Our words as parents leave their mark
My mum gave me a lot of advice. I forgot most of them straight away, but at least one has been etched in my memory forever: Don't be a follower. I was eight or nine years old and she told me about National Socialism for the first time. I couldn't possibly have understood everything, but my mother spoke with such passionate loathing that I immediately realised: There is nothing more reprehensible than being part of a group.
I first had to learn to just have fun.
I was a good boy who wanted nothing more than to make his mummy proud. So the very next day I began to live by her maxim. While playing in the big break, I went off into the bushes on my own, where only the class teacher could pull me out again. In music lessons, I sang my own secret melody to «Im Frühtau zu Berge» with lyrics that only I could understand. And when Esther Moser handed me an invitation to her birthday party, I tore it up. Birthday party? That's exactly how Nazi Germany started.
My mother was right. Disaster always happens when people all run in the same direction like lemmings. Nevertheless, I got a few things mixed up back then. My classmates weren't Nazis. There is a difference between resistance and antisocial behaviour. When people come together, they don't always do so out of fear and cowardice. Sometimes they just want to have fun. I had to learn that first.
The smallest comments can have a lasting impact on our children's lives.
It got better over time and I even started playing floorball! But even today, I still don't feel particularly comfortable in groups and prefer to be alone. It would be unfair to blame my mum for this. In any case, from the age of 30 you should take your parents off the hook. This is my life. I've decided to live it the way I live it.
How Grosi became a vampire
And yet I find it frightening how the smallest comments we make as parents can have a lasting impact on our children's lives. Now that I'm a father myself, I've only really realised this: What we say actually has an effect. It's not like on Facebook or in long-term relationships, where no one has listened to us for years. Here, for once, someone really takes what we say seriously. It's as tempting as it is dangerous. We suddenly have to pull ourselves together, our words carry weight and serve a higher purpose.
I recently told my son a scary story. It featured vampires. «How can you recognise them?» he wanted to know. I thought about it: «You can recognise them by the way they walk backwards.» He promptly saw his grandmother getting off the bus backwards a few days later.
Since then, he believes my mother-in-law is a vampire. That will go away. But other things I tell him won't go away. They will leave their mark and change his life permanently, just like my mother's advice back then. What will they be?
