Liza is breathing more deeply. I can make out her long eyelashes in the dark. It’s really funny the way every mother thinks her child is the most beautiful. Despite the fact that this can’t be true. Holding my breath, I pry my finger out of the vise grip of my daughter’s hand. Getting my finger out of her grasp while holding my breath is like giving birth. The child doesn’t want to come out. She stirs. Of course. That’s why fingers are constructed in such a complicated way. As an alarm system for when I try to escape.
She opens her eyes. Always the same sentence: “Mama, a little bit longer.”
“Yes, but let go of my finger, or else I will wake you up again when I leave.”
Always the same. Stuck in a loop, everything repeating itself. Not like the chaos I grew up in. I take my finger out of her hand. Then I lie down next to her again, but a little farther away, with no bodily contact. I know that she will now take four normal breaths and then begin to breathe deeply in and out, at which point she’ll sound like an old drunk man. That’s the sign that she’s asleep. Finally. Suddenly she shudders, but I’m familiar with this. Behind her eyelids she’s either falling or running into something. Free fall or, worse still, a collision. The same thing happens to me. And my husband. Right before you enter a deep sleep, boom, you shudder because you’re having a scary dream. I need to ask Agnetha about it—what it means and why our brains do that to us. I absolutely have to ask her that before I die.
Liza is finally asleep. I can go. I’m free, free from childcare. My shoulders start to relax. I feel like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. Kids look their cutest when they’re asleep, so innocent and smooth, like newborns. Why is it that people always hope to have kids and then, when you have them, you’re happy when they’re asleep or somewhere else? And this thought makes you feel guilty every time it pops into your head. Sometimes I use the opportunity to work on my stomach muscles—lying silently with my legs stretched out, I raise myself without using my upper body. I use nothing but my stomach muscles and I raise myself slowly, without lurching. If I’m sitting down, I cross my legs Indian-style and stand up directly from that position. Then creep out. Extra careful on the wood floor by her door—it creaks if you step on one of the planks. I let out a deep breath outside and then dash up the stairs.
Georg notices the tension in my face. “What’s up?”
The same question every night after I’ve put her to bed. “I can’t stand it when she won’t let me go. It’s a nice feeling to be needed, but there’s something awful about it, too. You know how it is.”
“Maaaaaamaaaaa!”
Fuck. She’s awake again. I run back down the stairs and snap at her. “What is it?”
Naturally I think she’s going to complain that I left too soon, that she hadn’t really fallen asleep. She often claims she hadn’t completely fallen asleep, despite the fact that I could hear that she was already deep asleep.
She looks at me worriedly and whispers sleepily, “The other door is open a crack. Can you close it? It scares me.” And then she adds, “My bum itches really badly.”
I’ve done it again. So short-tempered, such raw nerves—typical of me. Once again I have to apologize to my child.
“We’ll take care of your bum in the morning. How about you bathe early tomorrow before school? That should take care of it.”
How do you teach kids to wipe their asses thoroughly? I feel that even at thirty-three I could be better at it, so how can a kid master it? I don’t want to turn into a neat freak and constantly talk about hygiene. She shouldn’t be disgusted by her own body. She should be free. More so than I am. Nobody ever talks about the art of cleaning your bum. Nobody taught me. My mother, Elli, didn’t. We’re all Elizabeths in our family, all the women anyway. Which is the only gender that counts in our family, unfortunately. Each Elizabeth tried to bring a trace of individuality to the name. Even if we all have the same name, at least each of us has her own nickname. She told us that she never crapped and never farted. That made a big impression on me as a child, and I felt disgusted with myself because I couldn’t manage to keep myself from doing those things. She told us that her waste evaporated into the ether, through her skin, I suppose. She had learned that from her own mother, Liz, our deranged grandmother from Camden. She acts to this day as though she is the rightful queen of England. For which the name Elizabeth is perfect. She also has never taken a crap or farted. How nice for her. You can’t expect to get any help in normal human functions from those two. Just have to teach yourself.
You also can’t bother anyone else with such a nasty subject. Which means you just have to get creative and try to guess how other people do it. Earlier I would just wipe once, regardless of what came off on the toilet paper, and then pull my underwear back up. I just didn’t think about it enough. These days it goes like this: I wipe once, twice, and then I look to see what the situation is on the paper. Usually there’s still something there. So I wipe until the paper shows no sign of anything. I’m sorry, Greenpeace, but I use a lot of sheets of toilet paper that way. But at least it’s recycled paper! Which is once again about sacrifice. Everything that’s good for the environment entails sacrifice. Back when I still didn’t care about the environment, I used the thickest, softest, whitest toilet paper I could find, sometimes it was even dyed light blue. Like a typical English girl. But I made the switch and will never go back.
Once I can’t see any signs of anything on the paper with the naked eye, I do two rounds of wiping with spit. Just to be safe. Because commercial wet wipes are out of the question on both health and environmental grounds. They take a lot longer to break down than regular paper and are pumped so full of chemicals that you don’t want them near your body anyway. Better not to use them. Most of them are manufactured by the worst companies, too. I spit on a few balled-up sheets and rub myself good and clean with the saliva. Then I repeat it to be safe. Wiping with wet toilet paper creates those horrible little clingy minirolls of paper that you have to pull off with your fingers. With my fingers and some water from the sink, I get rid of those. Then I use a paper towel to pat everything dry. Done. Shipshape. And the entire process thought up and perfected on my own. I’ve never talked about it with anyone. What a crazy world. You have to figure everything out on your own.
I should have anticipated the problem with the door to Liza’s room. I’m familiar with this fear of hers, and closing that door is part of the bedtime routine. I almost never forget. Liza has two doors in her room, and the one that connects to our room has to be shut, or else she’s afraid that someone or something will come through it. She sleeps on the floor. Her room is designed to look like an ocean, with a pirate-ship bed. She could sleep in the pirate-ship bed, of course, but she doesn’t want to. She always sleeps on an air mattress placed on the blue tiles that represent the seawater. If you lie next to her, you also have to lie on an air mattress—otherwise you’ll slip beneath the sea. And ever since I’ve had to lie there every night, I have noticed that you feel oddly helpless lying there on the floor, totally defenseless. From that vantage point, the door does look gigantic and imposing, especially when it’s slightly ajar.
I’ve often worried about all the various and ever-changing children’s fears Liza has. She’s scared that snakes live in our apartment—poisonous snakes or the ones that strangle you. She’s scared that a tiger lives in our back garden and will jump into her room through the window. She’s afraid of burglars. And of people who abduct children. She’s scared of ghosts, witches, wolves, foxes, badgers, skeletons, lizards. But only at night. Never during the day. Frau Drescher says these are inner fears that children project outward. Children are afraid of the inner evil inside themselves. When they get upset at their parents and secretly wish the parents were dead, they immediately feel bad and project their evil thoughts instead onto evil animals that could attack them and hurt them. That way they remain innocent and can feel like