I haven't read since I became a mother.
What a terrible sentence, when reading has always been part of my life.
I still remember how I buried myself as a child in 1000 pages of Hanni and Nanni, how I experienced adventures with Enid Blyton's heroes - and with Kiki, the cheeky parrot.
I was a book-obsessed girl with a good canary.
Of course I still read today, but in a different way: non-fiction books for work, articles by colleagues, news.
Because reading is part of my job.
But I no longer have the patience, the attention and the inner willingness, no: the opportunity to get involved in other worlds on 200, 300, 400 pages.
There was once a quote that I made my own, even though I had long since forgotten who wrote it: "My home is where I have my library." And so, when I went to work for DER SPIEGEL in China, I with a whole wall of books around, novels, mostly American literature.
And now?
If I'm too tired in the evening and have no time between job and family during the day, I could write a novel myself: »The Endless To Do List«.
Look familiar?
My reading tips
What has stayed with me, however, is the longing for this feeling of being carried away, the feeling that a text is doing something to me, that I come out different after the last word than I went in.
After all, reading means learning something about life without having to experience it yourself.
And I want to tell you about three of these texts that gave me this feeling.
There was this »Protocol of an Alienation« by my colleague Heike Klovert, which shows that life is sometimes a quiet drama.
A piece that manages to put into words the complexity of family relationships and lets life have its gray tones.
There was a series by an author, who writes for us under the pseudonym Katrin Seyfert, about the worst thing that has happened to her in life: her husband, the father of their three children, has Alzheimer's disease.
For her love and his death, she found a language that has inscribed itself in my soul.
And there was this text by my colleague Antje Windmann about »Ecki«'s anorexia - the beautiful story of an extraordinary relationship between Ecki and Antje and an illness that Antje tried to understand.
The downside of hope
When I found out during my pregnancy that I was expecting a daughter with Down syndrome, there were a few ideals that I had to say goodbye to.
It also made me sad that the world of literature, as I got to know it, will probably remain closed to her, even if she will of course – hopefully – learn to read.
It's a feeling that's behind me.
Because who knows what they will one day read in "easy language" and what it will mean to them.
More importantly, what makes her and me happy doesn't have to be the same just because she's my kid.
What expectations and what hopes we bring to our children, what wishes we used to have and still have today - that is certainly one of the major issues in every family.
So it's no wonder that this question keeps popping up in many of our plays.
So I conducted this interview with the philosopher Monika Betzler about the question of whether parents and adult children can be friends and how we as adults can deal with family obligations.
How heavy it weighs on you when mothers or fathers are disappointed, when they give you the feeling of being inadequate, is a life issue for many children, including this man, who never felt accepted by his mother because of his homosexuality.
Insults and injuries can lead to a loss of contact, which is often an agonizing condition for both parties.
I therefore found the thoughts of the psychoanalyst Hans-Jürgen Wirth on the prerequisites for forgiveness worth reading.
But what do we do as parents when we are disappointed when our ideas don't come true?
How do we say goodbye to the images in our heads that don't match our children?
Let me know what comes to your mind when you think about the topic of desires and disappointments!
Our address is: familie@spiegel.de!
The Last Judgement
So, in order not to exert any pressure, shouldn't we be happy about similarities, about happiness that is shared and passed on?
I think so.
Dancing is one of those things that my daughter and I both love.
And salty, savory.
"I'm not a cute guy," I like to say.
But there is one exception: Kaiserschmarrn.
When I recently prepared such a nonsense in the pan, my first at home, without a mountain top, we were both so greedy that we were actually late for dance class.
Admittedly, it wasn't a recipe from the SPIEGEL archive because I didn't have a vanilla pod at home.
But who knows if luck can't be increased with these tricks from our cooking columnist Verena Lugert?
my moment
By the way, I checked who made the quote about the library: Erasmus of Rotterdam.
And that's when I came across another saying that I liked straight away: "Home is where you don't have to explain yourself." And for me that means: Home is my family.
Actually, I wanted to end with this sentence.
But then I read this text from the current issue of SPIEGEL, which blew my mind because it is so loving and so desperate: A father talks about his 14-year-old daughter who hurts herself.
With a knife.
Again and again.
It is a text that one will no longer forget, also because it shows that every wound inflicted on one's own child hurts one's own body.
That also means family.
Sincerely yours, Sandra Schulz
