20th of September
4 hours on the playground with Bruno. It’s fun to see him have fun, but it’s often boring to sit and stand there surrounded by socially awkward Slovaks who send off ‘do not approach’ vibes. When we arrive we have the whole playground to ourselves and I kinda like it that way. Less hostile vibes in the air. As soon as the playground fills up I feel my body tense up. It’s much more stressful than my job.
The first other parent to arrive is someone I have never seen before. I can hear her speak Russian to her son. Her son and my son start playing together, but because of the language barrier and a slight age difference (which at their age is actually a pretty huge gap) she hears me speak Russian to her son. I ask him his name, his name is Fjodr. You know, like Dostojevski.

The mum and I start talking. Fjodr finds my backpack and tries to pull food out. He’s never had a some bright yellow mango flavored treat and his mum explains that he’s searching for that. I give him some. My son likes to share, he likes it so much it actually worries me, but it does avoid trouble in a situation like this.

The mum is called Svetlana. When she finds out am Belgian she asks why it’s so damn hard to connect with Slovaks. She says that before coming to Slovakia they lived in Croatia and the people there were positive, open, warm and talkative. Here it’s the exact opposite. They tried to put Fjodr in a French kindergarten hoping that the mood there would be different, but it was exactly the same as anywhere else. She tried talking to Fjodr’s teacher, but she barely got a peep out of her. I tell her I have exactly the same experience and my son’s teacher is his mother’s colleague… But even so, not a peep. She says it’s relieving to hear that someone has the same experience, she was worried that maybe she was the problem. I tell her that all expats have the same issue here. I sometimes have clients from Spain and they don’t last long here, they can’t handle the coldness of people. I describe how people treat me in shops and she laughs.

I have my clients to talk to and okay, I can’t show much of myself with half of them, but it counts as social interaction and some exchanges are nourishing. She doesn’t have a job here, so she has zero people to talk to. I tell her that outside of my job I also don’t manage to build connections here. I tell her that am meeting friends tonight to play boardgames with and that they are wonderful people, but that I only know them because I used to teach them. It’s very lucky I got to know them that way.

Eventually we exchange numbers. The first time this happens while standing around at a Slovak playground. Something I have been doing two to four times a week for almost five years… The only other time someone tried to get my number was when some guy thought he could get free German lessons out of me if we’d have the lessons over a few beers and he’d pay for the beer. An offer I dodged in such a way I felt like I had missed my calling as a White House spokesperson.

Svetlana’s husband arrives, Alexander, we briefly talk, but they have to go. We agree to meet some time soon. Then Bruno’s friends arrive. He starts handing out food and my guts are tied in a nut worrying if so much generosity is going to trip him up later in life and questioning his motivations. Is he compensating for not feeling enough by giving? It’s something I do and it’s something my father did, it’s something his mother does and it’s something his sister did and something my mum and several members of her family did. I write my mum and her reaction is: ‘He sees it from you.’ I do have 12 cocktails, a bottle of Jägermeister, several cans of Red Bull and some snacks ready at home to give to my friends, even though I don’t drink any alcohol anymore. I’ll also order food for us. Monkey see, monkey does. To come to some conclusion here: I think our culture teaches us not to be generous, but that in reality it works like this: whatever you give you get back with ‘interest’, on the condition that you gave it away lovingly and not with the express purpose of getting more in return. So this reflex to see my son’s generosity as a potential problem is probably toxic conditioning.

I also want to add that since I’ve been doing more ho’oponopono the world has reacted a little bit differently to me. Two Slovak mums and one grandmother smiled at me for the first in all the years I have been running into them. I also discovered that playing with Bruno and his friends makes time go faster and that not hiding that I am still a child in many ways attracts them to me. I just have to forget that parents are staring at my clownish behaviour from the side-lines. They especially like it when I am the boogie-man trying to catch them and they can shoot at me with imaginary ice weapons which freeze me. It’s a lot of fun, we laugh a lot. I just have to shake off the idea that the adults are looking at me like am a total nutcase. Incredible how we put ourselves in a prison of other people’s imagined opinions.

Then it was bedtime for Bruno. Even after four hours outside he still didn’t want to go home, he was having too much fun. By that time Zuzana had arrived from work  and we cycled home. Only 1,4 km (so about one mile) in the urban jungle, but this always feels like we are risking our lives. I can’t behind to imagine what it must be like to be in a place where bombs are dropping all over the place. Traffic in Bratislava already feels lethal.

And there was a genocide going on and I could neither stop it nor slow it down today either and was again confronted with the fact that the mainstream media is fully complicit, so in the evening I played the board game Arkham Horror to forget about the real horror in our world. Although I have much to be grateful for, a sad veil seems to hang over everything and it requires non-stop work to make it feel lighter. Most of all I don’t want my son to feel it.