In 2018, she won the country's Favorite Kitchen Grandma award. The votes cast counted, which showed the level of love and appreciation better than any instrument.
This is how it happened that Aunt Irma - or as her grandchildren call her, Irmami - won the competition, since she herself did not start a like-hunting FB campaign for her own sake, and she could not even imagine that she could win. Former and current students of Érdliget Primary School, on the other hand, were very involved, old students even voted from abroad.
More than a hundred school classes nominated almost 70 kitchen workers for the competition announced by the National Pharmaceutical and Food Health Institute - which unfortunately did not become a tradition - and it was no small honor to be the first among them. As a reward, the woman who served others all her life won a wellness weekend together with her partner in the presidential suite of a hotel in Szilvásvárad. But even more important than that was the love that radiated towards him, which remained after the wonderful weekend, even during the weekdays.
Irma has always worked in the same workplace, in the kitchen all her life. He has been retired since 2011 and has been putting off actually staying at home for 12 years now.
When he started, back in the eighties, they also cooked for school children in the kindergarten. Two of them worked at the same time, one of them always went over to help the cook, then pulled the lunch to school in a small cart.
"Back then it wasn't like it is now that they buy frozen things," he tells of the old days, "but we went to the butcher and the store in the morning, and then we started cooking. We peeled and sliced everything by hand."
Today, the children don't know what the kitchen aunts' cooking is like, they can only compare how kindly she distributes the daily menu prepared in the canteen, and according to the children, Aunt Irma is unbeatable in this regard. She has already managed to convince many picky children to at least taste the lunch.
"Today's children don't like almost anything anymore," he says sadly. - They would prefer to eat hot dogs, chips, hamburgers. Among the soups, he eats mostly egg and scrambled egg soup with bread cubes. They look at the daily menu, and if one of them declares that he will only eat the main course, then each of them only takes the second course.
Sometimes I manage to persuade them to just taste how delicious the soup is. 'Well, that's really good', they say at this time. I talked more with the old children, because they understood better, there were not so many special lessons. I already knew their parents, and the grandparents of many. They became better friends, and the parent didn't always run away either. I hardly know the parents now, life has changed."
Irma says that it is not difficult to understand the children's language. Just a smile solves their language and they especially like to joke.
"Now in the last few weeks, when they have become more liberated, one of them says: 'There is a stone in the food!' I went: 'Show me where it is!' – to which they laughed, of course, that they managed to trick him. When I received the award, a little girl said: they see me as their grandmother. It went very well.”
We would think that those who have a happy family background can treat children with such love. In the case of Irma, this was certainly not the case for a long time. Her husband worked in the bearing factory, and on the way home, a pub fell by the wayside, where he and most of the team went. The bottom of the descent was when he entered into a maintenance contract for half of the family home. Irma spent 29 years with him when she divorced him, and the man died not long after that. What remained was the loan that had to be taken out to buy back the house.
Source: ÉrdNow
However, the biggest blow was when Irma's youngest daughter died at the age of 38, leaving behind a 3-and-a-half-year-old orphan. Since the little boy's father had already passed away, Irma's older, childless daughter took over the role of mother from her younger sister. They all lived together, so the terrible loss was somewhat more bearable for the child.
"I was lucky that I was able to choose between work and private life," explains Irma, explaining how it was possible to smile in the midst of so much sadness. "Someone else, who had a bad life, ran amok in there." Twenty years have passed since nobody knew anything about me. It was hard for me too, but the joy that was missing from my marriage was made up for by the children - both at home and at school."
When she got together with her current partner, she had two sons in addition to her two daughters, and today, in addition to her biological grandson, she has four more adopted sons, whom she has loved since birth.
In 2020, there was a big alarm in the family because Irma was first hit by a car, then she caught covid in the first round of the pandemic and was in the hospital for 5 weeks, one of them in the intensive care unit.
"I didn't cough or suffocate, but I was so weak that I couldn't even get off the bed. My lungs were 70 percent full of water.”
Then he got back on his feet and lives with post-covid symptoms, but his fitness is clearly demonstrated by the fact that even at the age of 71 he goes everywhere on a bicycle without gears. Her daughter would love to keep her at home to enjoy a well-deserved rest, but it seems she's giving herself another year, for the second time.
"It was as if I was only getting through this year, because of my colleague, who was like my younger daughter. He really asked me to stay, he also offered to come pick me up in the morning and take me home in the afternoon."
When I ask what he would like to do with himself at home, he is unsure: "Well, I would have more time for the house, the garden, my cats..."
She shamefully admits that she has eight cats waiting for her at home, and seven at her grandson's house across the street. In the evening, they also go to eat with him, as if they were just following the clock. They are all adopted animals, they have been neutered, so of course they do not reproduce. It's just that cats have a precise GPS in their heads about where to "get lost" with heartbreaking meows.
And Irma has enough smiles and caresses in stock to get the cats and the children as well. Because the key to everything is love.
"I often think about how difficult it can be for little first-timers, and I can see in them that if they get a little smile, it's easier for them. Whatever grief I had, I never made them feel it, yet I can see how sensitive they are to how I speak to them.
Dieters are given food separately, in closed boxes, and my relationship with them is even more confidential. There is a little girl who, if I don't smile, immediately asks: 'Is there a problem? Will you tell me?' Let's just say that I'm always nice to him: 'Oh, it's good that you came, baby, I've been waiting for you!' - I take it that way. And if he eats them all, I'll praise him on how clever he was.”
Now it was like saying goodbye again. Then the colleague who came recently started begging them to work together for one more year. "Teachers always say, 'What will we do without you?' Well, I say, do you want them to take me to the cemetery from here?! Well, maybe I'll end up staying again."
