More than a year and a half ago, I stumbled upon a YouTube channel belonging to a trio dedicated to subtitling a certain German soap opera. I was instantly hooked. I love languages, and this show introduced me to German (a surprisingly easy language to pick up) beautifully – it’s almost criminally easy to pick up a language if you hear several words repeated regularly along and compare it to the English subtitles at the bottom.
I love learning about the peculiarities of different cultures; the translator herself is a German who relocated to New Zealand and is completely fluent in English, so there was always an interesting explanation of some German custom or other, as well as comments on everything inevitably lost in translation, because she didn’t want us to miss out on anything funny the characters said.
I love witty snark; every episode was accompanied with a deliciously snarky commentary and hilarious nicknames for some of the more annoying characters, in addition to evil bitching about the show whenever the show was bitchy.
I absolutely love fanfiction. Good old Show was a goldmine, and coupled with a bunch of followers (plus the trio themselves) oozing talent, it meant endless fanfic that was also very good. Not one typo, language flowing smoothly, beautiful angsty angst – everything vital to an exquisite piece of fanfic was there.
And I loved the idea of finding friends with common interests but whose lives were as hectic as mine and who would therefore not consider it rude or, even more ridiculously, disloyal of me not to communicate regularly. Amazingly, almost all of the channel’s followers fell under this category. We started meeting unfailingly every night after the channel trio put up the episode to comment, and comments turned into bonding over sympathy for the nice guys and evil death plans for the bad guys. Show-related bonding turned to real bonding, and soon we were tweeting back and forth about kids, jobs, relationships, sending virtual bowls of hot chicken broth when one of the kids was sick, checking regularly to see what happened with someone’s dreaded meeting with the boss, throwing a virtual Good Riddance party when a miserable follower finally got a divorce, and of course alternately fangirling our darling show. My folks thought it was something nice only on the side and could never replace real friendships. My brother thought it was sad – outright pathetic, to quote him. My sister joked that I had issues. And my sister is a genius.
In fact, we all have issues. But for a bunch of us, that’s why it worked. We were all outsiders, loners, people who didn’t care much for real human contact and didn’t do all that well in it. We were struggling at parenthood; any of us who screamed that it was a fucking can of worms most of the time didn’t get their eye poked out by the metaphorical finger pointed at them in disgust and disbelief, judging them. I could vent about hating to play hostess and preferring to wake up to an empty house and a sleeping toddler so I could recharge and pick up the scraps of my sanity (something that was considered irresponsible by a real-life friend the single time I made the mistake of opening up about that) and a bunch of my Show friends would heartily agree. One of my Show friends (we considered her an alien – she’s a wonderful busy 40-something mom of three, three, kids who juggles real life and a full-time job and is a very gifted fanfic author) never rolls her eyes at me for being a diehard Harry Potter fan (albeit a proud Slytherin) because she herself is one. Compared to real-life people who are 8 years younger than me and think I’m unbelievably childish (or, well, a tad retarded) because of my HP enthusiasm, she was a godsend.
The thing is, life is truly a snarl of tangled setbacks and lows. There are highs, but responsibility can in fact do you in sometimes, and we’re not all born into life with the same mindset. I was always dumbfounded by girls I met who absolutely couldn’t wait for motherhood, and who are probably reading this and deciding I’m an ungrateful bitch who will ultimately get what’s coming to her. It was actually said, nah, yelled at me once by a “well-meaning” character – something along the lines of “other women would kill to have a child and you’re not thankful for your blessing”. Seeing as she was engaged, not even married yet, let alone a mother, I didn’t bother telling her that it was – to put it very politely – absurd of her to think those were my sentiments. I do not regret having my daughter; I regret my inability to make things go as smooth as other moms, seemingly at least. I regret being constantly fazed by all mommyhood-related responsibilities when other moms appear not to even think about them. I regret with all my heart that I have fucked up my precious daughter royally, which is what her pediatrician told me, because of my job and its insane hours which have led over the years to my daughter learning to become her own best friend since she’s always awake while I’m working, and I have to work if she’s to live semi-decently and go to a semi-decent school in this joke of an education system; because of my inability to make even small talk (it just doesn’t come for me; I try to breeze into a conversation with another mom and while I’m congratulating myself for improving my people skills I get an irritated glare and a hurried excuse from her to flee), which means my daughter hasn’t picked up any skills on initiating stuff with other kids; because of my pregnancy, which everyone dutifully informs me every day will be a catastrophe of gargantuan proportions for my daughter. I don’t know how those calm moms do it, but more than that I don’t know how they think. How do they approach the issue? I once had a team leader of the kind – she was always calm in the face of everything, she never freaked out or lost it, she never had long conversations (at least none that I heard – her life did of course extend beyond the walls of the office cubicle) about how on earth she was going to raise a mentally sound child and how she was going to juggle discipline and lenience and how she was planning to act when her kid resents her and everything to do with her (although that particular trait seems foreign to most girls I’ve met who were raised in Egypt –they fight and make up with their moms and keep a bunch of secrets, nothing serious, but there’s no strain of one generation having evolved from the other, no harbored resentment, nothing of the sort, at least with most of the girls I met here, while son-father resentment is alarmingly deep). I always wondered if my team leader was like other less-impressive females I’ve met – she simply waited for motherhood to come, calmly, knowing she would have the resources necessary to deal with whenever it did. I don’t know.
So, again, the thing is silly things can sometimes be the one thing that can help you keep your sanity. In my case it was the YouTube show and the bonding of our group of followers and the healthy cultivated interest in a new language. I may not be able to pick up a German novel anytime soon – hell, ever – but I’m getting some level of intellectual stimulation and fun, for about 20 minutes a day, the sort of interaction other people have so easily with real-life friends. Before meeting my Show friends I was almost positive I needed therapy – I cannot hold one smooth conversation made entirely of small talk with anyone without feeling like I was wracking my brains out and having an express train flatten me to the ground. It was exhausting, and it cemented my 24-7 feelings of worthlessness after spending the whole day trying unsuccessfully to entertain my daughter. It broke my heart, feeling that I was right all along in never wanting to be a mother because I would only raise another weirdo, and who knows when she can become comfortable in her own skin like I am?
Those precious Show friends and fellow moms gave me hope that yes, some kids do end up with incompetent moms, moms who really weren’t cut out for motherhood, but they do turn out okay in the end. It’s amazing how a short 160-character tweet, on some spectacularly bad days, can be the metaphorical hug you need to stop you from giving up on it all and deciding to try again, corny as it may sound. Also Danke Schön, meinen Schätze Freunden!
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