Making breakfast, taking the kids to daycare or school, driving to work, picking them up again and then falling on the sofa after dinner. Go to yoga in the evening once a week instead. This is what the everyday life of many mothers should look like. At the weekend, the average mother often cheers on her offspring at soccer games or takes the family to the zoo.
What should rarely be on the program: sneaking through a ghost town of uninhabited wooden houses, in combat gear with a helmet. And then shoot with paint cartridges at everything that moves: very few mothers play paintball. Why not? The operators of the Go Paintball Adventure Park in Brandenburg Garzau-Garzin near Strausberg had the great idea of giving mothers free entry on Mother’s Day – and a glass of sparkling wine. That releases the inhibitions.
Other Mother’s Day offers, such as a whispering violin concert at Gendarmenmarkt or the tradition of going to brunch, tend to hide that fact, that Mother’s Day can be seen as controversial: on the one hand, motherhood has been celebrated for exactly 100 years, if not exaggerated. On the other hand, it should also be remembered what goes wrong when it comes to motherhood and care work.
Yoga doesn’t help
“The main responsibility of women for care work has remained. This means that women now simply do twice as much, they are employed and cook, clean, take care of other people,” said publicist Franziska Schutzbach, author of ” The exhaustion of women” in an interview with the online magazine editionf. Women would “always work a ‘second shift’ in addition to gainful employment”. One cannot “train away the exploitation and inner feelings of responsibility with yoga.”
But maybe it helps some mothers to simply shoot away a few aggressions? The anger that hardly anything changes in the unfair distribution of care work, really let it out: First, a shot for every evening of the week that mom put the children to bed (that is, six, except on Tuesdays, there is Yoga).
Ten months of maternity leave, ten shots
Then ten shots for the ten months that women typically take parental leave, plus two shots for the two months that fathers take on average. And another 30 shots for the 30 children’s sick days that mothers accumulate almost every year – the maximum that the health insurance companies allow per parent. And finally an individual number of shots for all sorts of mental load tasks that mothers take on in most families. Likewise for the number of business trips that dad made while mom had to do everything alone with the children.
Alternatively, you can just shoot at it without counting too much. After all, it shouldn’t be mentally exhausting, but the tension should be released. “Really liberated,” she felt after playing paintball for the first time, says a mother of two. “Totally satisfied.”
Historically, Mother’s Day can be accused of a certain glorification of violence
Is the recommendation too martial? Inappropriate in these violent times? Well, historically one can accuse Mother’s Day of a certain macabre glorification of violence anyway: During National Socialism, mothers were awarded the Mother’s Cross on this day if they provided a particularly large amount of cannon fodder for the war. No one likes to think of that anymore today who attaches the idealized image of an intact bourgeois nuclear family to the question of whether day care centers with children should make little hearts for Mother’s Day or not.
Crafted hearts back and forth. What more and more mothers really can’t do anything with are roses from the gas station or chocolates with Mother’s Day imprint, which dad quickly put on the conveyor belt at the discounter at the cash register when shopping on Saturday. If you get something like this on Sunday morning, shortly after your partner has announced the next longer business trip, you should go to Garzau-Garzin to cool off with paintball. With a photo to prove that you really are a mother. (Gladowshöher Straße 3, 15345 Garzau-Garzin OT Garzau, information and online booking here).
