The Critical Mom Grades Final Exams

Did you know that Salome's beloved was named "Jonathan?"  They're probably out having sushi together right now.  Or that she had him "decapitulated?" And yes, that's a coinage that covers the process of screaming, "Back, daughter of Sodom!" and then having your head served up on a silver platter and your unwilling lips kissed by the frustrated teenager.  After grading a huge stack of first year English essays one year, I was rewarded by the following: "Although my opinion is based on the way I feel, that is what I think!"  Now that, in my considered opinion, is what twelve years of being educated by North Jersey nuns can do to a kid's mind.  I took for granted the Socratic approach when I was in a nun-free grade school.  Teachers were always bothering me:  "What do YOU think?"  I always told them.  And it never occurred to me at the time that many of my compatriots were growing up with "Memorize what I tell you to think or you'll be kneeling on a window pole for the next hour!"  (An acquaintance taught by "clerics" who endured said punishment became an orthopedic surgeon).  A friend told me that in her parochial school, down the block from where we played, the nuns liked to line up three girls, so they could slap them all across the face at the same time.  Nobody asked her to "think"--and she didn't know what they meant when they did--until she got to college.  And that's the kind of student whose exams so frequently come my way.  Another example:   passionately inveighing against animal abuse, one of my First Year English students wrote: "Animals are people, too!"  But my all-time favorite misunderstanding, when I was teaching Othello, occurred after I asked students to read the following passage:

And say besides that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, I took by the throat the circumcisèd dog, And smote him, thus.

 Now, this was in the bad old days before "No Fear Shakespeare" or any Internet, and I had  explained in gory detail that Othello's telling them how he grabbed a Turkish soldier with whom he was fighting and slashed him across the throat--just as he's doing same to self.  I'd also explained that in the seventeenth century an awful lot of English people were Christian and thought of anyone who wasn't--the Turkish soldier is Muslim--as "infidels," a word I defined, along with "circumcision."   I wanted my students to be able to show that they understood the passage because my class was being observed on that day.  And I had them all prepped, had even given them lines, and so when I asked, "Well, Bob, can you tell us what these lines mean?" I had a sinking feeling as his face went blank.  He was sitting next to his also-prepped-by-me pal, to whom I turned in despair.  And the two of them looked at each other, clearly struggling to remember the right answer, the one I had given them in the previous class, and muttering and whispering together, they came up with: "Iago and Othello are circumcising a dog!"

The Critical Mom and The Measles Outbreak

An 18-month old child died of measles in Berlin, and plenty of children here have it.  Many conscientious parents believe that they are saving their childrens' immune systems--or protecting them from autism--or leading a life "close to nature" that is therefore healthier--when they refuse to vaccinate.  There's Nature dancing-with-the-daffodils and there's Nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw.  You don't get the one without the other.  I've listened to my doctor at the Traditional Chinese Medicine Center, the one whose potions and brews and acupuncture got me through menopause in a healthy way, when my gynecologist wanted to pump me full of hormones or take a knife to my uterus (yes, there are still a few doctors around here who wonder why you need that thing if you're too old to have children).  I've seen the MAD MEN episode with the kid running on crutches because he came down with polio a year before the Salk vaccine was available.  I've read Eula Biss:  On Immunity: An Inoculation (http://www.eulabiss.net/) and please--take your kids to get their shots.  After an earful from my very trusted practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine ("It's unnecessary!  It's big business!  Children die!") I went to the equally trusted pediatrician, who sighed, took off her glasses and shuffled thoughts in her head in that visibly thorough German way before saying with all her heart, "You know, I have seen a child die of chicken pox.  And I never forgot it."  My daughter got her shot that day. Yesterday I phoned the pediatrician to make sure all three kids were up to date on their immunizations. 
Germany promotes, and supports, many excellent sources of alternative medicine, exactly the kinds of things that I always thought of as the lunatic fringe when I lived in New York.  But when acupuncture works, it really works.  When chiropractery works, it really works.  When potions and herbs work, they really work.  And the folks who practice these forms of medicine belong to a cult that never lets in a grain of sugar or a morsel of meat or a dab of butter or a single fiber of polyester.  But they are nice people and they really do heal you.  They just think their way is the only way . . . some of the time.  I know practitioners of hair-raisingly non-traditional medicine who have kept wards of AIDS patients alive long after anyone thought they could, and using none of the drugs that Establishment Medicine claims are absolutely necessary.  That doesn't prove that either side is right.  It proves that there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than can be dreamt of in your philosophy.  And it proves that you, as a patient, have to listen to both sides, weigh the situation, and make up your own mind.  But if you don't get your kids their shots, you expose both them and other, often immune-compromised children, to pain, illness, and death.  

P.S.  See Roald Dahl's heartbreaking account of his daughter's death from measles--and just when they thought she was recovering.

The Critical Mom's Crock pot

Or slow cooker, if you're British or Australian.  I was wary of mine, since the first few times I cooked a meat-and-vegetable dish the carrots stayed hard--as did the potatoes--while the meat was overdone.  I've learned to avoid all those beautifully illustrated recipes on the net that show somebody throwing a bunch of whole carrots into a crock pot, topped by potatoes, topped by hunks of meat, and glorified with five-star ratings.  Nope, it ain't quite that easy.  But here's what really does work, and really is pretty fast:

(1) Boil some water in your electric water kettle and pour into a big pot on the stove.  Keep heating that as you boil another kettle.  Add some sea salt.

(2) Meanwhile, wash, scrape and slice carrots into smallish pieces, also wash and cut into slices potatoes, and throw in pot.  Let cook around fifteen minutes.

(3)  While the potatoes and carrots are cooking, slice and toss into your crock pot peppers (around two big ones), zucchini, onions, and maybe peas.  And/or sliced celery.

(4) When you can easily push a knife into the potatoes and carrots--but they shouldn't be totally soft-- drain them and add them to the vegetables in the crock pot.  

(5) Take your chicken breasts (with bones is better--the bones add flavor) or your stew meat--and brown them in vegetable oil or olive oil.  The former is currently believed to be the heart-healthy choice, but the latter has more flavor, and if you read as many online health pages as I do you know how frequently ideas about what is really heart-or-total-body healthy change.  Do trust your instincts.  I'm assuming your instincts don't run to prepared foods and sugar shock, because if they did, you wouldn't be reading this recipe, would you?

(6) Back to the water cooker.  Pour boiled water into a large coffee cup in which you've put a tablespoon of dry chicken broth and another of dry soup greens.  Stir and let dissolve, pour over vegetables.  Add more water until the vegetables are nearly covered.  Add a bay leaf or three.  Pour in a little dry white wine (around 3/4 cup) if you're cooking chicken.  Use dry red wine if you're cooking chunks of pork.

(7) Put the browned chicken or stew meat on top.  Add garlic salt and freshly ground pepper.  Cover with lid and set the crock pot to high.

Your meal should be ready in four hours.  Enjoy!

P.S. Another pleasant addition is a Hokkaido pumpkin.  You don't need to peel it.  Just wash, cut, throw away the seeds (they're no good cooked--only regular pumpkin seeds taste good baked with olive oil and garlic salt).  Sauté with a little garlic, add water or chicken broth, let cook a bit, then add to the pot.

The Critical Mom's Fifty Shades of Gray

Well, mine is actually on my very crammed bookshelf and I'm embarrassed to say that I haven't actually read it yet but it is on my list . . .  oh, is it ever.  I've been around long enough to see an amusing video of David Sedaris reading aloud from it in front of a packed crowd and stumbling over the word, "clitoris."  And to see a very charming young woman who ran several videos of herself singing (What a voice!  And so pretty, too!) a song whose lyrics belied the tune, which she had borrowed from one of my favorite singers:  "GIRLS JUST WANNA BE NUNS!"  I thought she was really hip until one day she related an anecdote about a friend saying she was thinking of reading Fifty Shades of Gray.  The singer advised us that she'd said "yeah, go for it!" but then dipped into the volume herself.  Her face changed.  She seemed outraged.  But she didn't say it was bad or evil or disgusting: she said it was "addictive!"  Well, so is life.  Food.  Sex.  I wonder about that word, "addictive" and what she really meant.  I can't ask her because she's in a Carmelite nunnery somewhere not, in my view, living her life with the fullness that nature intends.  I might diagnose her as being addicted to asceticism or to guilt or to her mother's ideas about the nunhood being a good place for a young girl.  There's really no accounting for taste, and that's the truth exposed by audience reactions to Fifty Shades of Gray.  I came across a rather brilliant feminist argument in the Atlantic saying that what's worrisome about the book is the portrayal of women agreeing to sex that they're not happy with or comfortable about.  Is anyone really suggesting that the book advocates that they have this sort of sex?  I think that instead, Fifty Shades of Gray is geared to those who find exactly this portrayal its main selling point, and exactly because it's all in a book, not in real life.  Today I was in Kaiser Foods gathering carrots and parsnips and creamed mushroom soup in to make a crock pot meal, and what should appear, like the big bad wolf waltzing up to Little Red Riding Hood, but a massive display case of the book strategically placed near wine and sweets.  My ten-year-old daughter wandered up the aisle in search of chapstick, so I didn't pick up a copy and flip through it to see if the German translation is just as dirty, but I did think wow, porn's mainstream!  And what, the nun might ask, if my child had asked about the book?  I would have said, as I have now said to her about a number of books, "you might like it, but probably when you're over twenty-five."

The Critical Mom's Emergency Room

Sometimes, it pays to live in a small city. 
How well I remember the time I stepped on broken glass, cutting my foot badly, on the afternoon of the day I was going to fly home to Germany from Paradise, aka New York.  The wonderful au pair scooped up the two-year-old, said, "I'll finish your packing!  Find a doctor!  Go!"  so I limped out of the house, thinking "at all costs I will avoid the St. Luke's emergency room down the block."  I stopped at the office of an ophthalmologist whom I'd known since I was six.  Could he possibly just stitch up my foot or give me a tetanus shot?  The secretary wouldn't even let me say hello to him.  I'd been out of the country too long to realize how much things had changed.  So I sat in the St. Luke's emergency room among the teenaged members of the oldest profession and the very old alcoholic men with gruesomely infected feet and what sounded like tuberculosis . . . they were coughing their lungs out in my lap.  A fist fight broke out among the girls . . .  "YOU da @#$%^Y&UI ho!" "No, YOU da #$%^Y&UIOP{!!! ho!"  I moved out of the way, not before hearing cuss words that even I, a  woman of forty-something at the time, had never dreamed existed, but the security guards intervened.  Suddenly I did a horribly middle class thing.  I got up, went to the secretary, pulled out my credit card, and said, "Please let me see a doctor.  I'll pay right now."  And they glued my foot together.  And I paid.  And I hated myself, but I made the plane.  The whole thing took around five hours.

Fast forward to today.  The two year old is now a strapping sixteen, and I was getting a quick dinner ready for him, his brother, and his sister, and their friend.  Guilty about the frozen pizza, I thought I should at least slice some cucumbers before zipping out to a concert with my husband, and even though we had exactly four minutes before I had to be out the door, I grabbed a knife and inserted it in the plastic wrap covering the cucumber, as I have done on numerous occasions.    Only this time my hand slipped and so did the knife, and blood spurted from a spot between my thumb and forefinger.  I closed the wound with a bandaid.

"Mommy, forget the concert!" said my sensible kids.  "Just go to the emergency room!"  I knew they were right but my voice teacher was giving the concert, and I really wanted to hear it.  So I went.  With my husband.  Who didn't really have time to go, since he had to drive the kid's friend to the airport . . . but it was great, and on the way home to drive the kid he dropped me at the emergency room.  

"Augenblick!" (Just a moment!") said the nurse as she pointed me toward the waiting room.  She was sympathetic, too.  And only about forty Augenblicks later (I was expecting at least four thousand Augenblicks) they treated my hand.  And here I am, typing with it.  But it still hurts, so I'll stop now.  But it's got a big bandage on it, oceans of disinfectant and everything!

The Critical Mom's Rejection Letter

 . . .  For a memoir from a rather well known and respected literary journal, (circulation 2,500) once deemed "the most valuable journal in the U.S. today" : 

It was a fascinating read; it just was not for us.

So who is it for?  If it's so fascinating, why aren't you publishing it?  These are not the questions that rejection letters answer, of course.  Usually I get the form letter instead: "not right for us at this time."  Actually, I think I'd prefer that, since what I did get sounds like at least one of the following:

(1) It's good, but we don't do scandal, and shame on you.

(2) You made spelling mistakes, but we'd like for you to feel good. 
(3) This is weird and disgusting and makes us squirm when we read it.

What they wrote praises with faint damns. But if interpretation (3) is correct, I think I'm on the right track.  I just printed the thing out and re-read it and feel not inclined to change One Damn Thing.  So I'll just Google around until I find a magazine with a circulation of more than eight (yes, 8) readers.  Since my last memoir appeared in such a publication, I think I have a right to move up to one with a circulation of at least twenty-five, if not 2,500. 

P.S.  Last night when I was asking my very sleepy husband what the SAM HILL "a fascinating read . . . not for us" could mean, and he was saying "I don't knowwwww"  we both feel asleep.  And he dreamed a dream, a very odd dream, he reported in the morning, that we were living in The White House, and although Obama was still president, he was living in some little guest house on the grounds, and sitting around in his pajamas answering a call from one of us about not publishing Adrienne Rich because she might offend guess who?  MOI.  I love his sympathetic dreams.  When I was pregnant with our first child, he dreamed his mother would have the baby for me, so that I would not experience labor pains.

Well, in the wake of all this, I changed three words and removed one, and I'm going to ship the thing off again.   Now is the time to chant mantras like, "The Iowa writers workshop rejected Gary Shteyngart!  And they didn't think Sandra Cisneros had any talent!" 

P.S.  Then I looked the thing over.  Trimmed a word here, a paragraph there.  Oh, that paragraph really doesn't belong there.  It belongs here.  Or out.  Or no, half of it stays in and the rest out.  

This is why it is much harder to write something that is 4,000 words instead of 11,000.

The Critical Mom Turns Fifty-Eight

My husband makes the best marble cake I've ever had--sweet, flavorful, dry but not too dry. Perfect with whipped cream.  Breakfast with birthday cake and everybody giving me favorite things--dried papaya (which is delicious with a little goat cheese and that sweet, but not too strong Macedonian  König Arthur red wine from Aldi.)
My tastes in wine are close to those of Elaine May.  In A New Leaf, the most brilliant screwball comedy ever written by a woman--easily rivaling Woody Allen--she plays a character whose boyfriend is trying to impress her by wondering whether the 1955 vintage he has just ordered is better than the 1953.  She takes a sip and shrugs.  It's "nice," she concedes, but "have you ever tasted Mogen-David extra heavy malaga wine with soda water and lime juice?"  she asks, expounding on the delights of the Mogen-David wine cooler even as he reflects on how he spent his very last dime on the expensive heliotrope that sits all but untasted in her glass.  Yum.  I know just what she's talking about.  Sweets are still one of my favorite things.  Which is why I weigh six kilos more than I did when I was young, and why part of every New Year's resolution is to lose them.  But now, lose 'em or not, I'm going to get strong:  ballet Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.  The gym Tuesdays and Saturdays.  Belly dance Thursday evenings.  Tap on Fridays.  No osteoporosis for me!
Although I'm in a pretty good mood for me, I'm still wishing I were as wonderful a writer as Gary Shteyngart, as I gulp down his latest, a memoir called Little Failure.  The title resonates, since I often think of myself as a big failure.  With each passing birthday, I daydream about getting to re-do my life, rectifying all mistakes.  I imagine otherworldly post-life scenarios, in one of which I die, only to wake up as some tiny toadlike creature in a basket in a market somewhere, and remember immediately how I got there.  I got there by having purchased the life that I just lived, and "it was a bargain."  I learn that I paid to have "some" happiness, because I couldn't afford to be happy all the time.  That's for rich little toad creatures, who purchase, at ten times the sum I offered, lives that stay charmed from start to finish, including deaths that are painless.  I, on the other hand, have purchased the deal that starts with the rotten childhood, makes its way through the rottoner adolescence and the miserable mid-twenties and thirties to the life beginning at forty phase, when things really start to get better.  My imagination hasn't yet produced an answer to the question of how the little toad creature (some sort of a soul) acquires the currency needed to purchase a life, but I do daydream about the possibility of re-living the very same life and improving it (when I was eight I would have done this . . .when I was fourteen I would not have done that . . . had I known more about babies when my firstborn emerged I would have . . . .) as opposed to moving on to an entirely new life and forgetting the old, even moving on to an entirely new language, solar system, or gender.  But each beloved person in this life reappears in a new identity in the next . . . a child might be a father, a mother a sister or daughter.  Then I start to play with the idea of karma:  you store up points for whatever the fates decide is doing good, or you lose them for causing harm.  I think of the end of C.S.Lewis's The Last Battle, a judgement-day scenario in which Aslan glances into the faces of all creatures passing him as they leave life, sending those who have followed his rules to some glorious heaven containing everything they want, and the others off into oblivion.  Or maybe you'd be reincarnated as a toad.  And then a prince would kiss you.  Or vice versa.  These are the thought of someone determined to publish her novels and writings, perform in a few more tap dances, and generally live it up before hitting that most sobering of birthdays--sixty.  I should be so lucky.

The Critical Mom Crusades for Socks

As any mother knows, doing the laundry involves crouching on the floor in bathrooms and bedrooms where the dirty laundry piles up in corners, and pulling the inside-out underwear off the inside-out blue jeans before dumping both in the hamper you're taking downstairs to the laundry room.  But before you get to cart all that stuff down to the laundry room, there's hauling the bunched-up socks from inside the knee area of the jeans, where they've burrowed down for the winter after the kid stepped out of his clothes.  Or sometimes they fall out while you're picking up the jeans and skitter across the floor as if they had legs, landing right underneath the used dental floss that is somehow dangling from the wastebasket and clinging to it for dear life.
So, memories of helpful hints from Heloise and others dancing through my head, I picked up some of those small mesh bags with zippers at Tchibo, intended for laundering delicates--or a load of socks.  Each child--and each has frequently complained I DON'T HAVE ANY SOCKS, MOM!  WHERE ARE MY SOCKS???--received two of these, plus instructions on how to place their dirty socks in them.  I even laundered a whole set of my older son's new socks in one of them, returning said socks to him clean, in the bag, and he was very happy indeed.  All three children have received two or three reminders from me about using those bags, which they seem most pleased to possess, and have even hung on their doorknobs.  But yesterday, today, and the day before, the socks have taken control again . . . .they're back in the knees of the blue jeans.  They're barricading themselves behind doors.  They're mobilizing themselves for an all-out attack again.   But still, I've always had a whole bunch of them cleaned and folded and piled up in a laundry basket in the guest room, although finding a pair that actually fits anyone in our family involves a major excavation.  
Socks of the world unite.  You have nothing to lose except your owners.

The Critical Mom Goes Belly Dancing

I've always wanted to try it.  But up to now, since my options for dance classes were limited, and since I had to choose between ballet, which really does keep you in shape, and belly dancing, I took the ballet, which I could only do twice a week anyway 'cause that's all the local dance school offered.  But then my life changed.  First, I encountered a dancer in the local Lidl.  He was standing on line ahead of me and I almost changed lines, thinking "here's a lunatic."  He seemed to be jogging in place but his face suggested that he might be on drugs, so I'm-in-another-world were the eyes and the slack-jawed concentration.  Then he did a plié to the side and it hit me like the proverbial bolt of lightning:  "The young man is rehearsing a dance he's going to perform while he's waiting to buy his cream cheese and potatoes!"  I've been seeking--for a very long time--a decent dance school--the kind that offers ballet classes lasting an hour and a half at the least, and follows the traditional exercises, including grands pliés.  Now or never!  I thought to myself.  And I asked the young man, in my terribly accented German, if he were a professional dancer.  He answered in another accent--clearly not German, and we got talking, and it developed that I could probably attend the school he's attending which is technically closed to outsiders.  Thanks to him I can go there, and take the best ballet classes I've found anywhere in this godforsaken region.  And yes, he was rehearsing a dance but no I did not get to see it, since my daughter had a performance that day too.    But now that I get to go to these very good ballet classes I'm not stuck with the ones at the other place, where they make you spend ten minutes doing aerobics before starting the barrework and don't do grand pliés.  
So now was the time to try belly dancing, which also fit with my New Year's Resolution of doing core-strengthening exercises in order to regain the abdominal strength that I lost after three C-sections.  And I'm doing the core strength exercises at the University gym, and NOW I'm doing belly dancing.  Which is a lot more than strengthening your core muscles.  I always knew it would be fun--and that I'd get to wear colorful scarves and sequin-covered outfits and shimmy around the dance floor.  But I somehow hadn't grasped (not having seen enough YouTube videos) how very sensual, indeed just plain sexy, it is.  Wow.  But what gives?  How is it that Egypt, a country that practices female genital mutilation on more than 97% of its women--the Unicef statistics from the summer of 2014 say the practice is "nearly universal"--at the same time creates a culture in which women dance in a style that, if you've still got your clitoris and also have really good technique, which I can see takes years to develop, must be orgasmic?  Where do Egyptian styles of "purity" (the most frequently offered rationale for the cutting)  coincide with belly dancing?  Is my teacher, who is in her fifties like me and who was raised in Egypt, among the women who were cut?  Another question I can't ask, like most of the questions I want answered.  Are belly dancers women who are shimmying toward a lost sexuality?  Trying to gyrate into something that's been cut out?  And looking very beautiful while they do so, too.  Well, belly dancing is a technique-- I had not realized how much it is really a technique, as demanding as ballet--and one I sure can't wait to develop.

Paris, the City of Haters, and the Critical Mom

I'm with the folks saying, "Je suis Charlie" ("I am Charlie.)  The Americans are saying they're "not afraid," but that's whistling in the dark.  We're all afraid, and we all want our voices heard.  We want to tell the truth, and we want to live to say we told it.  We are these twelve brave people who dared to speak the truth even though they'd already lived through an attack and even though, maybe, they knew their days were numbered.  The words of the courageous Malala--"they can only shoot a body.  They cannot shoot my dreams," come to mind.  I wonder what she'd say about all this?  Charlie Hebdo didn't target Islam any more than it targeted Christians and Jews.  Charlie Hebdo just didn't go for religion in general.  I get this!  Oh, do I ever get it!  But the problem goes way beyond saying Judaism is dreck and Christianity is dreck and oh, Islam, too.  The problem is usually much more personal.  It starts in families.  It starts with being the one who utters the family secret out loud.  Maxine Hong Kingston's bestselling autobiography, The Woman Warrior, begins with "You must not tell anyone . . . ." and it's her mother speaking and she's warning and threatening her daughter with the tale of an aunt who got pregnant out of wedlock and ended up drowning herself and her newborn child in the family well.  The villagers had violently shown their scorn, destroying the family's possessions, animals, and much of their food.  The aunt died of shame.  We all die of shame when we don't tell the truth.  Bernadette Devlin, Britain's youngest MP at 21, in 1969, remarked that "to gain that which is worth having it may be necessary to lose everything else."  I don't go for extremes and I don't go for violence and I wouldn't have gone on a hunger strike to prove a point--this quotation is often taken to be a reference to Irish Revolutionary hunger strikers--but I do go for telling the truth, at the very least to myself, and lately, far more openly.  What if my family goes online and comes across the stuff they said that I invented?  Well, the farthest I'll go, to save myself agony or lawyers or both, is to call some of my memoir "fiction."  (after all, the family's been calling real events "fiction" for years, and went into a real rage when I remarked on some undiscovered realities about my grandfather and my father and my uncle.)   If telling the truth means giving up my original family, well, it wasn't much of a family to begin with, but it was everything for the longest time.  And I would never have the strength to tell the truth if it weren't for the family I chose--my husband and children, as opposed to the one into which I was born.   I don't expect to be shot, but I suppose I'll be ostracized.  Ostracism is something with which we can all live.  But murder, cold-blooded murder of those who reject or ridicule your god, your saints, your folks, or your beliefs, kills you, not those who laughed at what you cherish.  That is the truth that I wish the Paris killers could absorb.  Longue vérité en direct! (Long live truth.)  It's always mutating.  It's never stable. It's a living, breathing thing.  A bullet kills us--not it.

The Critical Mom and The Champagne

So far, I'm only anticipating it.  While we were watching Dinner For One, Germany's traditional New Year's Eve ten-minute tribute to Carpe Diem, we had sherry, because Miss Sophie, in the film, has sherry with her mulligatawny soup.  Then we had a little red wine with the appetizers and the baked nachos (my husband makes them with grated Gouda, chopped scallions, and salsa).  A few people are shooting off firecrackers already (yes, you can just buy them at your local Aldi's here . . .) but we're waiting until midnight.  And it's only 9:52 as I write, and two children have said, "Wake me up before midnight, Mom," and my husband is snoozing on the couch.  We did watch The Lord of the Rings and a little CNN, but now I'm just answering e-mail and reading one of my favorite blogs, "Little Earthling."  And I'm remaining upright, although I may just take a little nap.  Our eldest is in China, and sent a Whats App of himself and the other members of the choir singing "Clementine" in Chinese and wishing us Happy New Year.  It's already 2015 in China!  I'll top off the evening with a return to my blog as soon as I've had my champagne.  But now I've got to get the laundry out of the machine.  Oops, didn't manage that--we were watching 2012, apocalyptic enough for the end of the year.  
And now midnight has just come and gone.  I've had my share of champagne, oh bubbly!  Bubbly!  It goes superbly with the fireworks, some of which, thrown enthusiastically by my twelve-year-old, landed not in the road but the neighbor's garden.
"Not in the neighbor's garden!" we yelled.  But that's where the next one went, too.  The neighbor came out on his balcony.  Good thing he wasn't in the yard.
Now, one more sip of champagne, and then I'll toddle off to bed.  Happy New Year!

The Critical Mom's Post-Christmas Moods

It's lovely, the tongues of light on the windowsill from our tree--the electric candles flickering away, and on the table a forgotten glass of white wine, from which, yesterday, someone sipped.  I take a nap, and when I wake up, two of my son's friends, ages eleven and thirteen, have shown up hungry.   They're on a court-mandated weekend visit with their dad, who lives up the hill and who forgot to buy food or didn't bother, and is on his second or third volubly cantankerous relationship with a mail-order bride from a desperately poor country somewhere in Asia.  His first wife, the boys' mother, is in another city with her very wealthy new spouse ("my husband is well-situated," she said timidly, translating from German into English.  In German, that sounds normal but in translation it sounds like a line from a mid-Victorian penny dreadful).  I wonder often how she ever ended up with the boys' father, that ex-football professional whose charming smile is a dead giveaway.  But maybe it wasn't so obvious to a naïve and very Catholic sixteen-year-old who got knocked up.  This is how I imagine things.   But I can't ask and she'd never tell.
We gave the boys pumpkin soup, Bratwurst, and rice and they seemed very cheerful and stuck around to play computer games.   Their new stepfather, whom they hate, provides a lavishly luxurious separate apartment for them and their mother, and spirits her away to romantic getaways while the boys are visiting their father.  When I asked my husband whether we should tell the mother that the dad hadn't been feeding them he thought no.  She may know, but she'd resent it if we did, and the boys don't look underfed.  Back when the mother and the estranged dad were still living in the same building, the dad used to drop them off here and forget to pick them up   Then I wouldn't be able to reach either parent. 
We've got it good.  Our Christmas proved remarkably peaceful.  Long ago in a galaxy far away I belonged to an internet forum that provided humor to anyone who knew they had to invite a certain relative for Christmas or pay big.  You'd pay big anyway, but you'd pay bigger or sooner if you didn't invite her.  I've been over the river and through many dark woods seeking a substitute forum, but nothing else is quite to my taste. 
A Hallowe'en card in which said party joked about haunting us put me on edge:  she's in her nineties (but will probably outlive me, especially if I spend too much time with her) and I'd like for the kids to inherit something.  So we invited her.  Never mind that during the last visit she started squeezing my then five-year-old daughter's thigh in some trancelike return to her own abuse as a child.  Never mind that my eldest, in a rare moment away from her during that exhausting visit said, "Mom, you grew up with that?  You know, I kind of admire you."  Never mind that the minute I invited her I came down with bronchitis.  I've been planning dinner parties for when she's here--her visits are always easier when I pad the room with plenty of other people.  
But there's been a stay of execution:  she can't come, because of an ailment I decline to disclose.  Isn't that awful?  Isn't it the worst thing in the world?  Where's the champagne? 
 P.S.  Happy New Year, Danu Morrigan

The Critical Mom and the Ketchup

I wasn't around for the show--I was in the ladies room--but by the time we were in the car, I was learning that "if they did find your cell phone, the mess was such that they would probably throw it away," and "now, Mom, just let me tell you my side of the story," accompanied by the twelve-year-old's hysterical giggles.  It was worth the giggles, but I guess we'll never dare set foot in that restaurant again.  Apparently, during those few moments when I was answering a call of nature, the twelve-year-old squeezed on the plastic ketchup bottle, "not because I wanted any on my Schnitzel, mom, but I just thought it was like only half full and I was bored."
Hee, hee, hee.  Hee, hee, hee.  He has to stop talking because he's laughing so hard he can't breathe. 
"And then what happened?"
"Well, then I really just squeezed as hard as I could!  I mean, I REALLY thought it was empty!"
"And then the fireworks happened?" asks my husband.
"Did you see it?" I asked, ready to inquire why he hadn't stopped our little force of nature.
"No, but I saw the results.  Quite impressive.  The white tablecloth.  The wineglasses."  An entry might have been made in the Guinness Book of World Records on ketchup-squirting.  But we are all safe and sound, and it's almost Christmas, and there are good detergents out there among the Bavarian housewives, "and REALLY, Mom, IT WAS AN ACCIDENT!"

The Critical Mom's Seasonal Bronchitis

At least I hope that's all it is.  Six years ago I went through pneumonia and occasionally I have a touch of asthma.  Besides, I have already consumed more than my fair share of antibiotics this year . . . what with the revenge of Atahualpa in Peru, the trips to the local botica where they handed out Cipro like candy the moment they saw that I was 
(a) a non-native speaker and 
(b) writhing with embarrassment as well as the need to use body language to tell them what was the matter with me.  
Then I got over that bout, but at the end of the trip there was all that campylobacteria that I apparently consumed in the local cilantro . . .or the ice cubes . . . or something; anyway Cipro down the hatch again.
So I'd like to avoid a third round of antibiotics now, especially since the Internet tells me that even if you're coughing up yellow goo, it's probably viral rather than bacterial, so probably won't be chased off by the Clarithromycin that I do have some of, but haven't yet ingested.  (I read all the possible side effects . . . oh, is that ever a sign of middle age, and they are scary.)  Maybe the onion poultice I tried will work.  (All ya gotta do is chop an onion or two, simmer them in water until they're soft, lift them onto a clean kitchen towel or cloth, fold them in securely as if you were wrapping a tortilla around a gooey mess of chicken and vegetables, and slap it on your chest for as long as you can stand).  I did that twice today.  I'm going to add fresh ginger next time.  I'm taking Sinupret and Umckaloabo.  My chest is marginally clearer; I hope I don't have to go for the hard stuff, but it is nice to know it's there.  I'll try a little red wine, too.  Any reader know of any other home remedies?  

Day 2:  (Actually, I've been sick for five days, but at first it was "just a cold.") I caved in and took the Clarithromycin.  But before I did, I tried  yet another onion-and-fresh-ginger hot poultice.  And it did have some, minor, effect.  As did the gallons of fruit tea with honey, hunk-of-ginger-in-boiling water, coffee (strong) and breathing exercises.   Yes, I did give the natural way the old college try . . .  meanwhile, two hours after 500 milligrams of the magic bullet, my chest already feels clearer.  Well, what would one expect of somebody who grew up practically teething on antibiotics?  That was just the way New Yorkers did things back in the sixties when I was growing up.  Every cold was accompanied by a bottle of syrupy, green Chlorotrimeton, an antihistamene, plus Penicillin.   (I remember those Pen-Vee tablets.) Strep throats, ear infections . . . as our jovial pediatrician said, "Ear infections pay the pediatricians rent."   I had a childhood of asthma and generally poor health, which may have had something to do with all that green syrup and antibiotics, but my immune system, pampered, or weakened, seems to need the stuff now.  Go figure.  Now that I'm feeling better it seems so very unfair that I'll have to relinquish my evening glass of sweet red wine for the duration of the antibiotic regimen!  But okay, yes indeedy, of course I'll do it . . . especially since I ought to be well by Christmas, when I plan to indulge in cookies, too.

The Critical Mom and Richard III

Now, folks, what I have in common with Richard III---drumroll:  I do have something in common with His Majesty--is scoliosis.  He of the twisted spine!  Yes, that was one of the characteristics that the anthropologists trusted the most when they identified that fifteenth-century skeleton found beneath a parking lot and said to be that of Richard.  Then there's the intriguing find that he was illegitimate.  There's a trait I'd like to share with him.  Could I really be the child of my mother and my father?  I'm afraid neither of them had the energy for an affair during their marriage, which took up, really, absolutely all of their time.  But it would have been so nice to have discovered some noble, or in Richard's case ignoble, but at any rate, different ancestral line, in my case.
In Richard's case the different ancestral line . . . the one apparently proving that he seems not to have been of the royal house from which he claimed to be descended  . . .  hmmm, did he know?  And was that why he was always so evil and grumpy, at least in Shakespeare's version of him?  Shakespeare really knew how illegitimacy could disappoint one.  Think of Edmund in King Lear:

Thou, nature, art my goddess. To thy law

My services are bound. Wherefore should I

Stand in the plague of custom and permit

The curiosity of nations to deprive me

For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines

Lag of a brother? Why “bastard”? Wherefore “base”?

When my dimensions are as well compact,

My mind as generous, and my shape as true

As honest madam’s issue? Why brand they us

With “base,” with “baseness,” “bastardy,” “base,” “base”—

Who in the lusty stealth of nature take

More composition and fierce quality

Than doth within a dull, stale, tirèd bed

Go to th' creating a whole tribe of fops

Got ’tween a sleep and wake? Well then,

Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land.

Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund

As to the legitimate.—Fine word, “legitimate”!—

Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed

And my invention thrive, Edmund the base

Shall top th' legitimate. I grow, I prosper.

Now, gods, stand up for bastards!

Just think what being a bastard can do for you:  you worship Nature, instead of God, and that, back in sixteenth-century England, was probably a hanging offense.  (Nature was after all female.  And pre-dated Christianity.  She played chess with the pieces of Stonehenge).  Plus marriage ruined sex, Edmund was claiming.  Bastards were the only ones, he believed, whose parents had enjoyed producing them.  Which leads to his final line:  "Now, Gods, have some erections in support of bastards!"  So to speak.  A line which "No Fear Shakespeare" glosses most bowdlerizingly as "Three cheers for bastards."  Yes.  Well.  

Back to Richard:  Oh, What if?  What if not only I were illegitimate, like Richard, but what if he were the current queen's great-great-great-somethingorother?  Would the descendents of Mary, Queen of Scots, if she had any, get to charge in and claim the throne?  Or some other even rowdier ancestors?  Stay tuned.  Hala Gorani just trotted us all through the basics on CNN, but I can't wait to hear what happens next. 

The Critical Mom and Her Mink

Nothing says warmth like mink.  And the moment I found my mink, hanging there in the Second Hand Store for 249 euros, approximately my clothing budget for the year, I scooped it up.  A long, sleek, dark thing in which--were I taller, younger, and far more glamorous, and it a bit longer--Helmut Newton could have photographed me.  Even better,  I can indulge in imagining him photographing me frolicking about in it . . . which is almost as much fun.  So today, a very cold day indeed, a cold that goes to the bones and frosts the air the moment it leaves your mouth, I put it on and wore it as I walked up the hill to the tram stop . . .  now mink is elegant but sweat is not; it was almost too warm then . . . as soon as I had to stand around and wait for the tram, however, it reverted to coziness.  And I can even imagine that I look beautiful in it, when I'm not worrying that some animal rights activist will come up from behind and slosh red paint all over it and me. 
But I tell it not to worry.  We're pals.  It wraps me up, and I love it.

Down by the English Teacher's Pronunciation with The Critical Mom

When my kids come home from school with their stories, I wonder how anyone ever learns English around here in Deutschland.  At a good gymnasium too--in fact, they're losing students because parents say they make the kids work too hard.  I don't think they make the kids work too hard . But I wish the teachers would work a little harder on their English pronunciation.  For example:
 "Guess how the teacher pronounced the word "pet," Mommy?"
As in,  "Do you have pets?"
"She pronounced it "pat." 
 I could see how that would lead to confusion .  . . with folks patting their pats instead of patting their pets.  Or even petting their pets.  Or pats.
But the one I liked the most, recently, was "Bowel" for "Bowl."  As I said to my kids, "you really would not want your bowel anywhere near your bowl."
But I do wonder, sometimes, hearing "wizards" for "whistles," and "cloth-ehhhs" for "clothes" and so on, why nobody ever uses their online dictionary, which gives you (YOO-HOOO, GERMAN TEACHERS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE!) and I do mean YOU, a little recording of the word of your choice being pronounced by a native speaker.  You get to choose between British and American pronunciation.  Take the latter, it's cooler, and for your information, does not (and never did) sound like chewing gum. Actually, all ya gotta do is Google "pronounce raucous" or "pronounce espy" or even "pronounce lettuce," which I've noticed grade school teachers pronouncing "Let-oooooss."   It wouldn't hurt to go to English language websites for information about commas, either.

The Critical Mom's Pre-Thanksgiving Jitters

There's always the moment when I finally find the fresh cranberries.  One year my husband brought home two jars of "Preiselbeeren" and I said "Noo! Nooooo!" but then somehow we found fresh ones.  Ocean Spray!  Without the logo.  I guess the only source in the world for fresh cranberries is that big bog on Nantucket.
This time at least nobody had to drive for an hour.  I found them, actually, on my fourth try, and that ain't bad.  They weren't in Lidl.  They weren't in the Edeka at Kaufhof because it's no longer there--they seem to have dismantled that particular link in the chain of a very popular grocery store.  They weren't in the Edeka on Gemarkenplatz.  But there they were in Rewe!  The expensive store that has everything.
Except.
No McCormack's Vanilla.  That's always an expensive purchase on Amazon, or a gift from friends in the States.
But once I have my fresh cranberries, I stop hyperventilating.  Then the only other thing to worry about is the size of the turkey.  Every year I order a 10-kilo bird.  Every year they say sure, they've got one.  Last year they gave us a 6-kilo bird, which was okay, because we only had a bout ten people, total, but this year we're having 16 or 17.  Not tomorrow, the real Thanksgiving, because Germans never heard of that--last year when they sold me a turkey they said, "Happy Advent!"  We're celebrating this Saturday, so I'm still planning.  And one of my guests, a young Italian, asked, when I invited him, whether Thanksgiving was "a Catholic holiday." No.  I promise to make it make it as pagan as possible.  You'll be comatose after the corn muffins, the bird baked in bacon, the stuffing with celery and onions and butter, butter, butter á la Fanny Farmer, the gravy, the cranberry-orange-cinnamon sauce, the new potatoes, the sweet potatoes, the Swedes-'n-carrots, the Brussels sprouts, the peas, the champagne, the wine, the pies (pumpkin, apple, cranberry-apple) the cookies (oatmeal) and somebody is bringing chocolate mousse.
That oughta do us. 
Mouth watering yet?

P.S.  So now it is The Day Of.  The rest of the world is immersed in Black Friday and Saturday or Advent and my turkey--15 pounds American or 7.5 kilos--is incubating . . . 

The Critical Mom and the Twelve Year Old

Twelve is what is cunningly known as "tween" or pre-adolescent,  Or not so pre.  I'm the one who thought the kid had a sore throat, and no wonder he gave me a fishy stare.  That voice-changing business can take a mom by surprise.  But I'm so busy being taken by surprise all the time that I'm in almost as complete a state of flux as my pre-and nearly-post adolescent kids.
"Mom," asks the twelve year old, a paper airplane in one hand and a lighter in the other, "Can I light this and throw it?  Please?"
"NO!"
"Why not?  Why not?"
This is the most exhausting part, when you're explaining why not and then caving to some compromise, "Yes . . . outside, in the yard, where the grass is still wet, and only if you make sure that you know where it's landed and put it out."
So he starts to open the glass door to the back patio.
"And not in your socks!"  I yell.  "Don't dream of going outside without shoes AND A COAT!"
"Ah, I'm not going."  That was the last straw . . . he really hates to put on his coat.  The one he picked. The one we bought him on a frozen Bavarian morning when he'd lost his other coat.  The one that looks great on him, and is warm, and cost a bundle.  That coat.
The one I insist he wear when the temperature dips to 8 or 9 Celsius  (that's about 46-48 Fº).  And when he didn't, I removed his computer.
I hate taking away his computer.  Someday, when he's forty, I should live so long, I hope he's glad that I made him wear his coat.
P.S. And now back to my novel.  Almost at 30,000 words, though the plot is getting a bit less plausible.

The Critical Mom Writes a Novel

It's one of those things I've always wanted to do.  And I've tried, in a half-hearted way, always with results that now seem to me disastrous.  But November is National Novel Writing Month (how?  what?  Who said so? A presidential decree?) Better not question too fiercely.  April, the cruelest month (you know, the one breeding lilacs out of the dead ground or the one where folks are just longing to go on pilgrimages) is Poetry Writing Month, one-a-day, like your vitamins.  Now, I did do the poetry one . . . a poem a day sounds a lot less scary than 50,000 words in a month.  But if you join National Novel Writing Month (and hey, if you're a speed writer, you still can!) you get, for free (but in a burst of enthusiasm I sent them ten bucks) a nifty little word-counting website that charts for you how many words you've done that day.  You get little electronic badges for producing your first 10,000 and your first 25,000 and for selecting a writing buddy.  I find all this delightful.  

Here's what it all looks like:

http://nanowrimo.org

I am, in other words, now that I'm up to my 27,000th word, just too dang busy to pay attention to my blog.  Which, as a result, now has a readership of about four per day.

Folks, there is nothing more fun than writing a novel, I have discovered.  It's like telling yourself a story.  I love putting my heroine (actually, she's more of an anti-heroine) in Norway and Bavaria and Amsterdam.  It's a gas.  I'd almost say it's better than sex, but then nothing quite is.

The Critical Mom highly recommends National Novel Writing Month, and promises to bring you more news by the end of November.