Origin

My daughter has a different mother tongue than I do. She is unique and separate from me in many ways. But I also recognize myself in her often. The anxious summoner of imaginary monsters I was as a child and sometimes still am; the analytic, structured and pragmatic adult I morphed into; the restless collector and experimenter I have always been. There is genetics at play, projection on my part as well, I must assume, probably mirroring habits and behaviours to each other. I observe, guide and protect, she grows, delineates and becomes.

When my father died, me and my siblings went on a sort of biographical pilgrimage through the country he was born and grew up in. It filled blanks in my head that I didn’t know were there. I picture taking my daughter on a trip through my old homes, so she would not fill those blanks by herself. To understand where I came from in time to ask me questions about it.

We would start by the old forester’s house in the hillside village, where me and my sister were born. Point at the houses that now occupy what was a vast garden. Where I chased our dogs until they chased me, where I imagined the thorny thickets to be my jungle, pretending to be Mowgli. Where, in my memory, most of my early childhood passed, when we did not track the little forest up the hills, me on my tricycle or my father’s shoulders. I didn’t go to kindergarten because I did not want to. I only visited one of the two village kindergartens for some weeks when my mother was treated for her first breast cancer. I recall very little, other than the small witch huts the teacher carved into apples, as if they were tiny pumpkins. It must have been autumn.

So we would walk through those hills, me and my daughter. I would point out a tree that looks like I might have climbed it. Be half-certain that this playground was where we would usually turn around. I would try to find the farm where the old lady watched us on some afternoons. The first person I pictured looking down at me from heaven. Although my father’s parents died before her, this cherubic grandma with a perpetual headscarf was much more of a presence in my life. We would spend hours there in between the redcurrant bushes and chicken coop. My sister and I snuck into her pantry and ate butter by sticking our fingers into the block, leaving strange traces like toothless, giant mice. The same mice who hid under the flipped stuffed white linen chair and giggled uncontrolled while their parents threw pens at each other and shouted about things we didn’t comprehend. Probably responsibility, cheating, money, my mother’s anger issues or my father’s drinking. As a depressed teenage misfit, I often imagined these years to be my happiest, before the separation, before I had to go to kindergarten, before we moved to the small city on the other side of the hills.

Growth

I would then take my daughter on the two or three hour drive to that city. The drive that was biweekly routine for my sister and me. I would tell her about the weekends we spent at our father’s, how different being in that house as a visitor felt. How I remember getting up before anyone else to watch TV instead of going to the garden. My mother despised TV, so I don’t think we had one when this was still my home, we definitely didn’t have one in the city. How the strange neighbour girl made us smoke cigarettes in the thickets and my father’s new wife made us eat up dinner. How my father would buy things for me that felt out of reach in our new life and how he did not pay child support. How, eventually, my baby brother was born. The fifth and last of my father’s children. My oldest brother was a grownup as long as I remember. My other big brother was only present as a single picture, him in front of his toy tractor in overalls. We met him for the first time shortly before our father died, he never knew we existed. My father was not good at ending relationships amicably. Eventually, he sold the house I was born in to buy a run down castle, the most consequential of his miscalculations. Those weekends felt so free then and feel so claustrophobic in hindsight.

I would show my daughter around the city where I grew out of childhood, point out the various apartments we rented, the schools I attended. I was so excited to start school. I wanted to dress up as a circus director on the first day, my mother wisely did not give in to my whining. That didn’t stop the bullying, I was too large and strange. I had some friends, but more reasons to dread school. For carnival in fifth or sixth grade, I dressed up as a tiger. The photo of tiger-me with the blue backpack grinning on my way out the door is heart breaking. Most other kids had understood that we were too old to dress up and the boys circled me, ripped off my tail and kicked me. Hyenas. I would show my daughter the parks, where we played. Where we took walks with grandma when she visited. Where we later got drunk in summer, where I walked the dog every evening with my best friend. We keep our secrets to this day, the ones from back then and the new ones. I would show my daughter the route I took to pick up R before school every day, although we went to different schools. The same route I walked a hundred times in the dark, trying to not be scared anymore, listening to Iron Maiden and writing poems in my head. I would show her the library and book shops that were my escape, a cliché, to other worlds. I would try hard to explain how this grey industrial nothing of a place still feels like hell to me, and like home. The resting place of my cocoon, before I hatched as myself a two or three hour flight away.

Becoming

I would also, briefly, show her the student town that served as the separator from my mother who lived for us. Where I tested who to be, steeped in natural science, kryptonite to the esoteric dreamers my parents were. The old military buildings on the outskirts where I disappeared in thick smoke by the forested hillside the night my father died. The eight-person shared apartment where I made friends for life that I never hear from anymore in between my exchange semester in paradise and returning there for good. To the place I read and dreamed about. Where I met her mother and her, who I live for. I hope she knows how happy I am now, especially compared to then. I hope she becomes herself more effortlessly. My mother is the first person she imagined looking down at her from heaven. I didn’t manage to explain it differently.