What is it like to be a daughter of the Baldies?

My sister and I took some time reading through their posts on this forum, and we think this oddity can sometimes be detected in their posts, even by people who don't know them personally. But what comes through in these posts is merely the surface.

A post we read with special interest is the one about their first meeting. While it is quite candid there is something left out in this tale; I will come back to this in a moment.

The first thing that is striking about my mothers is their lack of any hair. This is due to alopecia universalis, an autoimmune disorder. All hair is regarded as not belonging to the body by the immune system, from head to toe, and this really means all, so they don't even have eyelashes.

But that is just their looks. Their behavior is odd too. They do, for example, both have the Asperger syndrome, which means they have difficulty connecting to the emotions of other people. This shows in the way they speak, but interestingly in very different ways. While both don't look into the eyes of the person they are speaking to, Mommy Friede stares somewhere over the shoulder of the person she is speaking to and speaks in a very loud voice, as if that person is somewhere in the distance, while Mommy Jean looks into her lap and speaks almost in a whisper.

Both have explained to us how they acquired these behaviors. Mommy Friede said that as a child she always had the feeling other people did not understand her (while it was probably the other way round, at least emotionally), so she raised her voice to be better understood. Mommy Jean had the same feeling but reacted just the other way round. She lowered her voice out of frustration because she thought people did not listen to her anyway. Having difficulty to look a person in the eye is, by the way, typical for the Asperger syndrome. A conversation with both of them is therefore definitely a strain to the ears because you have to adjust them all the time.

That Mommy Friede speaks with a very loud voice and Mommy Jean with a very quiet one does not mean one of them is dominant and the other submissive in their relationship; it just means one of them is extroverted and the other introverted.

Mommy Friede also had ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) as a kid. The combination of Asperger syndrome and ADHD is very rare but does sometimes occur. Mommy Jean on the other hand had SCT (sluggish cognitive tempo). This does not mean she is stupid; Albert Einstein for example probably had SCT too.

Their doctors suggested the kids should practice yoga, a suggestion Mommy Jean's parents immediately jumped on because they were hippies. They have both been practicing yoga for almost 45 years now and are therefore extremely flexible. Doing yoga is something my sister and I picked up from them too.

As to hippies: Both our mothers had contact with drugs very early in life. The home of Mommy Jean was always full of sweet smoke because her parents were hippies and lived in Oakland CA, which is just a bridge away from San Francisco, the center of the hippie movement. Mommy Friede's parents both worked, and her elder brother who is ten years older than her had to watch her, and he started smoking hashish at age eleven. So both were involuntarily passive hashish smokers.

But their oddities don't end there. Both are extremely close to each other, and I mean extremely; their relationship closely resembles a symbiosis. They can't stand to be separated, and if for some reason they have to for a short time they embrace each other as if the separation is going to be forever, and when they rejoin they embrace again as if they have been apart for years when in reality it was only two hours or so. Mark that these embraces are very clumsy (people with the Asperger syndrome are usually not too fond of body contact), and if I saw two other people embrace like this I would probably laugh. But with my mothers I can't help but be deeply moved.

My mothers have even tried connecting themselves with a short chain between them, which of course leads to problems in daily life. They tried connecting themselves by the necks, by the waists, by one wrist or by one ankle and once even in all four places. When there is some sort of crisis in their lives they sometimes sleep like that.

My mothers are also home nudists, a habit which my sister and I picked up from them. The first time we visited a school friend at her home this caused funny and somewhat shocked reactions by her parents because we both immediately undressed as soon as we entered her home. So I actually am nude while writing this (collective yells from the readers: “Show us pictures”)!

Connecting each other with chains sounds kinky, and my mothers are most definitely very kinky. They tried to hide it from us, but my sister and I secretly watched them when we were eleven years old and they thought we were in bed. They found out that we found out when we had to write an essay about our parents for school and asked them if we could include the “funny things” they do and they asked what “funny things” we meant.

We had a long conversation after this in which they explained their behavior to us, and after this conversation they decided to no longer hide their kinky side from us since we knew about it anyway. I won't go into the details (disappointed “aww” from the readers), but trust me, they have done some really weird sh**.

And then my mothers are also High Priestesses of Gaia, the ancient Greek Goddess of the Earth, and raised us in that spirit. So we are followers of their religion too, as well as Aunt Bea, the sister of Mommy Jean, who lived at our home for a few years while studying at the university of Cologne. And this religion definitely has an influence on our daily lives as well.

This description of my mothers does not do them justice; they are really very lovable women. But most definitely with a lot of oddities.