The loneliness of a wolf-man

c Jenne Bleijenburg

"We have to shit on a wolf, don't we pappa?"
"Say what?"
"If we see a wolf, we have to shit on him! Don't we?"
"Ok?"
"And do you know what yellow means?"
"No, what does yellow mean?"
"Yellow means that you cannot touch him!
That is what yellow means."


Oh, my dog never bites sir!
He is a sweet kid. A sweet and disturbing kid. Disturbing because he scares them. The other kids:
"Off with your head!"
"I am gonna cut you..."
I know that these are just sentences from movies or books, that he only knows the emotional impact they make when you say them, and that he does not connect them with the meaning of those sentences themselves. He is merely stating the syntax, not the meaning. It is like Maus is speaking in ink, where the other kids speak in words.  He just constructs them,  like card houses.
Wordhouses.
But the other kids don't know that.  I see them scared by these lifeless, zombie-like sentences he recombines with all random words he's got lying around in his head.
He is like a doctor Frankenstein of language.

Wolf's child

I sometimes tell them (the parents or the children)  what's wrong with him, or at least what I know about what is wrong with him.
Or what is different with him, when I am in a politically correct state of mind.
But more often I joke about it. Because jokers have the magical power to change something frightening into something funny:
"Yeh, well, sorry. We found him in a forest. He's been raised by wolves so be careful: He might bite your leg off or eat your dolls."
When he was born, the only thing wrong (or different) with him seemed to be this weird little finger nail. Thin, long and hard, like a wolfs nail. So that's when we started to call him "our Wolf's child".
My other two boys have their own, different totems:
The oldest (13 years, ET) - The Owl: Because he always had his eyes wide open and never slept (compared to other babies we knew).
The middle one (10 years, WT) - The Monkey: Cause he could climb before he could even walk. One of the carpenters once fished him out of the roof gutter when he was just one year old.

When I'm gone

c Jenne Bleijenburg

I sometimes lay awake at night, worrying about the future.
Who's gonna love him when I am dead. Who's gonna take care of him, laugh at his funny and absurd words.
Will his brothers do?  Will he be able to stand on his own two feet.
He can be terribly annoying. It is sometimes like I am in love with a dangerous animal.
I see these ragged dirty men, singing in the street, hollow eyes, just some teeth left, talking to walls and screaming, scaring people with their words and their behavior. They are the ones that talk to the death, talk to the animals, they are the crazy ones, the holy ones, the sacred half godlike part of this world and part of another world ones. And I worry that Maus could be one of them, later. Sleeping under bridges, or under large things that smell like bridges. What kind of a man will he be? What kind of life will he lead...?

Wassiks fears
The mere thought of how Paul Ehrenfest - a brilliant physicist - solved his fears for his son Wassik, who had Down syndrom, always freaks me out. Ehrenfest was suffering from depression, and, primarily motivated by that I suppose, he first arranged the future care for his other children, and then first shot his 15 year old son Wassik, and them himself.
I really hate this guy. That is not love. That is managing your own fears. The mere fact that he took care of his other children but chose to take Wassik with him to his own grave, disqualifies him as a father, depression or no depression. And I really hope that no one ever solves the Ehrenfest Paradox. Just to piss him off.

Tiresome - c Jenne Bleijenburg

And my son, Maus, he will have to cope, somehow. With or/and without us.
And we are going to make him cope. That's what we (fathers/mothers/brothers) are here for.
Ehrenfest be damned!