Growing Up (3), a true kind of short love story

(continued from part 2)

At home, alone

As I reluctantly made my way home, everything appeared to be unchanged from the outside. However, my mind was racing, reflecting on the last 20 minutes and trying to comprehend them. How could a short encounter have such a profound effect on my youthful, difficult, and apparently directionless life? How could my little world be turned upside down on this ordinary evening on a bus?

How did you know

That I've been waiting?

Never knew the world would be

So beautiful at all

I just want to say

You make me happy

Never knew that you would be

So beautiful to me

Chris de Burgh 'so beautiful'

As usual, I crossed the street and entered a small lane, with bushes on the right and grassland on the left. I turned left, followed a narrow path, descended three steps, and entered the main door on the ground floor by turning left once more. Even as an adult, I wasn't allowed to have my own door key, so I rang the bell for someone to open it. I climbed up the steps until I went through the open door. While my thoughts were still on a stairway to heaven, I was not in the mood to share what had just happened—I needed to hold on to these bright and inspiring images as long as I could.

I greeted everyone I bumped into and headed straight into my room; I wanted and needed the solitude. Not to be distracted, I shut the stained glass door and chose the comfort of my bed instead of the chair. My mind was busily working, and here in the silence, I could hear my heart pounding louder than normal. As many thoughts raced through my mind, a harsh 'dinner is ready' shattered my dreams and pulled me down to earth, back to reality.

Social housing is designed for two purposes: to be cheap and efficient; much in sync with my mother's philosophy of life.

In one corner of the compact kitchen, we managed to fit a rectangular table with a main corner bench accommodating three family members, while the other three had slightly more room in their individual chairs. When my father was away, my mother would sit at the head of the table, and my youngest sibling on her left, beside her sat my second youngest sister. Me as the only son and the third child, I sat across from my mother. My older sister's place was on my left, and typically, my oldest stepsister was sitting beside her. However, after she moved out and got married, my father would take her vacant chair when he was at home. Seating was arranged by age, with my mother in the most prominent and controlling position, reminiscent of Nazi-style organization when she was a child.

My mother typically prepared the food and cut everything into small pieces so we wouldn't need to use forks and knives—both for safety and convenience—until well into our teens. This was one reason why none of us children learned how to handle a fork and knife until I was 19, when I cut my first steak. For dinner, we usually had bread with sausage and cheese. My Bavarian father called this Vesper (actually an evening prayer) or Brotzeit (literally bread time) in German.

I didn't say much during this 20-30-minute dinner; my mind didn't quite follow the conversations around the table. However, my occasional, seemingly unreasonable smile piqued the curiosity of my two younger sisters. As they tried to get something out of me, I diverted them with some silliness about themselves. And I have to admit, these distractions helped me to get off my mind.

My eyes could not help but wander around, and I was surprised at how different everything seemed in this so familiar kitchen. Like through a veil, I noticed that the kitchen light was not very bright, that shoulders were hunched over meals, that smiles were faked, and subjects were rather being gossiped about than seriously and openly discussed. There have been numerous instances of racism and prejudice in the words spoken around me. It became clear that my mother's life experiences, filled with frustrations and disappointments, have been passed down to the next generation through these so-called conversations.

After returning to my room, I continued to reflect on these two different worlds I encountered within a few minutes. On one side, a new world, an educated, friendly, and bright acquaintance; on the other side, quite the opposite. An old world with old-fashioned views, uneducated, unfriendly, and dim. To understand this was very frightening because the 'other side' was my roots since I was born; I didn't know anything else. And I was not quite willing to give in and accept that this grey world would be my future!

About my father

Here I have to mention the person who is often missing from this table - my father. Born in 1930, he was a child of the II. World War and had never had a formal education. As a young man, he started to learn some carpentry, but he never finished his training. His only asset was a driver's license and therefore could find work as a trucker, high in demand after the war. He started as a beer driver for a brewery - a truckload of beer that he delivered directly to inns or pubs, in German 'Gastwirtschaft'. That's when he started with his drinking problems, according to his wife's own words. Once she told me that she never had seen him sober before their marriage - a truly shocking revelation.

He later became a truck driver delivering goods all over Germany. The freight forwarder collected goods around my hometown and delivered them to their subsidiaries from which they were delivered in smaller quantities to the customers while full truckloads were sent directly to large customers. My father's tour was from the southern part of Germany to Hamburg, roughly 850 km one-way. During these long hours far away from home he developed a 2nd bad habit after his alcohol problems - extramarital affairs, starting with different waitresses along the route.

As a truck driver, he was only home for a few hours each week. On Saturdays, he had to service his truck and somehow ended up stuck in the basement, where the beer machine was located and couldn't leave there until he was drunk. When my father came home, he became violent, insulted everyone. His big hands could not only destroy things in the house but also hurt the people around him, physically and psychologically. My mother developed what I would call an appeasement policy, tried to take the wind out of the sail, and made him sleep early.

The following Sunday morning, when my father was kind of sober, we had our awkward family breakfast. None of us children were willing to talk, so my mother and father pressured us to open up with some cheap jokes or vulgar conversation about everything except the real reason why all of us were frightened and hunched. After breakfast, it was my mother's turn to retaliate and argue with my father. He took it quietly and somehow understood that he had done a lot of things wrong, but he could not learn from it and change.

My father and I - in a sober moment

About my mother

In every family, the roots are planted and cultivated by the parents. Due to his constant absence, the family environment was created by my mother alone. Unfortunately for us children, she was a too-good student of Nazi ideology and their strict, heartless education. Her favorite mantra was 'as long as you put your feet under my table you have to do what I say'! explains very well how much of a authoritarian person she was in the 1970s. She was a master in manipulating the home atmosphere with intrigues and spying games and playing each one off against others. When she 'liked' one of her children she could and did 'not like' the others. Her favorite game was letting every child down and feeling bad about themselves for whatever reason came along. Even a simple too-long haircut was a reason to shout at her son and put him down not only in front of family members but also in front of his son's friends. All of us children learned to see everything with suspicious eyes and everything was negative, not the true intention of education.

(to be continued)