Should the teenager be done with puberty? She’s got her driver’s license now, and she’s laughing at her parents’ jokes again. The father interprets it that way, yes Christiane Tauzher is not convinced that her daughter’s transformation is complete.
For a while, it looked like the teenage girl might be splitting off from her animal twin, the wombat. She slept less, she no longer extended her claws, she communicated with us, she only crept into her cavernous room at off-peak times. We stopped calling her Wombi.
A new era seemed to have dawned, after she even laughed at a parenting joke that went like this: A couple of marsupial activists demonstrated outside the kangaroo enclosure at Schönbrunn Zoo for the admission of a real Australian wombat. The message was: Vienna urgently needs a wombat. In a newspaper that I got my hands on at the hairdresser’s, the “demo” in the presence of the kangaroos was actually worth an article with a photo. I sent my daughter’s photo along with the caption, “You could lend yourself.”
An initiative calls for a wombat in Schönbrunn Zoo.
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Surprisingly, it wasn’t the sober standard answer “parent joke” that came back, but the emoji, which teenagers frowned upon and tears from their eyes. I stared at my display in disbelief, checked the sender again. Yes, it was actually hers. She found the same funny what I found funny. It was amazing.
When she then also passed the driver’s license test, the conversion work in her young body seemed to be complete. Before us stood a finished young woman. Olaf said something like “Well, looking back it wasn’t really that bad anyway”. At that moment I almost choked on the sip of Prosecco that got stuck in my throat and didn’t dare to go forward. Did my husband actually say “not that bad anyway”? He avoided my gaze, I forced the prosecco stopper to move on and wished that the past difficult years would fade from my memory just as quickly as the pain of childbirth.
I didn’t quite trust the sudden calm and harmony after overcoming puberty, and I turned out to be right.
Because as soon as our daughter had her driver’s license in her pocket, she was nagging us day in and day out, asking us to borrow the car for vital journeys. There was one of these during the last week of school. “I HAVE to drive to school,” she told me with a serious look. The fact that it is 250 kilometers, that the weather forecast had announced thunderstorms and storms and that she owns a 1000-euro train ticket for the whole of Austria, played no role in view of the important cargo that could only be transported by car.
These were two rare tomato plants that the older child had acquired as part of a course from a vegetable farmer in Burgenland. “This species is a very old variety,” she told me. “There are very few of them left. The tomatoes taste almost as sweet as fruit.” When I asked how big the plants were, I didn’t get a concrete answer. Instead, a long monologue about the fact that the rare sweet tomatoes cannot be expected to travel by train.
Olaf gave her the okay to transport the tomatoes without my consent, and all I could do was get angry and pray that she would come home safely.
On the day we met again – car and child had returned from Salzburg unharmed – the relapse happened. The young woman became a Wombi again. She moved back into her “bed” living space and only came out to eat again.
“The drive was really exhausting,” she argued. And: “I have to recover.” And: “I’m totally tense from sitting in the car.” And: “I have to sleep.” And: “I have to sleep again.”
Wombi was back.
When I went out the door, I discovered two plants about 30 centimeters high at the entrance to the cellar, which were more gray-brown than green. When I picked them up, dust came out of the pot. It took a while before I realized that I was holding the rare tomato plants in my hands, for which the Wombi had taken a five hundred kilometer drive under the most adverse circumstances.
“You don’t have to water them…” Really?
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The rarities were on their last legs.
I fertilized them and put them in a pot with fresh moist soil. They scratched the curve.
The next day, when the Wombi had left her cave to smear a ham and mayo toast, I told her about the rescue of her tomato plants.
“Oh,” she replied, waving her hand dismissively, “that wouldn’t have been necessary. You don’t have to water them at all.”
I’m going to call the Schönbrunn Zoo today to arrange for the Wombi to move to the kangaroo enclosure. The wombat activists will be thrilled when they see the wombi. Maybe the zoo can build her a glass cave through which you can watch her sleep. I promise I’ll bring her a cute rare tomato every once in a while.