One thing always goes wrong
It's worth listening to grandmothers, even if they sometimes talk a bit much. It's worth it because they have experienced so much more and therefore have a different perspective. My favourite grandmother in this respect was the one in Glarus. When we sat at her dining table and ate her spaetzli and roast, and later for coffee, everyone would get up at some point and go about their business. I stayed seated and listened to her.
Her life had been uncomplicated by today's standards: growing up in Lucerne, training in Geneva, marrying a man from Glarus, moving in with him in the years between the wars, bringing up six children. Back then, as a Catholic, she was met with great suspicion in the small Protestant town. A newcomer, could she be capable enough, could she even fit into the mountain canton? She fit in and, at the age of ninety, was still sitting in her house on Rathausplatz, now a Glarus native in her own right, telling me, the mother of her great-grandchildren, about the past. And I thought about how differently we live today, how much has changed since then.
«I suspected that there must be a great truth in her words.»
Michèle Binswanger
Well, not everything has changed. The grandmother in Glarus may not have travelled all over the world as people do today, self-realisation was not an option, nor was breaking out of the life she was meant to lead. And yet she had made her journey, which was not short on excitement, and distilled a life lesson from it, which she passed on to me and which still accompanies me today. «One thing is always crazy,» she sometimes said when talking about her children and their destinies. «One thing is always crazy.»
At the time, I was latently on the edge, with two small children, juggling a job, a relationship and everything else, and so of course I would have preferred to have heard that this would soon be over, that life would find its bed like a calm river and flow quietly along. But I suspected that there must be a great truth in her words. And today I believe that she wasn't just referring to her own large, psychologically complicated family. Because the sentence actually applies to every family: «One thing always goes wrong.»
Sometimes it's the children you can't figure out, sometimes it's your partner or your own parents or siblings. Sometimes you're crazy yourself, and sometimes it's difficult to work out who exactly is crazy. But I found her insight comforting; she, who had already experienced so much, had to know. Everyone always wants to do everything as well as possible and get it right. Sometimes that works, but it's not the norm. What is normal is that there are problems. One thing always goes wrong. And if, by chance, this is not the case, you should not forget that this is an exception.
Michèle Binswanger
A graduate in philosophy, Michèle Binswanger is a journalist and author. She writes on social issues, is the mother of two children and lives in Basel.
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