Old bag with school bag

Last Thursday I took part in a self-portrait workshop run by Grace at the 'Trailing Spouses' Art Group. I had brought along my own props: a medium format camera and my son’s schoolbag, as I had an idea about how I wanted to portray myself. The camera represented my college days, and the dreams aspired to since that time towards some sort of career in photography. The school bag sums up my life as a mum, especially as I now carry it everyday for my son. Called a “Tornister”, nearly all German school kids have one. They are squarish, large and robust enough to sit on and you can choose from various themed designs. The thing is, it is so heavy, I end up carrying it for him. I always feel slightly preposterous walking down the road sporting a magenta striped rucksack emblazoned with footballers in mid-action, the straps squeezing my shoulders.

  

I merged the two portraits, to show that I find it hard to draw the line between these two images that reflect myself. Also, this lack of separation often leaves me feeling that I fall short in both respects, firstly as a mother and secondly as a creative and /or professional person.

 I read on the ‘used to be somebody’ by the journalist, Gaby Hinsliff, that she felt a kind of lifting of guilt associated with being a working mum when her child started primary school. She says “…. it is the first time the choice - that terrible, double-edged choice - about whether to be home or not has been completely taken away from me.” In Germany, or at least where I live, there is still very much a choice about how long you leave your child in school. In the school where my son goes to, for example, the lessons start at 8:05 and sometimes finish as early as 11.50am. Then, some of the children are picked up for the day before lunch by their mums(or Dads perhaps), whilst others stay on in the after school care centre, which was founded just seven years ago, until 4.30pm at the latest. So that feeling of guilt is still in the air, when there are still two systems for the stay at home and working mums. This school system is changing in Germany, but there still isn’t one school here in Bielefeld offering the same school hours to all children, starting and finishing at the same time.

On occasion, I have picked up Eric before lunch and we have both really enjoyed the extra time together with my younger son Henry for the rest of the day. I am not actually supposed to pick him up before 2pm. Most of the time I pick him up between 3:00 and 4:00pm, like in the British system. Being self-employed, my workload is fragmented and I need to be able to work through to the afternoon on some days.

I do feel though it is strange, that in Germany you have to book a minimum of 45 hours a week of childcare for the under 3s in a kindergarten (9hrs a day!), which seems a lot, whereas when they go to school at the age of six, you may find the same child only being entitled to attend school for 4 hours a day. After school care is not free. It costs me 130 Euros a month including lunch, although if you have two or more children in a nursery or school, you just pay for the one child with the highest fees, which is good. 

Nevertheless, I do think it would be nice for the atmosphere of the school and the children if they could all be at school at the same time, and all enjoy the Karate, football or cooking clubs etc that are on offer  in the after school care centre. Socially, the school is also divided, for the parents and the children. Children who finish school before lunch are not allowed to use the playground in the afternoon because of insurance reasons. I obviously have more contact with parents whose children are in the after school care because I see them when I pick up my son. 

My experience is that many parents here don’t like the idea of comprehensive education, where lessons take place in the afternoon, because they believe it would be too inflexible and strenuous for the children. They prefer the model of lessons in the morning and an option of after school care in the afternoon, perhaps because of their own educational experience. My husband, for example, was at school from Mondays to Saturdays in the morning, but then he could run around unsupervised with siblings and friends for the rest of the day. I can’t imagine that happening these days. 

So I suppose I will have to get used to that portrait of myself for a while, and the choices associated with it.  In the meantime,  here is a picture of the "Tonni" in its full glory.  

Rude Health

Sometimes, when I am least expecting it, a phrase pops into my head. As I was hauling the buggy up the front steps this morning, I suddenly thought of the expression, 'to be in rude health'.  These words conjure up images of ruddy cheeks and boundless energy, and a smug feeling that while others around are felled by coughs and colds, I remain in a magic bubble of 'rude health'.  Unfortunately, it is usually just at that moment of feeling invincible that I get a sore throat and within a day I am floored by a nasty bug.

When you have children the chances for remaining in “rude health” remain slim. In December last year, my children and I took part in a kind of relay race of illness. When one was getting over a cough, it would be passed gaily onto the next contestant, who would add a stomach bug to it. Then, in the next lap a high temperature and general feeling of nausea would be handed to the next participant for good measure. It was a marathon, lasting over a month. Like all worthy sporting events, it wasn’t about the winning, it was about the taking part, but in the end Eric was awarded a mighty dose of antibiotics, which did us all a lot of good.

Before I had children, I didn’t realise how much of my time would be devoted to feeling under the weather. When Eric started Kindergarten, I had more bugs in the first year than I had ever had in my whole life. The nursery teachers had developed super-human immune systems, after years of exposure to this unique breeding ground.  Unfortunately, it takes at least five years to build up this kind of immunity, so by the time you have some sort of protection your child has left. Then something comes along which even the most robust immunity cannot fend off.

That something or some things, rather, come along in the form of little six-legged parasites otherwise known as head lice. Come on, it is nothing to be embarrassed about! Everyone has had it, even if you can’t remember it. I remember it, as I had them about six months ago.  Again, I was feeling in “rude health” and invincible, so I was probably asking for it. Nits had been going around the school for weeks, but that my child could have them let alone me was unthinkable. When I discovered to my horror that I had them it was a weird feeling, like 40 going on 8 years old again. I was transported back in time, sitting in school assembly where the head teacher was talking about a nits outbreak and I was trying desperately not to scratch my head, although, in fact, I actually had them. The smell of disinfectant dripping off a metal comb came back to me, used by the school nurse to inspect our hair. It just couldn’t be true that I had nits.

Sadly it was, and as I showed the wiggling proof, isolated in a glass, to my husband he still didn’t believe it, saying that it was probably just an insect that rather resembled a head louse that had wandered into my hair. I found this quite an absurd idea that there were insects that were in the habit of impersonating head lice but I had other worries. Suddenly, I was aware of the other people I could have passed them on to, and weighed up whether I was going to tell them or not. After all, you say to yourself, it is nothing to be ashamed of. Remember what it said on the pamphlet that came with the nit-lotion: it is a myth that nits prefer dirty hair.  But still, you feel ashamed. The next few days the world around me shrank to the task of nit extermination and prevention. I spent literally hours every evening picking out nits from my son’s hair, washing bedclothes at 60 degrees and putting garments in the freezer and trawling through the internet for any tips or hints that I could glean. I began to get quite interested in the subject discovering, for example, on a webpage entitled a Brief History of Lice Combs that nit combs had been discovered in Egyptian tombs and that there is an 11th Century ivory example  held in the British museum. I subsequently spent one hour on the phone getting down to the nitty gritty with one of my best friends in England, who told me that since the British government had stopped providing free nit lotion, the head lice situation had become an epidemic. I wondered if there was a hairdresser equivalent of Jamie Oliver who could convince the government to turn this problem around, say, for example, Trevor Sorbie MBE.

At the moment, touch wood (or our trusty black plastic lice comb) we are nit free, and we are not suffering from coughs or colds or being attacked by any kind of bug. In short, we are in ruder health than we have been for a while. Hopefully we will remain in the rudest of health to the point of offensiveness for the foreseeable future.  And there is nothing more to say on the subject, apart from that I hope that you all remain ruddy healthy throughout the rest of the winter.