Christiane Tauzher gave her daughter a hair dryer. Apparently a very special one. The teenager loves him very much, he is a star with her friends. The mother, on the other hand, regrets the gift very much …
I would have known that he our family would split – I would have my hands off him calmly. It’s been two years now that he moved in with us. The disaster began in the MediaMarkt – he was the last of its kind, and he had a ten percent discount sticker on the packaging. Today I curse myself for my weakness. In short: the teenage girl got him from me for my birthday. At the moment when she him unpacked, I experienced more love and gratitude than in the past 15 years combined. She even swapped her cool Whatsapp photo for a mother-daughter selfie. The news that she is now a owned, spread like lightning among her friends. Congratulations were received and appointments were made.
Olaf’s present, sneakers, went down completely next to mine.
“Do you like the shoes?” Asked Olaf in a huff. “Totally, really. Very nice. Thank you,” replied the teenage girl, who was pacing around in the kitchen in search of the ideal lighting conditions in order to put it in the best possible light for Instagram. (Tip on the side, for all parents who want to be cool: you no longer say Insta, but Gram – pronounced like cream, with a G on the front.)
Back to him: It’s loud as a leaf blower and looks like a space policeman’s intergalactic baton.
“I can no longer imagine a life without him,” the teenager told me recently. I rolled my eyes and when I was about to say, “please, it’s just a …” she interrupted me brusquely. To call it a hair dryer, she said, was an insult. A hair dryer is my thing from the 90s that looks like an oversized carnival revolver. Theirs, on the other hand, comes from a vacuum cleaner dynasty. It is a marvel of technology that simultaneously sucks in hair and wraps it around the baton and blows out warm air, which has the “stubble curl” effect. He can breathe, so to speak, and he sounds like this: WuuuuuuUM. Pause (during which the next strand is wound up). WuuuuuuuUM. Break. WuuuuuuuuUM. Break. WuuuuuuuuuUM. The sound pierces through all the doors and walls.
You’d love to choke it off and banish the blow dryer to its leather storage box forever.
Speaking of the storage box: it never lies in it; after use, the teenage girl drapes it on the outermost edge of the sink. One wrong movement, a deep sigh, a gust of wind, and the miracle thing shatters on the tiles.
Here you can read the repetitive bathroom exchange between daughter and mother: “Please put the hair dryer in its box. If someone walks by and arrives, it falls down.”
Daughter: “Then nobody should go by. Or you could just look and pass by so that he doesn’t fall off.”
Mother: “But it’s not that difficult to unplug the hair dryer and put it away.”
Daughter: “I need it every day. You don’t put the coffee machine back in the cupboard every day after you’ve had a coffee.”
Mother. “Uh, but the coffee maker has a hard time rolling off the countertop.”
Daughter: “It doesn’t matter what I say anyway.”
Mother: “No, it’s not. But the hair dryer was really expensive and I …”
Daughter: “I didn’t force you to give it to me. You did that voluntarily. Legally, the hair dryer is my property and I can do whatever I want with it.”
Mother: “Do you want it to be broken or do you want it longer?”
Daughter: Roll your eyes, exit.
Secretly, I wouldn’t mind if the devil’s stuff shattered on the floor, but the mother in my breast, the role model, the educator, who has to teach the child to take care of his cause, is stronger.
Maybe. Definitely at some point. Definitely. If he’s temptingly close to the edge again and no one is at home but me, I’ll give him a nudge. Then I watch it roll towards the abyss and I will let it roll. WuuuuuuuuUm. End.