Heroes here and there

Most certainly, this was and is not intended to be a journal on soccer. But I have to write about soccer at least once more. Simply because I bumped into two very different kinds of heroes on your side and on this side of the Atlantic lately.

Here, it is a tiny soccer player who definitely ascended to heroic status last Wednesday. His name is Philipp Lahm, and his last name ironically means "lame", although he is an amazingly fast runner. He is the most likeable hero one could ever imagine. He is probably also the most typical modern (West) German kind of hero I can imagine.

First of all, he plays defense - so he's totally unoffensive -, but scored the third and decisive goal of the German national team against Turkey this week (message: You don't need to be on the aggressive side to be successful). He is only 5,6 feet tall and looks like the sort of son-in-law any mother would just love to have in the family. Definitely not on the Goliath side. Although Germany's leading news magazine, "Der Spiegel", ascribes a good measure of sex appeal to "EC Hero Lahm"...

On top of everything, his rising fame even outside the soccer fan community - which began at the world championship in 2006 - seems not to have damaged this guy's golden heart in the least. Among other things, the 24-year-old lends his face to a campaign against speeding on Germany's infamous highways, playing with his being small in physique by declaring: "Speeders are SO cool", showing a tiny distance between his thumb and middle finger. And he founded a charity to support underprivileged children in Europe and Africa. "I had a super childhood, I have always been privileged", he said in an interview. "Now I want to give something back."

The other hero is someone I had more difficulties to accept as such, although he clearly seems to be a very amiable person, too. His name is Danny. He is not famous at all. He is a soldier from New Jersey, and he serves in Iraq.

His picture hung right next to my eight year old son's classroom door, framed by US flags. “We Salute... One Of Our Country’s Many Heroes Fighting In Iraq, Army Private 1st Class Daniel Gabryszewski”, said the poster that the second graders had made. Danny wears an overall in camouflage color. The martial outfit somewhat distracts from the fact that he, like Philipp Lahm, is more on the tiny side.

N. and his classmates wrote to Danny regularly, and he answered their questions by mail. He drives some kind of special army truck, and a New Jersey newspaper printed an article about him.

But why should children be indoctrinated like that, was my first thought when I heard about this campaign. Why do they have to glorify a soldier fighting in a war of which the legitimacy is more than questionable in the first place?!

When I told N.'s teacher, Mrs. M., of my concerns, explaining that Germans in general tended to be rather uneasy with the concept of war heroes for historical reasons, she smiled and said: "I think the children really need someone like that." As she had worked miracles with those second graders before, I didn't object any further.

At the end of the school year, the class organized a charity sale for Danny. They designed posters advertising the event, crafted door knob hangers and fridge magnets, and persuaded their Moms to bake cookies for the sale - in spite of almost 100 degrees Fahrenheit outside.

From the posters I learned that "their" soldier has his king-of-hearts qualities, too: On top of "fighting against terrorists and for democracy in Iraq", as N. told me in a tone of utter conviction that made me cringe, Danny takes care of stray puppies, and he supports poor children in Iraq with school materials.

That's what the second graders' sale was for: Buying pet food for the puppies, and pencils and markers for the children Danny tries to help. Everybody came: teachers, students, parents, siblings. After less than an hour, each and every item had been sold. And the children counted more than 300 dollars in their cash box.

The most important thing, though, was the whole lot of thought and honest work they invested - and their obvious pride in their common project.

I'm still not totally convinced that it is a good idea to make second graders worship soldiers as heroes - even if I have to admit that it is somewhat easier to stand up and be counted on a successful soccer player's side, than on the side of a soldier fighting in a questionable war.

But I sure learned that working for a hero's good cause is a most inspiring activity for children. And when N. was asked whether he was looking forward to go to Germany for the summer, he said that he sure was, but that there was just one thing he really regretted: That he was going to miss the picnic his classmates were planning in July - for Danny, while the soldier from New Jersey would be on vacation at home.

Soccer sensations

Cologne/Haan, June 25

The first thing that happened after we had made it out of the Cologne airport last Friday was that N. stepped into dog poop. Won't be the last time, I guess.

One tends to forget these things after ten months of absence. Germany has pretty straight laws against leaving dog poop on the sidewalk, but hardly anywhere are they strictly enforced. In Berlin, for example (probably the German dog capital, too), you shouldn't ever walk through the streets with your eyes simply on people, sights, or traffic lights. At least half of one's attention should be focused on scanning the sidewalk for possible turds.

Things soon got better, though. The weather is gorgeous - seems there IS going to be a summer in Europe this year. And yesterday, when I stepped out of the Cologne railway station, the first thing I saw was a guy picking up his dog's smelly legacy from the sidewalk.

Then, of course, the whole country is in soccer euphoria. Flags everywhere. Hanging out of windows, sticking on cars (eight was the highest number of flags I have counted on a single car), even on baby strollers. Hardly a bar, café, or restaurant that hasn't installed huge TV screens to encourage - and profit from - the collective worshipping of the Soccer God.

Right now, N. (my son), his father (my husband), and his grandfather (my father) are watching the semi final match, Germany against Turkey. Three generations, all experts, of course. Cursing, brawling, yelling, lamenting. The German team is playing like a bunch of toddlers in a sandbox. The coach should be fired and sent to Siberia. The Swiss referee is a partial imbecile (pro-Turkish, of course). And now the TV lines from Basel broke down on top of everything. For the second time. Unbelievable. The score is 1:1.

I'm not a big soccer fan. I even used to hate late Saturday afternoons, when every family in West Germany had to go home from whatever activity they were engaged in because Daddy absolutely had to watch the "Sportschau" on TV, showing the games of the national soccer league.

But I have to admit that I am once again moved by the cheerful patriotism that Germans have been exercising at least in the context of international soccer championships for the last two years. It started 2006 with the World Championship in Germany, which our family experienced during our last summer as residents of Berlin. When Jürgen Klinsmann and his men became heroes. When the whole country was happy. And for the first time, the world liked us. Even more important, we finally seemed to like ourselves.

There are more than solid reasons to hate and fear any German nationalism, of course. But two years as immigrant in the US have made it pretty clear to me that without a healthy dose of patriotism, a country's identity and self confidence probably won't be worth much. And a national identity, a certain feeling of belonging somewhere worth belonging, is something one comes to cherish even more when living as - and sometimes feeling like - a Non-Resident Alien in a foreign country.

There! The German team just scored the third goal against Turkey - it's 3:2 now, 30 seconds before the final whistle. Three generations are jumping up and down on my parents' living room sofa. "We are in the final!", beams N., "maybe we will even become the European champions!" Now the TV shows half a million soccer fans, cheering and celebrating in front of the Brandenburger Tor in Berlin.

Honestly, I couldn't care less whether Germany is soccer champion or not. But seeing all these people celebrate their team and their country, makes me feel just happy to be one of them.

Even if that includes people whose "best friend's" dog poop I sometimes cannot completely avoid.

corn

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bakery in lagos traditional food

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Split Peas & Mais

Split Peas & Mais, originally uploaded by More Altitude.

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Wirrarika-(5) Ethanol's effect: Expensive tortillas

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Rice grains for sale

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Food trough

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Filling Up

Filling Up, originally uploaded by More Altitude.

All About Bubbles

There are lots of things one gets used to after living in the United States for more than one year. That everybody asks you how you are, but nobody wants to know. That a “7” in handwriting doesn't come with a dash in the middle. Even this stubborn resistance against the metric system.

What I haven't got used to, though, is the overwhelming presence of economic excess.

At least in this part of the country, where a seven-year-old boy once expertly asked me whether we were paying for our car "on a monthly basis", an automobile with less than six cylinders simply doesn't seem to feel right.

When my neighbor D. was pregnant with her second child, her girlfriends gave her huge gift bags full of expensive clothes at her so-called baby shower. My son, who turned eight this month, got a couple of hundred dollars' worth of birthday presents from his friends (or rather from their parents).

On a larger scale, law firms and enterprises of the financial sector compete for graduates from elite colleges by offering six-figure salaries for their first year on the job. Getting rich and retiring by the age of 35 has become not an unrealistic goal among twenty-somethings at Wall Street.

As we have also learned during the past few months, a lot of people with no financial resources whatsoever were given - and accepted - hazardous mortgages from major banks. Mortgages they could never seriously be expected to pay back.

And why shouldn’t they go for it? Didn’t even some politicians and NGOs actually embrace subprime mortgages as a means to give poor people the chance to own a home, too? Didn’t the whole country get used to living with huge deficits in its federal budget as well as in its trade? And hadn’t everybody lived quite comfortably with spending, on average, more money than he or she actually earns? The national savings rate has been in the negative since 2005. But why bother if one had got used to the value of homes growing at a double-digit rate every year?

Now, Americans watch the mortgage crisis expand and the stock markets crash. Their's, and those of other countries around the world. Concerns grow that a major recession is going to follow suit.

And not only do the wealthy lose money. Middle class people and families with low income stand to lose their homes and investments they rely on for their old age. Cities face bankruptcy because of the real estate market collapsing in whole districts.

Not that there hadn't been warnings in abundance. For someone coming from a part of the world where economies tend to suffer from over-regulation (and where people tend to put their money into savings accounts with ridiculous interest rates, rather than either spending or investing it), it was fascinating to watch the mortgage crisis evolve with the Fed, the government, and other institutions looking the other way. While the financial industry turned ever more creative in "redistributing" risks as if they could make them dissappear.

As a student of American history, I had already marveled at the excesses of the so-called Gilded Age towards the end of the 19th century, when “robber barons” like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and J.P. Morgan dominated the scene until these early financial heydays ended with the Panic of 1893.

Since then, America has become even more of a “Bubble Economy”, as Eric Janszen, founder of the investment website iTulip, argues in the February issue of Harper’s Magazine. (Janszen, and iTulip, became famous for predicting and commenting on the burst of the dot.com bubble in 2000.)

And no end is in sight, according to Jantzen: He writes that what he calls the FIRE sector – Finance, Insurance and Real-Estate businesses – has successfully replaced the business cycles which had at least been connected to the economy’s fundamental value and health, with a cycle of “shared speculative hallucinations”. Helped by media, governments and legislators, they pick out a certain sector and inflate it with capital, thus creating a perpetuum mobile of rising assets for as long as the hallucination lasts.

To cover their losses after one bubble bursts, the author concludes, financiers will have to create an even bigger new one. And a new bubble might already be well on its way: Janszen predicts alternative energies and infrastructure to be the next target. Not that those sectors didn’t need investment, he writes. But odds were that the lion’s share of the bubble trillions would end up in shares and not in actual new industries or infrastructure.

Janszen doesn’t leave much hope for any “change” of this system from the political side; on the contrary: Following Al Gore and the latest media hype, presidential candidates like Hillary Clinton have already begun to embrace alternative energies as a political key topic, thereby only delivering one more crucial ingredient for FIRE’s success in creating a new bubble.

One might add that financial sector’s powerful grip on the US economy does also result from the simple fact that alongside the bubbles, the sector itself has grown into huge dimensions. FIRE nowadays stands for more than 20 percent of America’s GDP.

Last but not least, the sector has been extremely successful in luring a major part of the country’s intellectual talent into its own system. Take the example of Princeton University: Six out of ten undergraduate students go from this university straight to Wall Street. Needless to say that the best get hired in advance, before they even graduate.

At least right now, it seems hard to imagine a way out of the vicious circle of bubble economy. Or, as Janszen laconically puts it: “Given the current state of our economy, the only thing worse than a new bubble would be its absence.”

Boy Group Revisited

It was my first rock concert in about 15 years. It was the first rock concert I ever listened to sitting on a chair.

Sting is still the hell of a great-looking guy. His voice is still fabulous, as is his yoga-modeled body, effectively shown off in tight black pants and a white sleeveless T-shirt so ragged it looked like an actual leftover from the eighties. And “The Police” reunited still is a band that may not have revolutionized rock music, but plays songs you tend to replay in your head, songs you want to hear over and over again.



“The first boy group in history”, mocked my husband (who came with me anyway). But now the boys are way into their 50s - Sting and Stewart Copeland -, or even 60s - Andy Summers. The idols of my late teenage years, featuring grey hair (Stewart), a paunch (Andy), and a heavily receding hairline (Sting). Matching my own wrinkles and growing demand of hair color products.

This is how I spent at least the first half of the concert in Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall Arena. Looking at and marveling at how old we all have become. The huge video screens displaying close-ups of the musicians from different angles, were constant pitiless reminders of that fact. Of course I had known before. But now it was shown. Live on stage.

Was that mixture of nostalgia and self-pity distracting me from the music? Was this the reason why this vibrating, exciting live-concert-feeling simply wouldn’t kick in - although the show was pretty good, the band in high spirits, the songs often jazzed up or otherwise reinterpreted? It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the event and the music; I sang along, still knowing many of the lyrics by heart. But “rocking” in my chair already felt a little awkward. Was it the folding chair that prevented me from jumping up and dancing?


Before the concert, we had met Robert in a Japanese noodle place at the Trump Taj Mahal’s bombastic casino floor. A bald, jolly little guy in his fifties, eagerly digging in his memory for some traces of the German he had learned in high school. We small talked. He had come to see “The Police”, too, combining the concert with a visit at the casino before he’d have to go “back to business” on Monday. There was a shuttle service, he told us, for the Taj Mahal’s hotel guests to the concert hall and back. Very convenient.

Maybe that’s what is most irritating about going to a rock concert when you are forty- or even fifty-something.

As a teen or twen, one got there in an old VW Beetle with at least six people crammed inside, sleeping bags in the trunk. The event was huge, feelings were intense, anything could happen - or so you hoped. And the music almost made you fly. Until one woke up freezing in a soaking wet sleeping bag the morning after one of those open air concerts.

Two decades later, chances are that a rock concert is something well organized, to be fit into a tight schedule. Somewhere between picking the children up from soccer training on Saturday afternoon and getting back home not too late on Saturday night for the babysitter. No drugs. Furtively glancing at the cell phone display in the middle of “Message In A Bottle”, in case the babysitter is sending out an SOS at this very moment about a toddler who had suddenly fallen sick…

No, neither the boys nor the concert were anything like 15 years ago. What a pity. And what a relief.

happy uncomplicated lives

I met Anny at a wedding reception.

I am not a great fan of receptions, let alone wedding receptions, especially in the US. (I could also write about ten dozen paragraphs about my issues with American weddings, but promised myself I will try to keep my posts shorter).

It’s because I am socially-challenged. Hopeless at small talk. And very-awfully uncomfortable having to make acquaintances that are supposed to last a quarter of an hour.

Anny was an exception.

She was born in France before WWII. Her parents – I assume at least one of them had to be Jewish – emigrated to Argentina, where she spent most of her childhood. Then, in 1947, she moved to the US. “I grew up speaking French and Spanish, that’s why when I speak English, my accent is hard to detect” she said.

Mine is probably easier, but nevertheless she was not able to decipher it (I have no idea why, but it always makes me feel good, when people have problems trying to guess my accent).

Where did you come from? How long ago? What do you do? She was firing questions like from a machine gun and I could see in her shiny, black eyes that she was genuinely interested. I did not have to talk for long. “I know exactly what you are going through” she said after about one minute.

A few hours and many toasts-speeches-hors d'oevres -champagne-and-wine-glasses later, we bumped into each other again. This time it was in a tent where a live band was playing. My daughter who assumed a flower girl duties for the day (do not ask me about a 100 dollar plastic dress she had to done) was dancing with her grandparents. A lot of goofiness and laughter.

“You should be happy that you daughter has such happy and uncomplicated grandparents” Anny told me. “Because she will be able to live a happy and uncomplicated life."

Just as she was saying it, I noticed that the bride parted with her elegant high-heels and was dancing bare feet. One of her elegant braid’s maids donned sneakers and you could barely see a Nike logo from under her long, red satin dress.
Happy, uncomplicated lives. I can't stop thinking about it.

Do I want my daughter to live a happy and uncomplicated life? Or is it more complicated than that?

Happily, it’s probably not upon me to decide.

Happy IVGLDSW Day!

This morning, I got an email from a friend that made my day. She had received it from another friend in Switzerland, and I already passed it on to a friend in Germany. But I'd like to share it with more Very Good Looking, Damn Smart Women out there, and that's why I posted it here without knowing to whom I owe the copyright - except for the quotes, of course...
Wherever you are in the small world, enjoy!

"Today is International Very Good Looking, Damn Smart Woman's Day, so please send this message to someone you think fits this description.

Please do not send it back to me as I have already received it from a Very Good Looking, Darn Smart Woman!

And remember this motto to live by... Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, wine in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WOO HOO what a ride!

To the Girls !!!

Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what the hell happened.
(Cora Harvey Armstrong)

Inside me lives a skinny woman crying to get out. But I can usually shut the bitch up with cookies.
(Unknown)

The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.
(Helen Hayes - at 73)

Old age ain't no place for sissies.
(Bette Davis)

Thirty-five is when you finally get your head together and your body starts falling apart.
(Caryn Leschen)

I'm not going to vacuum 'til Sears makes one you can ride on.
(Roseanne Barr)

Behind every successful man is a surprised woman.
(Maryon Pearson)

Nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission.
(Eleanor Roosevelt)

When life hands you lemons, ask for tequila and salt and call me over!!!"

Suburban Stay-At-Home Mom Horror Driver

On the first October weekend – it was the last hot weekend of this extraordinary summer in the times of global warming -, we went to the beach. We got there by car, an old Daimler of the kind I’ve been driving for the last ten years or so.

All parking lots were full, so we took a residential side street where we finally located a free space. It looked tight, but so what? I only had to squeeze into this parking gap parallel to the sidewalk - something I used to manage in seconds in Cologne or Berlin when I lived there, without even interrupting the conversation I was engaged in.

But this time? I just couldn’t do it. It took me half a dozen attempts to get in there, tires screeching along the curb. I felt so embarrassed I was ready to drive back to P. there and then. Only that wasn’t an option with a slightly mocking husband, the children, swimsuits, and all the toy diggers in the car. So I ignored these people sitting on their porches smirking (as I was sure they were without really daring to look), and shepherded everybody to the beach.

When I later confessed this disgrace to D., she really smirked. “So, you’re finally here! The stay-at-home mom, queen of the suburb! Welcome!”

And it’s true. If you live in a suburb (or, well, a small town) in the US, there’s no necessity of any parking skills. No frantic competition for the few legal parking spots in the streets of your neighborhood when everybody comes home from work in the evening – there is your garage, or your driveway. No circling around the block where your favorite grocery store is located, to virtually make a dash into any space that another car left no ten seconds earlier - there is the shopping mall with its huge parking lot or garage, no parallel parking anywhere, just move in and back out. To cut a long story short: No practice, no skills.

Need more indicators how far I already departed from the city girl? Come to think about it, within my suburban surroundings, I use the car much more often than I used to when we first moved here. Now, public transport is hardly an option, of course. But biking is, at least in this small town of P. where there still is a downtown and, close by, a comparatively cozy shopping center dating from the nineteen-fifties. But isn’t it just so much more convenient to quickly take the car to go there, especially as you could transport two more gallons of milk and wouldn’t have to go again this week? This kind of thought wouldn’t ever have occurred to me in Berlin!

So, what to do to avoid “Death by Suburb”, as Dave Goetz puts it (Subtitle: “Keeping the suburb form killing your soul”)? I may not be religious enough to follow this author with his “spiritual practices” that, as he claims, counter “suburban toxins” like envy of the neighbor’s SUV or more aspiring soccer kids. I’m not there yet, thank God, and P., after all, has quite a few decidedly un-suburban qualities, which might prove soul saving.

But just in case, I should probably start with a reversal of driving habits. No shopping by car this week (even if that means I will have to go twice to fit three gallons of milk and the diapers for my little one onto the bike). But for the next trip to New York I will take the car and not the commuter train, even if I get stuck in the tunnel for two hours, and parking fees will be ruinous.

My big fear about that, though, is that I might already be this horribly dangerous suburban mom driver, knocking about the big city… Maybe I should try Philadelphia first.

on sunday, about saturday– love story validated

I could probably count on my fingers the number of fiction books I have read over the last decade.

There is a huge pile on my bedside table (which I recently got courtesy of D and her handsome husband. It’s been painted gray. The pile can go much higer now that I parted with my cardboard box! Thank you!) which I call a queue.

Books I intend to read hibernate in the queue for a year or so, until one day I decide to clean up my bedroom, and bring them to the “library” upstairs and start a new queue all over again.

There are a few fiction books in the queue right now, but I have a feeling they will probably travel upstairs some time before Christmas (to make room for new ones) and most of them will not have been read…

Saturday by Ian McEwan was a memorable exception. I got it as a present last year and it did not stay on my bedside table for more than a few days. I read it in the span of two or three nights.

I loved it.

One of the reasons why it resonated with me, was the setting. The story takes place in London on February 15th of 2003 – the day of a big peace rally in the wake of the Iraq war. I lived in London at the time, I was in the rally (which was huuuuuuge), and I remember that day very vividly.

I know the square where the main protagonist lives with his wife – my husband and I would sometimes meet for lunch in the nearby RIBA café. (By the way, this wonderful modernist building happens to be one of the best spots for lunch in central London. Food, given its price, is unusually good, at least for British standards. And the bookstore downstairs feels like heaven. Be careful about your credit card!).

It feels nice to read a fiction book which has so many non-fiction details that one finds familiar. In some ways you feel you were allowed to enter the pages and be part of the story.

The book had excellent reviews. Critics praised McEwan’s wonderful writing style. Rightly so. They raved about the composition. I couldn’t agree more. They loved the surgical precision and neurosurgical theme, which I also appreciated.

To me however – and I haven’t found a single review which shared the sentiment– Saturday is primarily a love story. It starts at dawn with two people waking in bed together and it ends late at night, when after a harrowing day, they both meet there again, like in a safe harbor.

Perhaps I read the novel in a way that was not necessarily intended by the author – I had thought -- after all, Observer critics and New York Times reviewers probably know better. Maybe these were my personal circumstances that made me look at this book in that way, I kept telling myself.

I went to see Ian McEwan earlier this week. He came to Princeton to promote his new book – Chesil Beach.

It was great to see an author whom I like.

Bad haircut, wrinkled linen shirt that used to be white and turned very off-white (I bet he wears it every day), wire spectacles that could perhaps find some use in the late 1970s, but that no self-respecting New Yorker would even consider donning today. I miss London so badly – I couldn’t stop thinking as he was reading fragments of the new novel (I even found his British accent to be charming!).

Chesil Beach (which I still haven’t read in full) treats about a couple on a failed wedding night -- seventy pages or so, about their inability to consume their newly formed marriage (both are virgins), struggles to find each other, express or understand what they feel and think. It's about love and patience, he reportedly said in a recent interview. “Does it reflect your own difficulties?” someone asked as he finished reading a few passages. Only on an American campus a question like that can be posed without a trace of hesitation. And only someone as British as McEwan can answer with such virtuosity – understatement, good humor, mixed with polite but firm “mind your own business” message.

For me, the most important thing during that meeting however, was him briefly mentioning Saturday – also in response to a question from the audience.

“I got in trouble with the reviewers for this book” he said. “It’s about two people, who are married and who love each other. As simple as that. Reviewers these days find it very troubling.”

Thank you Mr. McEwan!

The Pursuit of (Women's) Happiness

Last Tuesday I was sitting down at the dining room table, trying to start reading the paper for what was probably the eighth time that morning - only to be instantly interrupted by my two-and-a-half-year-old: “Mama, my train! It doesn’t work!” Up I was again, trying once more to attach the engine to the long toy train R. had assembled on the living room floor. Feeling a little exhausted at 8.45am already. Wishing – with a pang of guilt, of course, about what a heartless und ungrateful mother I was - I could catch a train to some office in the city and put together some words for an article instead.

Ok, train is back on track, all aboard, another five minutes for my newspaper if I’m lucky. And there it is: A column in the New York Times’ business section, titled “A Reversal In the Index of Happy”, telling me that women nowadays not only tend to be less happy than men, but also that they are, on average, significantly less happy than they were in 1970! Although – or maybe: because – women in the new millennium do a lot more paid work and less housework than in the nineteen-sixties.

What has happened, apparently, is that men in general cut down on their work, while women still spend about the same amount of time on work but feel they’d need to do a lot more. Or, as the columnist puts it: “Men’s leisure time has grown; so have women’s to-do lists.”

If it is true that women today compare themselves not only to other women and what they have achieved (like they did in the Sixties), but also to men, it seems like we did not exactly chose new priorities, but simply set ourselves a lot more goals. Like a female student said in a conversation with one of the happiness-researchers: Her mother’s goals in life had been to have a beautiful garden, a well-kept house and well-adjusted children who did well in school. “I want all those things, too, but I also want to have a great career and have an impact on the broader world.”

The result is a lot of pressure, and even if a universally accepted definition of happiness is probably hard to establish, too much pressure most certainly is not a good component.

So, are these surveys simply water on the mills of neo-conservatism, indicating that society would be so much better off, and women would be so much happier if the latter concentrated on their traditional role in kitchens and kids’ rooms? Is cutting down on perfectionism a promising way to more happiness? Like the lady whom I met on the train lately told me: “When my children were little, I simply decided that we did not need a spotless house. So I stopped cleaning up after I came home from the office and played with my children instead, telling myself: They will remember the fun and not the mess!”

Should woman endlessly deliberate what might make them happy, until they miss the chance to have children, like it tends to be the case in many European countries? Or should we just fight more vigorously for affordable universal day care plus better treatment by employers for women with small children?

Before we moved to P., I was one of the lucky few, who had that perfect combination of work and children for a short time. I worked part time - three days per week – as a journalist in Berlin for an employer with a lot of understanding for parents’ need of flexibility, while N. was in school and R. was in preschool until 4pm. Also, there was a nanny to bring the boys to school and pick them up on the days I worked. Plus, a husband who, in spite of a full time workload, still loves to spend time with his sons and does so regularly.

Now, as I’m not yet allowed to work in the US, one important component of my life is missing, and sometimes badly. There is less balance in my everyday life; I tend to feel I’m standing on just one leg right now where there used to be two. Maybe there are more unhappy moments now, especially when I nourish feelings of loss and renunciation. But there might also be more moments of intense happiness because I spend more time with my children. Just enough to let me sense that concentrating on one task is not necessarily the worse alternative to multitasking - and getting this feeling that one doesn’t do anything right. Am I all in all less happy now than I used to be in Berlin? I honestly couldn’t say.

Don’t get me wrong: This is no plea for the case of stay-at-home moms. I’d go back to work tomorrow if I could. But instead of nourishing unhappiness at times when one cannot have it all, it might be better trying to make the most of what is the case just then. Like sitting on the sun deck on a beautiful September morning, spending one intense hour with R. building a new, exciting train track. And then writing - maybe not that Pulitzer-Price winning article, but at least this post -, while a perfectly content little guy choo-choos along all by himself. Here we are: One happy little man – and one happy woman. At least for this precious moment.