“See?! Just one foot in front of the other, slowly, calmy…”
The size 44 ice hockey skates were filled up with extra socks but still wobbled frantically and seemed to have a life of their own.
“That’s it Chrys, you’re doing it, you’re skating!”
The Christmas lights around the little skate rink in our small town were blinking in purple, white and yellow. The ice was bubbly and too thin but we could care less, we loved the two weeks we could skate over our central parking lot with jingle bells ringing in our ears.
Aunt Mumu’s red cheeks and big smile were the only reason I wasn’t completely terrified on the huge hockey skates even though I was shaking my way over the ice like an accident taking its own sweet time to happen. Aunt Mumu was clapping her hands and reaching to the sky as if she was truly watching an Olympic miracle. She looked a bit like a homeless person. Green male winter coat way too big at the shoulders and too small at the hips. A knitted scarf with stripes in every colour of the rainbow. If she would have had red braids, freckles and huge walking shoes as well, she would be a seventy-year-old Pippi Longstocking. Her dark brown eyes were beaming, as always, and the split between her front teeth just seemed to make her smile bigger and brighter.
She was not really my aunt. She was our neighbour and everybody called her Aunt Mumu.
I had met her on the very first night in our new home. Mom had forgotten to make sure we had electricity, so we walked around inspecting the rooms with nothing but mom’s lighter to help us see what the house she had arranged for us from a distance actually looked like. Aunt Mumu must have been wondering if the house was haunted with flickering light moving around in the kitchen, she knocked on the very fragile door with paint falling from it in big flakes and stepped in without waiting for an invitation.
-Hello? Just came to welcome you to the neighbourhood…oh dear. No electricity just yet, huh? She looked around without saying a word. I hoped she couldn’t see the sad state of the three small rooms but if she did she said nothing about it.
-You are welcome to have dinner at my place if you need some time to get settled.
Mom had a good story about some administrative glitch somewhere and how everything would be alright tomorrow morning but when Aunt Mumu locked her eyes into mine, I could tell she was one of the few who couldn’t be fooled so easily.
She made a casserole and we ended up staying for three days. When we eventually moved into our new house there was electricity, but the rest of the house was a mess. Mom always knew how to dress things up to make them mean something else though. She didn’t want to participate in a patriarchal consuming society, that was why there were hardly any furniture and why the wallpaper curled from the walls. That was why there was no food in the kitchen, just some bread and ketchup. That was also why she couldn’t keep a job, because she was fighting the system. She wasn’t accepted because she was part of a growing community of strong, creative, liberated women who were going to change the world.
Auntie Mumu was the only person I could let into our world. She was the only person who didn’t attack my mother when she saw the truth: my mother couldn’t take care of herself and she most certainly couldn’t take care of anybody else. What was really special about her though, was the fact that she was the only person who wouldn’t buy my mother’s crock. She did neither, didn’t try to change mom or have me placed in child care but also didn’t buy the pretty lies. She just stuck around. She was there, two houses further, always ready to make some tea. Never judging.
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