Better than sex

A warning: this text is neither controversial nor particularly substantial. I am writing this during my coffee break. And I'm taking this as an opportunity to tell you about a not-so-secret, but all the more passionate love that I share with many, if not all, mums. It's about something that is just as important to women as shoes and therefore more important than sex. It's about the black stuff of passion: coffee.

Taking away women's coffee would have a similar effect as if the world economy ran out of oil overnight: A standstill of all systems, violence, chaos, depression, misery. The western hemisphere would be finished. (I hope the Chinese aren't reading this.)

It's all about getting up in the morning. And then staying up there as much as possible.

Coffee punctuates our daily existence, is social cement for the Desperate Housewives, just like my mum's coffee parties with her friends back then, where the bitter drink was sipped from homemade cups. It felt like a secret initiation rite.

And soon I was sipping along. In the early stages of ignorance and immaturity, I made do with the canteen coffee at my grammar school and later with the sour brew from the Selecta vending machine, until my first friend, a Portuguese, introduced me to the world of Galao, the Portuguese version of the latte macchiato. I fell in love with it and remained faithful, despite the more heroic examples of my friends who occasionally swear off coffee with long sermons about its disastrous effects on health. What do they know? And of course, there are certainly numerous studies that reveal such frightening things as that frequent coffee consumption causes breasts to shrink.

But not even that can scare a die-hard coffee drinker.I don't think there are so many studies on any other topic, all of which seem to contradict each other. I put this down to the fact that there is simply too much passion involved. And that's what coffee is all about. In other words, first and foremost it's about getting up in the morning. And then staying up as much as possible.

It's about all those who crawl out of bed and drag themselves into the kitchen to transform themselves into the enchanting Jeanny with the first sip of coffee «Bing!», ready to face the world and kick arse if necessary. And so in the morning, in the hell of the commuter stream, I secretly rejoice at all the women staggering along latently on the verge of burnout, perhaps mothers like me, clutching their cups, giving themselves a good caffeine flush so that the body loses its heaviness and the caffeine high times set in, lifting us onto the track and making us feel that we are getting something done after all. Our work. Our family. Our life. A feeling as fleeting as a snowflake in the sun, but which manifests itself subliminally when we sink our lips into the foam as if we were stealing a kiss from our loved one. In return, we accept being condemned to the walking «sex-and-the-city» cliché with our paper cups.

And so we lovers and self-indulgers indulge in the entire range that is always and everywhere on offer: there are times for cappuccino, which encourages extended foreplay with milk foam and cocoa, there is the short, strong quickie with espresso, there is the gentle latte macchiato that you take your time over. But at some point the coffee break comes to an end, at some point you have had enough of coffee, come home, take off your shoes and are glad that your husband is no longer drinking coffee. And that you can relax and then you think again about whether shoes and coffee are really that important.

About the author
Michèle Binswanger is a philosopher, journalist and author. She writes on social issues, is the mother of two children and lives in Basel. She writes regularly for the Swiss parents' magazine Fritz+Fränzi.

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