bus stop with the bridge, and at the top of the narrow aluminium railing stands a rascal. As if one wrong step could break everyone else's neck, but certainly not his; he pulls himself up quite effortlessly and holds out his hand to the next person until all the louts are standing on the thin roof. They let their eyes wander briefly over the world they have just mastered, then one of them tears open a packet of crisps. <p

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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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