Whisper... Whisper, Little Nightingale

This morning, I woke up tired. I woke up tired and tried to gather my thoughts before taking Laura to kindergarten. Just before leaving the house, we had a little tantrum, as she was deeply unhappy about the fact that, although her mother had borrowed one hundred euros from her to pay for her dance classes at short notice, the one hundred and fifty euros she returned today were apparently not quite as good. We clearly need to work a little more on this whole businesswoman concept.

On the way, she was murmuring away in the back seat, and unfortunately, I couldn't follow what she was saying as well as I would have liked. She was speaking so softly, almost as if she were talking to herself, while the noise of the car drowned out every word. Every now and then, I could hear a change in her intonation, followed by something like, "You know... That's riiight..." From her tone, I could tell she was looking for some kind of confirmation. I'm not even sure whether what I'm doing is right. I don't know whether having a medical background could be considered a hidden weapon when it comes to having psychosomatic conversations with your own child. Somehow, both her mother and I resort to these kinds of conversations to probe deep into her consciousness, looking for little signs of stress or anxiety that we can later explore through longer discussions. Although I couldn't understand what she was trying to say, I tried to follow the tone of her voice. She spoke slowly and quietly, the words almost reluctant to leave her tiny mouth. So she was calm. She wasn't agitated or anxious, and she wasn't thinking about anything particularly troubling. The long pauses between words were most likely her own reflections on what she wanted to say or on memories she was revisiting.

I noticed that she wasn't asking me many questions, and even when she addressed me directly, she didn't wait long for my input. If my answer took a little too long, she simply moved on. So she didn't really need me. She just needed someone to talk to, someone who would listen to whatever she wanted to say. After another five minutes of listening quietly, I realized she was going through a list of higher values. Almost like a template of what she was allowed to do, what she wasn't allowed to do, and how a child her age was supposed to behave in society. At this point, I felt I had to intervene and steer her thoughts in a different direction: "I'm really amazed at how you, a child of only four years old, can see things in such a mature way..." (I realized she might not fully understand the meaning of the word mature, so I decided to change it.) "...almost like a grown-up already. But do you think all children are like that? Do you think they all spend time thinking about what they're allowed to do and what they're not?" After a short pause, she continued galloping through her ideas and thoughts, and although I still couldn't understand exactly what she was trying to tell me, I didn't ask her to speak louder. She had chosen the tone and volume at which she wanted to speak, and I was afraid that if I tried to change her factory settings, I might somehow interrupt this exercise. So I settled for simply listening. I knew that as long as she kept talking, she wanted to tell me something, and I could sense how relaxed she was and that she was in a good mood.

She was telling me about what we had drawn the night before, while I was thinking about the cyclists coming towards us from the opposite direction, wearing shorts in ten-degree weather. I wondered whether they had any problems, whether their knees hurt, and suddenly realized that I had grown old. Like all things that pass with time, I too was beginning to feel old. At forty, I can feel an enormous difference between the way I experience life now and the way I did at twenty, and I try to imagine, by extrapolating, what that difference will look like when I'm sixty or eighty. There was a time when such thoughts would never even have crossed my mind. And now here I was, worrying about some cyclist and his rheumatism. Perhaps even the hemorrhoids he might have, making his bicycle ride uncomfortable. You know that joke: "How do you know you're getting old? When your friends start worrying about you when you fall instead of laughing at you!"

My thoughts briefly drifted towards the blood pressure medication I had taken that morning. On my cardiologist's recommendation, I had switched from candesartan to irbesartan combined with hydrochlorothiazide, and I was wondering whether the combination and the doses were appropriate. On the other hand, I was trying not to be a Klugscheißer, someone who always has to comment on everything and insist on having a different opinion. After all, we all hate those kinds of patients: the ones who come to us asking for advice and then simply do whatever they think is best anyway.

When we finally arrived at kindergarten, I was quickly struck by yet another dimension of my little daydream. Whenever I enter the kindergarten courtyard, I feel a sense of peace and security. I have the feeling that Laura is well cared for there, and somehow I regret that, at her age, I didn't get to attend the same kindergarten. As we went inside so she could change her shoes, I suddenly became aware of all those tiny little shoes. I started wondering what the people who would one day grow into them would look like. Tomorrow's adults are being shaped by the experiences they have today, right there, in kindergarten. The interactions they have today will contribute to the people they will eventually become.

So all these little koala bears, crying, whining, spilling water all over the floor in explosive tantrums, are the very ones who will carry society forward when we, when my generation, reach the most vulnerable point of our existence. We, as parents, take care of them today, at their most vulnerable, so that they can take care of us tomorrow, when we reach ours. They will be the firefighters battling the flames, the police officers protecting us, the doctors treating us, and the plumbers and electricians fixing the things that break down in our homes. How can we raise an entire generation in such a way that they preserve the empathy and love they naturally show as children? How can we protect them from the individualism of the world we live in?

I wish I could catch glimpses of the future and see how each of them will develop. I wish I could see exactly which negative experiences will leave their mark on each of them and, somehow stepping back into my role as a doctor, protect and guide them all. When I got back to the car, I realized something was missing. My little nightingale was no longer there, no longer singing softly in my ear.