31.5.2014
Tonight, Gernot will be arriving home late. Some emergency cabinet business showed up, so my husband is taking care of it now. I would have joined him, but he insisted that he go alone so that I could be allowed to look after Retia. Recently, Retia has been pining for me, despite the girls' best efforts to keep her company whilst Gernot and I are away for work.
It is very strange having a child. Perhaps...perhaps it is because I am always so work-oriented, always thinking about I must do for the next day, what my appointments are for the following week, whom I must meet and speak to, how many press conferences there are three days from now, how long tomorrow's cabinet meeting will be, all sorts of things. Or perhaps it does not even have anything to do with being busy with work - maybe I just never expected to even have a child, despite the fact that Gernot and I are college sweethearts.
So whenever I hold Retia, my one-year-old daughter, in my hands, it baffles me, the fact that I am a mother. I know the responsibilities of a new mother, what she must do and all the duties that come with having a newborn baby. Retia is not exactly a newborn, but to me, she still feels like one. But my problem is that I still do not yet feel like Retia has drastically altered my life. And sometimes, I wonder if this is truly a good or bad thing. You might expect a new mother to feel as though her life is turned upside down with the introduction of a new child, but I am not one of them. Maybe it is because of my work. Case in point, only recently have I been responding properly whenever the girls tell me, "Frau, your daughter". I remember the first year following Retia's birth, there were many instances when I didn't even respond whenever my daughter was involved. Especially one instance in which Prinz Eugen spoke to me about heading out to buy more diapers for Retia, and I gave her a funny look as though I didn't even know that I had a daughter. That was quite embarrassing.
Yet, even still, whenever I do hold my own daughter in my hands, I know that this is my child. I just need some more time until the fact that I am a mother can sink in for good.
Retia is learning to walk lately, so we entertained ourselves watching Retia toddle around awkwardly on her little feet. Prinz Eugen perhaps was enjoying herself the most, laughing whenever Retia fell down on the carpet and helped her up each time. Lebe and Max had already made my supper for me when I arrived home, even though they didn't need to.
Never did I ever imagine that these girls would ever amount to become an essential part of my life, my family's lives. Robotic, computerized humanoid robots whose sentience and physiology resemble those of humans' virtually perfectly, borne from a top-secret weapons development program? If the girls began wearing civilian clothes, it would be impossible to tell them apart from any normal human. And now, over the course of one short year, I feel as though they have been with me all my life. Life is strange, it really is.
Prinz Eugen has been experimenting with our spices in the kitchen to find the ideal combination of flavors to add to a chicken recipe she had found the other day. That girl has taken quite the interest in cooking. I believe it started when Gernot and I phoned the girls that we wouldn't be able to make it back home in time to make dinner for everyone because of a meeting that lasted much longer than anticipated. Prinz Eugen decided to take up the responsibilities of cooking herself and managed to make a decent labskaus. Seeing this, I offered to teach Prinz Eugen how to cook, hoping that perhaps she could foster her natural talent for it, and it was quite the worthy investment, since it appears to me that Prinz Eugen is our resident cook more than myself. I rather feel bad about it sometimes, for it is as though I am transferring the responsibility of feeding the family to her, but Prinz Eugen said that she didn't mind. If it came to cooking for us, there was no physical way for her to ever feel unwilling about it. What a sweet girl...but at the same time, I do hope that the others do not eventually come to take Prinz Eugen's cooking for granted. Too often have I seen those with the generous willingness to shoulder others' responsibilities for free become exploited and taken advantage of at the hands of those who simply view the former as expendable resources. I would know, and I should know - I do not work in the field of politics mindlessly.
For dinner, I made everyone grumbeersupp un quetschekuche, U-511's favorite, and some kerscheblotzer for dessert. The girls love my cooking, and it makes me quite happy. I was never a great cook in my own opinion and know plenty others, neighbors and friends and coworkers, who are much better cooks and chefs than I, so the fact that the girls absolutely adore whatever I make is very flattering. Even if I were to botch a dish, perhaps add in too much salt or too little vinegar, they have never complained. Should I be any less of a cook than I am now, I would never know that there was something wrong with my cooking so long as I only fed them.
This being said, however, I am quite happy with the status quo. I learned to cook out of necessity for my husband once we became married, so becoming the world's best cooking mother was never necessarily on my mind. Nor do I plan to cook for anyone outside of our family, and when I say family, the girls are also included as well. Because why not? For nearly a year, except for missions and training and medical enhancement surgeries, these girls have been living with us, partly because of Gernot's order, and we have since bonded together and enjoyed one another's company. And because the girls have all taken the forms of young maidens who appear anywhere from high school students to college kids, it certainly feels like they are all my daughters, along with Retia. They certainly treat Retia as though she were everyone's cute little baby sister, so that helps the image grow. I remember when I once dreamed about the family I would have with Gernot, how many children we would have, but those are memories of college and the years surrounding our marriage, before the punishing days of politics took over our lives. I do know that I was rather dreading the process of raising a child during those days, the sleepless nights as a new mother that I would inevitably have. But with the girls looking after Retia for me so that Gernot and I can concentrate on our work and the girls being daughters of ours in their own right, it is like having six daughters with none of the pain of raising such a large family. It is quite the wonderful feeling, quite the surreal sensation.
Once we ate our late dinner, Bismarck asked me about our progress from yesterday's talk. She is referring to Gernot's suggestion of sending the girls to Japan for additional training under the guidance of the experienced naval personnel who are part of the Japanese Moebius Four Platoon. I answered her truthfully that it was only a mere suggestion, that it was more of my husband's idea than my own. Bismarck insisted that I try my best to see through with it. There was only so much training that was available to the girls here - a fact that all of us are painfully aware of. They can have as many ballistics programs and firing coordinates and angles charts loaded in their brains as they want, but not having actual live combat experience or at least live naval combat training means that their informational assets are ultimately useless, mere theories and no solid evidence or expertise to support them for the girls to know that their knowledge is actually working. And seeing that our own country has no private facility in which the girls can actually train somewhat, Bismarck argued that their only opportunity of fulfilling their intended roles was to seek the guidance of their counterparts in the Far East, the Japanese. They were allies in the past, and in fact, several of our submarines had been sold to the Japanese as war asset, U-511 included among them, so surely they would not mind hosting them as their guests.
I promised Bismarck I would see what I would do for them. But given the state that Japan is quickly becoming, I do not know if even historical alliances will allow my girls to receive the training they require to become effective naval personnel. I will try my best, for the girls have done so much for me so far and I do not want to let them down, but I am not keeping my hopes up.