“…’Cause everything’s been fine until now.”

Early this morning I was making the girls lunches, and when I went to pack Molli Malou’s into her backpack I found a folded-up note in the meal compartment.  I nearly threw it out, but I noticed it said “til mor fra molli” on one side.  Trine had just entered the kitchen and we opened up and read the note together: I will include a photo of the immortal epistle at another time, but provide its English translation below:

“Dear Mom I am sorry to say it but unfortunately I do not like my food    but I would like to have pizza bread with lettuce in it    and I would also like to have [ham] filet on white bread    it is ok if you are angry   are you actually? loving regards Molli”

Her mistakes are few in the original Danish: she writes det svare for desværre (homonyms), the mysterious “pizza bread” of which she speaks involves brod rather than brød, she spells filet as fele, she spells hvidt as hvit (white), and she is missing the silent g in kærlig (loving or affectionate).

I have taken only one liberty in the translation: the last sentence reads “det er ok hvis du er sur   er du da det?”  There is no good way to translate “er du da det” since it literally means “are you indeed that?” — which sounds clunky in English but is both proper and perfectly natural in Danish.  “Are you actually?” is about as close as I could come, but suffice to say that “da” is a little easier to spell than “actually,” so you need not be too astonished by her spelling.  (The only word of more than six letters in the entire letter, in its original Danish, would have been desværre, which she flubbed.  Not that I’m down on her for that: “det svare” is a correctly spelled homonym — as if she had written threw for through: right spelling, wrong word.)

Trine and I were both startled and amazed by the note.  Molli Malou frequently complains about her lunches, but we felt badly — were even saddened — that things had come to such a head that she seemed to feel she could no longer appeal to us directly for redress of her grievances.  We flagellated ourselves and one another for having missed the warning signs, and for having become the kinds of unapproachable parents Molli Malou no longer feels comfortable confronting.

Once Molli Malou was awake and about, we mentioned we had found the note.  We approached the subject carefully, and gently, doing our best to stress that she’s always welcome to tell us what she does and doesn’t like to eat and that we only get angry when she says she wants something then later complains that she hates it — a not unusual behavior with her.

The girl was all smiles and shrugs.

“That’s an old note,” she said, “it’s from a long time ago.”

“So… lunch has been good lately?”

“Really good, yeah.”

And that was that: she plodded into the kitchen and sat down for breakfast with her sister.

Later we praised her to the skies for having written such a good note: not just well-written, we told her, but very polite and thoughtful.  She was so proud of herself she actually got all blushy and aw-shucksy.

It dawns on my now, — here at the office, — that we may have invited a veritable stream of correspondence from Molli Malou, since the topics of her dissatisfaction are many….