As always when due dates for school assignments approach my presence was requested. This time Daughter was finishing an essay on evil. To prepare for the assignment, the whole class had traveled by train to Germany and Poland to visit a concentration camp. The homework support role has two shifts: While Daughter still tries to finish an assignment I cook nourishing meals, bring water and warm socks and speak only when spoken to.  At the point when she loses patience and motivation completely I become a hostage. The rules of the second shift are crystal clear: none of us may make it but as long as I stay put she will complete the work.  

The difference between being held hostage by a bank robber and by your child doing homework is that the latter hostages are likely to be ridiculed throughout the ordeal for their lack of knowledge of “how math is done these days” and can not hope for a SWAT team to break through the door to rescue them. Knowing Daughter’s temper I feared the worst.  

I was mistaken. The two problems we encountered had nothing to do with temper or lack of motivation. Firstly, Daughter was completely, absolutely unable to pronounce “Auschwitz”.  No matter how many times she tried, or how many times I pronounced it for her, what came out of her mouth was “Auswitsch”. Of course I knew before that Daughter is unable to pronounce "Schweiz”, which means Switzerland" in Swedish. What I did not know was that the speech defect was congenital to all words containing the “sch” sound.

The second problem was mine only, not Daughter’s. As she used me as a sounding board for structuring her thoughts I became aware of how intelligent she suddenly has become. The premise of her essay was that evil is either necessary in a sense or has positive consequences in that almost all our laws have evolved to prevent something wrong or evil from happening again once it has already happened. Without the original bad things happening we would not have made laws against them, she argued, or even morality. Had one of the assigned books perchance said so? “No, Mom, I thought of it myself. Why do you look at me like I am lying to you?”

Apparently some time during the past couple of months Daughter’s IQ has gone up by a factor of 300. So she did not immediately see a need to define the concept of evil while writing an essay about it. Big deal. Recently known for ripping math books apart when unable to solve a problem, Daughter  is now apparently happy to stay home several consecutive evenings to write an essay on the concept of evil without being prompted, attends non-mandatory extracurricular math classes, extra English class and begs me to get a newspaper subscription so that she can expand her vocabulary.  I don’t know when or how it happened. It can’t be them Omega 3 tablets I have been buying for her - the jar in the bathroom cabinet is always untouched where I left it last.

Unexpected IQ surges are an unpleasant business. First you get used to living your life with someone so preoccupied with their clothes and their friends and their looks that they don’t see you. Being unseen feels good,  like wearing an invisibility cloak. You’re safe. Then suddenly the person turns their gaze to you and to your horror that gaze has become a penetrating laser beam. I have lived through this once before, come to think of it, when four years younger Sister who always wanted to be a hairdresser suddenly tweaked her plans and became an orthopaedic surgeon.

Daughter’s speech defect was confirmed a second time this weekend when we were buying  bottles of lemon“Sweppesch” for her 18th birthday bash, which I am too exhausted to describe at the moment, except to say that all hostages were released and there were no fatalities.