It was night, my child woke up every half hour crying from the itching and I had taken on the task of living mattress. I was a moving mattress, a waterbed actually. A boat. The sea. As I tried to move like heaving water to keep my child asleep, I thought about whether I should eat cheese made in Holland or fake cheese made from coconut oil and other things brought here from far away countries. had to be flown. Because if you all cause extra global warming with that, animals will also indirectly die, I told myself. And people. So maybe it’s better not to eat anything tasty at all.
A mosquito flew into the room, I heard her approach. With my free arm, I started making large wiper movements over my child.
‘How do you, as a Buddhist, actually feel about beating mosquitoes to death?’ a friend had asked me last year. She had met a man who cared deeply about animals. The man gave himself an annual quota: he was allowed to kill seven mosquitoes and after that quota was reached he had to undergo the stinging. My friend now wondered if she was dealing with a dangerous madman or if there were more people in our bubble who kept mosquitoes alive on principle.
I told her that in recent years I had practiced experiencing the sound of a mosquito as just sound, and the mosquito’s sting simply as a sensation, which had worked quite well until recently. I had even landed a mosquito on my arm one summer evening and watched as she stuck her trunk into my skin and sucked herself full of my blood. But since the baby was born, I had effectively knocked out any mosquito that tried to get near it.
“So to come back to your husband, he doesn’t have to be a dangerous madman,” I said. ‘But I’d be careful with an animal lover like that. It is especially important to find out whether he finds animals easier to understand than people. And whether his father hated animals. Those are serious alarm signals.’
A second mosquito joined the first. I was a mattress trying to mimic the sea, with only one arm free. One unexpected move and my child would startle awake and in the commotion that would ensue, the mosquitoes would have free rein.
“Listen,” I said silently to the mosquitoes. “This kid is itching enough from his chickenpox. He really can’t take your jabs right now, so go somewhere else.’ And when this didn’t impress them: ‘And otherwise I will personally see to it that all your offspring are eaten by carnivorous plants.’