I wish I had a Teddybär
Where’s the untranslatable german word for THIS feeling?
When my mother became a mother at 19, she had a questionable grasp of English. She once called my father a “Schlafzimmer (bedroom) gangster”, and my cat Gracie is named after a reference to how “Grazy” she was for being a bold woman at that time. Southern Missouri in the 1960s wasn’t kind to a German immigrant, and Mom ended up separating her languages. German was reserved for the friends she made who had also moved to the area, phone calls home to her family, and the occasional word she couldn’t translate in English.
Side note: The separation was so pronounced for her, that if she was talking on the phone in German and I had a question for her, she couldn’t really translate it in her head. I learned just enough German as a kid to get her attention when I needed something while she was on a call. Although, now that I think about it, that could have just been a brilliant strategy to get some quiet time to talk to her family.
Even decades later, she couldn’t always find an English word good enough to describe what she wanted to me. She taught me about “Mittelschmerz” to help me understand the pain women feel during ovulation. I still use “roust” to ask the dogs to move out of my spot on the couch before I sit down. And Mama set me up for a life of “Wanderlust” long before the word was plastered across every souvenir t-shirt.
There was one feeling we shared that she didn’t have a German word to describe. As a kid I ended up calling it my “teddy bear mood”. It meant that I was feeling sad, but not over anything in particular that I could name or needed to fix. Maybe a lot of different small things had been building up, maybe I read something sad, maybe I had a sad dream. All I knew was that I felt sensitive and I wanted to curl up with my teddy bear and maybe watch a sad movie that would make my cry.
As an adult I’ve learned to recognize this feeling for what it really is — the need to experience sorrow in a world that tells us we should just choose to be happy. So often we don’t let ourselves really FEEL what we need to feel. That person said something hurtful? Don’t let it get to you. That sad story on the news? Move on. Something really tragic and awful happened to you? Feel sad for a minute and then shove it all down and focus only on the positive. Things happen but life is busy and we don’t always give ourselves the time and space to honor what our hearts and bodies experience. Toxic positivity and the pressure to turn negatives good is so pervasive most of us don’t even see it. Mom understood that we have intense feelings, and sometimes the best thing to do is give in and let them wash over us. Mom understood that sometimes I just needed to hug my teddy bear and cry. She taught me that was okay.
I just wish maybe she had also taught me a cool German word to go with it.
