Wrecked - Charlotte Roche

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to distant places. When I see a squirrel I’m even happier than after I have sex with Georg. I don’t know why we don’t live out in the country somewhere, near some woods where I’d have the chance to see more wildlife. The feeling I get when I see a deer or squirrel is overwhelming. I’m no longer myself, and that feels great to me. Time stands still. I hold my breath and smile. Like a hunter, I’ve developed a good eye. I notice every movement in the bushes. On the highway I keep one eye on the road, to preserve my family’s life, but the other one is on the fields and woods along the side of the road. I always see the most deer. Then, for an instant, my life has purpose. I try to convey my enthusiasm to our kids, but it just doesn’t work. “Yeah, yeah, Mama, a deer, great.” I can’t explain why I don’t try to create more of these moments of happiness by going for walks in the woods or even training to become a forester. I’m a big believer in happiness through scarcity. It’s precisely because you see wild animals so rarely that it makes you so happy. I’ve noticed that it seems to be the same way with other adults. I know a lot of adults who are happy to report that they’ve seen a squirrel in their backyard. And if it comes back often, they convince themselves it wants to be near them.

      Unfortunately, there’s nothing to see today in the strip of green grass. Too bad. Maybe next time. Happy moments really are rare in my life. But before I can let my mind wander too far down this depressing path, I’m home.

      I turn the stove back on. As soon as it begins to sizzle, I take the pan off the burner and put it on the trivet on the table.

      “Dinner is ready.”

      I always have to say it three times before my husband gets up from his computer and comes to the table. My daughter and I are already sitting at the table. Nobody can start before all of us are seated. Everything is strictly regimented at our place. Manners, manners, manners. Perhaps they’ll come in handy one day.

      “Guten Appetit.”

      Liza goes first. Lately she also wants to serve us. That means that a lot of food gets dropped on the table. But it also means she learns a new skill, which is one of my goals as a good mother.

      My husband and I discuss the plans for tomorrow, and my daughter complains that nobody is talking to her. That’s her latest thing, complaining that nobody is talking to her. I’ve learned over the last few years that everything comes and goes in phases. Whenever children start to do something incredibly annoying or terribly worrisome, they grow out of it—and it’s replaced with the next annoying or worrisome thing. Nothing lasts. Something new always comes along and displaces the old.

      “Okay, how was your day at school?” my husband asks his stepdaughter.

      “Great. Today we voted to decide what new clubs will be funded at school.”

      “Oh yeah? What did you vote for—nose-picking and farting clubs?”

      My daughter cracks up.

      Anytime he makes her laugh, I feel happier than I was at my own wedding. I think it’s because he’s not even her father. I don’t laugh with them, though. It’s childish humor, and only children get it. I telegraph my feelings with a put-on frown. It makes it even funnier for the child when the mother distances herself from that type of humor.

      All three of us eat very quickly. Too quickly. I’ve read that you should chew your food thirty times before swallowing. But when I’ve tried it, I find it disgusting. The food turns into a thin mush that no longer bears any relationship to whatever it was I originally shoveled into my mouth. So far nobody in our family has had any stomach trouble, despite us all wolfing our food down. I’ve tried a few times to teach the kids to chew their food thoroughly, but when I don’t do it myself there’s really no point. So I don’t bother anymore. I can’t do everything perfectly. Just nearly everything.

      We hop up immediately after dinner and put everything in the dishwasher. I think it’s bad for the environment that we use it daily. But my husband and others have told me that even though the dishwasher uses electricity and water and pumps out soap, it’s actually better for the environment than washing dishes by hand. I just can’t get that through my head. But I go along with it anyway, even though I don’t believe it for a second.

      Protecting the environment drives me insane. A lot of the things you’re supposed to do seem illogical. I’d really like to have everything explained in detail sometime, so I’d know how I—and how we—should act at home going forward. I definitely don’t want to be one of those people who does nothing just because nobody else is doing anything. And I don’t want to fool myself, either. There’s a tendency to convince yourself of all the things you’re doing for the environment when in reality—with the things that count—you’re making things worse. This thought is unbearable. For the most part, ways to help the environment are about limiting yourself, sacrificing—you just stop doing things that other people don’t think for a minute about doing. The point is not to take yourself or your luxurious lifestyle so seriously; instead you live more simply in some areas. But making these sacrifices takes an iron will, because nobody checks up on you. Unfortunately there’s no such thing as an environmental inspector who can come into your apartment and take the dryer away because it’s both pointless and terrible for the environment. Nope. Our dryer is sitting right there. We just can’t use it. Laundry has to be hung to dry or else we are wasting energy.

      The dishwasher is loaded. After each item was placed in the dishwasher, Liza said, “Okay, finished.”

      And we said, “No, you’re not finished. There’s this still, and that . . .”

      With kids, there’s somehow never one big task that needs to be taken care of. Any big task is divided into lots of small tasks, and after each small task is accomplished they’re ready to call it quits. Parents have to keep pushing children so that later in life, when they have their own place, they won’t live like pigs.

      My parents didn’t manage to make it stick with me. My own parents fucked up royally when it came to the most important things parents need to instill in their kids—understanding money and maintaining a clean home. I wonder how they would justify that now. I doubt they’d ever accept the blame for it. Of course, I can’t ask them at this point because I’ve cut them out of my life. I’ve decided my parents don’t deserve to have children. I’m thirty-three now, and I said good-bye to them at twenty-nine. I don’t mean literally. I never said, “Good-bye, I’m cutting you out of my life now.” I just broke off contact. Forever. That means I don’t go to see them on their birthdays, I don’t send cards. I won’t be at their funerals and I won’t visit if one of them gets testicular cancer. (I think my mother has balls, too.) I won’t visit their graves. I simply no longer have parents.

      Even to me it seems like something of a taboo. I’m constantly plagued by feelings of guilt. We’re all brought up in a society where even hard-core atheists are taught that you should honor your parents and so on and so forth. But why should you honor your parents when everything they did to you was bad? I constantly try to convince myself that life without my parents is better and that they don’t deserve me as a daughter. At Christmas it’s just unbearable. Even as anti-Christian as I am, I get painfully sentimental and feel in my bones how bad it is to celebrate Christmas as though I have no larger family unit—that is, without the older generation. It seems so wrong that I often break into tears, but it’s still no reason to change anything. My decision is final: I will live without my parents. It’s my right. Anyone is allowed to leave anyone else if they find out that person is bad for them. I have to keep telling myself that to calm myself down. I learned it from my therapist. Otherwise I sit around thinking what I’m doing is monstrous. Especially when I think further and imagine the same thing happening between my daughter and me. Awful.

      Frau Drescher has convinced me, however, that I can’t take my daughter’s grandparents away. Despite the fact that I’ve decided they were bad parents to me, they could still be good grandparents to her. I doubt it, but fine, if she says so. Family! I have only one, so I’m by no means an expert. So I listen to her. Against my will, I arrange meetings between my daughter and her grandparents, my ex-parents. Other people have to help with the exchange, because in my pigheadedness I’ve decided I never want

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