Joachim and His Mother: Mother–Son Relationship

Joachim and his mother share a relationship in which love is real but not always easy to recognize in the moment. She accompanies him through his early difficulties, and he is drawn into the practical world of her caregiving; yet her well-intentioned interventions can strike at the very independence and care he is trying to claim. Their intimacy is also marked by emotional intensity: his anger and joy can exceed their immediate causes, while her own distress can erupt in a form that frightens him. Later, as Hermann becomes gravely ill, Joachim witnesses a new closeness between his parents and sees his mother become his father’s devoted caregiver.

Childhood and Care

After Joachim was sent home from first grade, his parents chose not to return him to kindergarten, sparing him what they feared might make the experience more traumatic. He spent the rest of the school year at home, often accompanying his mother on her work as a mobile physiotherapist. While she taught farmers how to lift and carry heavy loads safely, Joachim wandered around or played with toys belonging to children who were at school. Once a week, during her riding therapy, she taught him tricks on horseback during the breaks. His father sometimes took him along to swimming therapy, where he was lifted into the water by crane alongside people with severe disabilities.

These episodes place Joachim beside his mother in her work of caring for others, but they also show the unusual shape of his childhood: he is not simply kept at home, but carried into the places where she works. At home, too, he takes advantage of time alone when the cleaning woman visits, exploring his brothers’ rooms. His old school friends seem alien to him after his departure from class, while he wants no further contact with his former kindergarten companions. His mother’s practical care thus accompanies a period of separation from ordinary childhood routines, without erasing his sense of isolation.

Help, Interference, and the Marzipan Gift

The sharpest early conflict between Joachim and his mother grows out of a project meant to express love. Before Hermann’s fortieth birthday, eight-year-old Joachim wants to give him something more personal than a coaster: forty homemade marzipan potatoes, his father’s favorite sweet. He chooses the recipe with his mother and shops for the ingredients with her, including rosewater from a pharmacy. But once he begins making the sweets, he insists on doing the work himself. The precision matters as much as the gift: he weighs the almonds carefully and takes pride in carrying out a task despite being regarded as restless and easily distracted.

When his mother points out that the almonds’ brown skins need to be removed, Joachim rejects the suggestion that she help. He leaves the kitchen briefly to plan a forty-molded foil tray. In his absence, she finishes the marzipan potatoes and coats them in cocoa. He returns to find them stacked beneath a bowl on top of the refrigerator, with cocoa traces around it. The sweets are intact, but the act he had reserved for himself—the careful rolling of each potato in cocoa—has disappeared. To his mother, they have turned out well; to Joachim, she has taken away the central part of the gift.

His response escalates into a collapse. He crushes the finished sweets together, carries the mass to the bathroom, and tries to wash it apart under warm water. His mother apologizes from outside the door, but her attempts to comfort him are accompanied by the sense that he is making too much of the incident. As the marzipan dissolves and runs down the drain, the loss becomes inseparable from his wish to prove that he can be careful. In the mirror, he encounters an enraged, unfamiliar version of himself; outside, he answers his mother in a bright, reassuring voice while continuing to stare at that face. The episode exposes a recurring mismatch: her assistance is meant kindly, but she has not understood what Joachim was trying to do, while the scale of his distress is far beyond what she expects from the spoiled sweets.

Shared Feeling and the Mother’s Breakdown

Their closeness is not confined to conflict. When the charcoal kiln Joachim has built with Hermann begins to smoke, Joachim is overwhelmed with joy. His mother comforts him as he cries, unable to keep his happiness within any ordinary measure. Afterward she brings him a pillow that smells of the stable and covers him with her perfume-scented coat. He lies outside beside the smoking kiln, watching the work he helped make. The scene offers another form of maternal care: she does not need to share or explain the feeling to stay beside him and comfort him.

A later crisis reverses the direction of that care. Joachim and his brothers hear desperate screaming from inside the house and discover their mother on the living-room floor, tearing newspapers and shouting that a man should finally leave. Her anger and grief appear to Joachim as a frightening transformation: the familiar face is altered, her movements are rapid and violent, and she keeps attacking scraps of paper even after the newspapers have been torn. Hermann responds with the detached authority of a doctor, ordering the sons out. The narrator’s eldest brother refuses, while Joachim remains in the doorway and feels, to his later shame, a trace of irritation at his mother’s continued distress. He gives Hermann a small shrug, a gesture he later understands as having sided with his father.

Afterward, his mother comes to Joachim’s room, newly washed and exhausted. She tells him she believes things will improve and says she had not meant to frighten him. Her declaration of love for her sons moves him, but also makes him uncomfortable: he does not know how to carry the weight of her words. She cries while looking happy, then turns to the ordinary business of supper and offers to make him rice pudding. The scene holds affection and unease together. Joachim cares about his mother, but cannot simply meet her emotional openness with an equal response; he asks where Hermann is and accepts the offer of food instead.

Separation, Illness, and Reconciliation

Years later, Joachim has left home when Hermann becomes ill. After his parents’ marriage has become difficult to sustain, Hermann moves to Lübeck to live with a new partner and her two young children. The family house stands empty. When Hermann’s cancer returns, however, he contacts Joachim’s mother. The news that he must undergo another operation reaches her through a call to her son, and she is again drawn into Hermann’s crisis. As the illness advances, Joachim visits his father and sees how the new household cannot accommodate the demands of his worsening condition. Hermann eventually returns alone to the family home, sick and isolated.

Joachim’s mother becomes his caregiver. After Hermann’s lower body is paralyzed, the pain that had tormented him for nearly two years disappears for a time. Joachim finds his parents living together in a tenderness he had not thought possible: when he visits, he sees two lovers, exhausted but animated by attention to one another. This reversal gives their earlier separation a new shape. The relationship between mother and son now includes his witnessing her care for the father who had moved away, and the parents’ renewed intimacy becomes a defining part of what he sees in the final period of their lives together.

As Hermann’s breathing worsens and the struggle of treatment continues, his mother moves to the hospital to be with him. Joachim describes their last weeks not through theory or explanation, but through the practical labor of dying that they endure together. At the bedside after Hermann’s death, she is still there, beside a lit candle. The mother who once could not foresee how her help would wound her son is now shown in sustained, attentive care for her husband. For Joachim, the relationship’s meaning rests not on a simple resolution of their differences, but on the capacity for love to persist through bewilderment, separation, and bodily suffering.