Rabenmutter (Raven Mother)

I am posting this story for my friend, S. She loves the story because whenever she hears the expression Rabenmutter she remembers my story and starts laughing. The episode has un-demonised the threat of her being a Rabenmutter (raven mother): a horrible expression commonly used in Germany to take mothers down a notch or two. In the dictionary Rabenmutter means uncaring mother, but this is nothing other than the tip of the iceberg in its multiple implications. I discovered what Rabenmutter means a long ago when my son, Nomad Son, was about two years old.

He and I were travelling together to visit my parents in Grenada over Christmas. For any of you living in Europe, you know how stressful it can be for anyone trying to fly somewhere warm at this time of year. The experience is a perpetual massive crush of people, tempers, and mishaps. The line-ups are long, the safety procedures, ubiquitous, the airline personnel are at their wits end.

Nomad Son and I were experienced travellers, even though he was only two years old; he had been flying regularly since he was six weeks old.

For this trip, I bought him a new backpack for all of his toys, change of clothes, and extra juice and baby food. When I bought the backpack at the shop, it looked quite small. At home, placed against his delicate two-year-old frame, the backpack extended over the length of his back and hung partway down his po. Once the backpack was filled with all of his paraphernalia, it didn’t hang so low, but stuck out horizontally like a fat beetle’s body.

Back at Hamburg airport…

After standing for over an hour in the line-up, we finally reach the check-in desk and I rush up and started taking out our tickets, reservation information, and passports. The impatient Lufthansa employee looks at me with this expression, which says: this is not going quick enough, I hate you, well maybe not you specifically, but anyone who is travelling with a child, ordering special seating, vegetarian meals, and baby meals, oh, please god-get-me-out-of-here, I can’t stand one more minute of this. And while she is silently communicating her misery to me through the expression in her eyes and her embittered cramped facial gestures, I hear Nomad Son yell out an “Umph!” behind me.

I turn around and there he is, like a beetle flipped over on his back, arms and legs flailing around. I encouragingly, brilliantly instruct him, “Turn over, sweetie. Turn over on your side!” And he does. He manages to swing over onto his side, then gets into a crawl position, and hoists the weighty backpack up like a true-blue bench presser. No mean feat let me tell you! I praise him for managing to get back up off the floor, and then look up proudly at the crowd standing behind him. Instead of the expected admiring faces, or isn’t-he-cute expressions, the adults are universally stone-faced. And, on each and every one of their foreheads, there sits blinking neon-signs with “ Rabenmutter” written all over them.