‘He sets up a tent in the summer, while I dream of faraway places’
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If your partner turns out to be a noble environmental knight while you are more of the damsel of the good life, it can cause some resentment. But hey, we’re on Earth to learn from each other, even separating tea bags.
Basma (33), mother of Fynn (8) and Myka (5):
“It seemed like a no-brainer when our landlord offered to install solar panels on our roof, for which we only had to pay a modest additional rent every month. The savings on our energy bill would be significant. It sparked a fanaticism in my friend the likes of which I had never seen in him.
Wash only in the sun
From day one, he was glued to the app in which he could track the yield of solar energy per hour. Fun, involved, I thought at first. Until he even started adjusting our washing schedule to the weather forecast. Dirty football outfits from the boys? They only had to wait a day for the sun to shine again. Direct consumption of solar energy would save transformation costs.
It drove me crazy, until we got our first refund: almost a thousand euros in a year. Since then I’ve been beeping a little less loudly, when I hear the transformer in the attic roar again and my friend sighs blissfully: ‘Ah, listen, boys, the song of durability.’”
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Conscious footprint
Ingeborg (30), mother of Noah (1):
“He does not fly, does not eat meat and fish, does everything on the recumbent bike and spends hours in our vegetable garden with home-grown vegetables. It’s that my husband had a strong desire to have children, otherwise I would never have gotten a baby through. Our ecological footprint is too large in the West, he thinks.
So in the summer he sets up a tent along a river in the Ardennes, while I dream of faraway places with bounty beaches. I still visit it since my marriage, but only with friends, and amid loud murmurs from my husband. Whether Noah will ever be able to taste it in his youth, Joost may know.
“In the summer he sets up a tent in the Ardennes, while I dream of faraway places”
Yet I admire how consciously my husband is in life, and I encourage our son to play in nature and eat unprocessed food as much as possible. Win-win: then such a trip with friends is the best option for me.”
Eco-Struggle
Magali (42), mother of Emma (5):
“We eat vegetarian, don’t sit on the gas and raise our daughter inclusively. Responsible, I think. My girlfriend thinks otherwise. She washes with organic detergent and makes her own cleaning agent, I want wax pearls because the house smells so good. I’ll go to hell for it, she certainly shouts weekly. I won’t wink if she wins the Nobel Prize for inventing the eco-friendly variant of this.”
This article appears in Kek Mama 10-2022.
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