My friend Petra causes a ruckus wherever she goes with her children. "Are you some kind of camp? Are you baby-sitting them for someone? Did you adopt them all?" total strangers unashamedly ask her on the street, in the shop, on the tram, even when she visits the emergency room.
"No," she responds, "they’re all mine." Sometimes she smiles to herself with a certain Schadenfreude, because she is well aware of how much that answer does people’s heads in.
On other days, after the tenth person in a row asks her those questions, she exasperatedly spits the answer out of the side of her mouth. It all began when Petra was working a part-time job several years ago while she was in college, in the textile industry, and as sometimes happens when two people spend a lot of time with one another, she developed a relationship with her boss.
He was Petra’s first big love. Tonda was a beautiful guy, attentive and sensitive.
When Petra told him that their trysts had resulted in a child, he was glad and immediately began to plan the wedding and arrange everything for the arrival of their offspring. Unfortunately, his family intervened and took a stand against him marrying a Czech woman.
Vietnamese people respect the wishes of their parents, and when Tonda tried to convince Petra that they could only remain together if it was a secret, she did not want to complicate her own life, Tonda’s or that of the child, so she broke up with him. However, they both contribute to raising the child to this day and have a fabulous, friendly relationship, even though each of them now has another partner.
Petra and Tonda’s daughter Lea will celebrate her 13th birthday this year. Petra spent a couple of years focusing on her daughter, school and work before Martin came into her life.
Martin was divorced, with a six-year-old boy, Nathan, and a five-year-old girl, Marie to care for. Long periods of separation due to his work were what led to his marriage falling apart.
He and his wife were on separate continents, and hours of telephone conversations could not cover the thousands of kilometers between them. Martin was a family type who needed to take care of someone and needed someone to care for him, with love.
He mainly needed to care for his children, whom he took custody of after reaching an agreement with his ex-wife so he could provide them a European education. Martin managed to heal the hole in Petra’s heart left by Tonda.
Within one year they were married, and Petra not only got an exotic husband, but Lea, her little girl whose skin is white as snow and hair as black as a raven’s wing, got two siblings with skin the color of hot chocolate. Two years after the wedding, Petra gave birth to a little boy, Daniel.
When the rest of her family stood over the boy’s crib and sarcastically noted that he did not look like his mother at all, Petra was angry, but she had to recognize that he was a cocoa-colored copy of Martin. Daniel had just begun to walk when Martin’s countryman Matthew came to visit them.
Matthew had gotten married here years ago in order to get a residency permit. It’s illegal to do that, but it’s a victimless crime.
He got permanent residency, and along with it the opportunity to work and go into business. He saw his wife for the first and last time on their wedding day.
Matthew’s wife was a young Romani woman, a prostitute who had accepted CZK 20 000 in exchange for saying "I do" and had then gone her own way. A couple of weeks before his visit to Martin, Matthew had been contacted by the social welfare department with the news that he had a year-old son.
The boy’s mother had given him up and disappeared somewhere in Germany. Matthew’s paternity was, at first glance, just a formality, but of course he began to feel responsible for the child and didn’t want him to end up in a neo-natal insitution.
On his own, however, he couldn’t handle taking care of the child. Could Petra?
The arrangement was supposed to be just for a couple of days so Matthew could make arrangements. The days became weeks, the weeks became months, the months became a year.
Matthew first stopped visiting the little boy, then stopped sending the money he had agreed to provide. In the end he wouldn’t answer the phone.
Petra realized that not only did she not want to return little Filíp, she wasn’t even able to. He and Daniel were like twins.
What followed was a long battle with official red tape, visits from social workers, and protracted court cases before little Filíp was definitively theirs. Because of all of those concerns, Petra didn’t even notice she was pregnant again.
That was when Tinka joined her siblings Daniel, Filíp, Lee, Marie and Nathan. Martin and Petra both work around the clock to provide for their big Czech-Nigerian-Romani-Vietnamese family, addressing the same concerns that all other larger families do – who needs new shoes, who needs a satchel, what to have for lunch, who will go to the parent-teacher meeting, where they can buy a bigger pot to make dumplings for eight.
Martin and Petra never realize how different they are until they encounter the clumsy questions and stares of those around them. It no longer amuses them to explain which child has what sort of mother or father and where exactly they all came from.
Dad is the man who takes them bike riding on the weekend and plays football with them, tells them stories about when he was in school, and does his best to be strict when they come home with a note from their teacher. Mom is the woman who bandages their scraped knees, caresses and hugs them, the one who drives them to gymnastics and karate, the one who signs their grade book before their Dad sees it.
There is a great deal we all could learn from this family. At a minimum, we could learn to stop looking for all the differences and diversity among people and concentrate instead on what we have in common.
