Do you know that? You just want the best for the kids, but is there anything really stupid coming out? Juno Vai is still ashamed of her very personal Python fiasco today.

My daughter is now at an age where I am periodically ashamed of her. Like the other day, when we brought her to Munich, because her favorite boy band performed there. I begged for mercy: picky guys who make pop-platitudes while hysterical fans collapse all around make me nervous. So my husband sacrificed himself and accompanied Vic and her twelve-year-old brother to the event. I hid in a cafe for so long.

When I picked up the family later, my daughter was hoarse from the "I love you Zac Jack Dan" screams. Triumphantly, she held up a pink Barbie crown, which she had snatched out of the hands of her idol and which apparently still had the hair gel of Zac, Jack or Dan stuck to it.

I was happy for her as best I could. Seriously. After all, it was perfectly normal and she had not even drunk alcohol to get into that bombshell mood (like we would have done at 15). But then suddenly the tour bus turned the corner - and she actually ran after like stabbed. My son too, but more of a reflex, because in an emergency he always sticks to his sister.

There have been moments when I was ashamed of myself as a mother

The two of them disappeared in a group around the corner and I had time to think about what Vic would be ashamed of, in the not too distant future. Maybe I'm starting to complain about their adapted neo-philistine generation or veteran stories from my punk period. Absolutely despicable. I'll probably get quirks too, get bumpy and with 150 percent likelihood age-stubborn.

In truth, there have been moments when I was ashamed of myself as a mother. One of them is permanently documented: In our staircase there is a picture of Vic, on which she is about six. She is sitting on a chest, her blond hair sticking to her head, sweaty, and she shows a gorgeous tooth gap smile. The cheeks are unnaturally red, almost as if they have a violent fever.

This is most likely due to the approximately two-meter-long albino python that winds around her neck. A heavy, extremely muscular specimen, in whose pug-ass center one still recognizes, with a little imagination, the contours of a rodent destroyed for breakfast.

During a visit to the Baltic Sea, we had visited with friends the mini-circus there to keep the kids happy. When a trainer opened the box after the show and pulled out the mighty reptile, there was no stopping Vic.

Come on with the snake, bang up on the child!

Now it is like that: I find circuses basically depressing and snakes almost always trigger panic regardless of form and color - whether in the jungle or in a circus, where they naturally do not belong anyway.

In Costa Rica I came late at night almost on a coral snake. I was five months pregnant and it is probably only due to the excess of hormones, that I reacted to my circumstances almost sensationally sovereign: I made two lunges to the left and let the animal to precede. An exception, because usually I am afraid even in the zoo, that the cutting disc between me and snake like Harry Potter suddenly dissolves and I am delivered.

So I did not like the idea of ​​seeing a python on my daughter's tender shoulders. But instead of saying "Och nö, let's just say that", I sensed projection: I could / should / should please do not transfer my own fears to the child, dear, how unreflective!

So come on with the snake, bang on the child, hey, great, how it feels, right? Father and son applauded. Vic sat a little sunken, almost seemed to collapse under the weight. She smiled bravely. I watched nervously every minute movement of the python, admonished hastily, a photo was shot, the animal again packed into the box. Away quickly.

At home, the picture was hung up, hero stories were told, I felt I had done everything right. Years later, I walked up the stairs with Vic and our eyes fell on the Python photo. "Boh," my daughter said. "That was pretty awesome, the cattle were so heavy and it was hard on my neck, real panic at the time."

I swallowed. We had just mislaid a picture. It shows her mockingly smiling brother in a park in Minsk. A lean, quite lively python curves on his shoulders. Suspected hungry - no trace of breakfast rat.