Die Wir Mögen, Necken Wir
Die Wir Mögen, Necken Wir
The nonsense our parents teach us - 🌿A TWO-MINUTE MEMORY
In grade school I was constantly bullied by my classmates. I am not sure why. Were they disturbed by my homemade, patched-together, hand-me-down clothes? Or my Toni home permanents, administered by my mother, that made me look like I had poodle ancestry? Or maybe it was because I licked the paste. I don’t know, but the derision of other girls was relentless all through grade-school.
I earned good grades, I could draw commendable pictures and I could find my way around the Dewey decimal library card-catalog like a pro. I was not entirely without skills, but I was so terribly shy, and just an easy target. When I would come home sniveling about the insults and the taunting, my mama, Katy, would hug me and say, “Honey, they tease you only because they like you. If they didn’t like you they would just ignore you.” What the hell does that mean to an eight-year-old? They torment me because they like me? Seriously? I found cold comfort in that explanation. But, still, she said it often, and I would roll my eyes and go into the back room to sulk. I never understood why she didn’t have any logical solutions to my misery, just useless words.
Many years later, after my mother had had the nerve to die and leave me to face the world without her, I was reading a novel in which I found this sentence in German: “Die wir mögen, necken wir.” Wait a minute! What? I had to look it up just to be sure. It is an old German adage, apparently, that translates to “We tease those we like.”
So she hadn’t made that up! Her own Deutsch Mutter no doubt always said it to her. But surely Mama knew it wasn’t true, having experienced untold misery in school herself as a homely, impoverished, non-English-speaking child in North Dakota. So then why did she always say it to me?
It makes me wonder, now, as a mother myself — how many useless, or just plain wrong things do we learn from our parents that we then pass down to our own children like so much DNA – rules we have or things we say that make no sense? Why do we do it? I don’t know, but maybe sometimes, when faced with the absolutely unsolvable, this ancestral “wisdom” is the only guidance we, as parents, have to draw upon. Maybe quoting our parents helps us feel better ourselves as parents when the answers just can’t be found.
If you liked this little Katy memoir, here is another one full of motherly “advice”. But sensible advice! Katy's Double Gin Single Tonic Lemon Not Lime
Lovely story, Sharron. Every now and then I find myself saying things to my kids that my parents told me when I was a kid. I don’t necessarily think about it...it just kind of happens. The way we are brought up and the ideas we are offered become a piece of who we are whether we like it or not!
Isn't it odd that, even as an 8 year old child, you knew the words of wisdom were false. I wonder if words are repeated often enough, we will always come to believe them.
Thank you, Sharron, for sharing this moment in time from your childhood.