26 years ago today, I boarded a plane and left the US for Sweden. I arrived the next morning (January 11) and went straight to the hospital with Anders to see his sister, whose oldest child Henrik was born the day before I arrived. Everything about it was pretty much a blur, though I remember being impressed with the “patient hotel” that Maria was roomed in. I never got to stay in a patient hotel myself, when my kids were born, since they were both C-section babies, and major abdominal surgery requires that you stay in the ward.
We already had an apartment, and Anders had already been in Sweden for 10 days at that point, since he had left Michigan on New Year’s. I can’t remember now if I had changed my departure flight due to my dad’s passing right before Christmas, or if I already had it planned to leave on January 10. Either way, I remember that it was hard to leave my mom behind in her big empty house, even though I was excited about starting the next phase of my life in Europe.
Our apartment was lovely, a big 2-bedroom, 1.5-bath with a huge living room and lots of windows and a big balcony. We were on the 2nd floor, with a bakery below on the street side and a green area with playground on the other, facing over the canal in Malmö. One of the bedrooms was long and skinny so it was filled up with bookcases and Anders’ desk.
I signed up for SFI, the government-sponsored Swedish classes for immigrants, but they were full, and after a couple of months, I ended up registering at FolkUniversitet so that I could get started. The classes there were for college-educated expats like me and I learned quickly, even though my teacher teased me that my Swedish pronunciation was too southern and not to let my husband help me. After a term, I secured a spot in SFI, which turned out to be not very fun. My classmates were refugees and asylum-seekers, many of whom were receiving subsidies to attend, and who were thus not very motivated at all. The men in particular gave our teacher a hard time, and at one point even called me a “jävla Amerikanska” when I tried to get them to shut up and stop disrupting the class, so we could learn.
By the end of summer, I was so fed up that I accelerated my plans and took the SFI test to get my certificate and get out of there. I was also very pregnant by that point, as we’d managed to surprise ourselves by conceiving in February. My plans therefore, to get my Swedish certificate and find work, were thus put on hold. At the end of that year, Martin had been born, and we had found and bought a house…our first house, in Flyinge.
With the 6 years I lived abroad as a teenager, and these 26 years, I have now officially lived half my life in Europe. Even though I am both a Swedish and an American citizen, I still feel like a third-culture kid: one foot in each place, but not really belonging fully to either. Part of that might be because I haven’t been home to the US in so long…it’s been 4 years. It will be interesting to see how I feel in March when I go for a month. Since I’m going to new places (my mom’s new place in South Carolina and my sister’s new place in North Carolina), I suspect it won’t be easy to simply slip back into an American state of mind. That’s okay, though. I don’t know if an American state of mind is something I would want to be able to slip into anymore, anyway.
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I am still coughing, and tired, though I’ve been managing to work half days yesterday and today. I worked several hours each day of the long weekend as well, trying to get caught up. My manager and my team are being very understanding about my need to take things a little slow. I don’t want to have a relapse, after all. Anders is in Iceland this week for work, and I am on Martin-pickup duty. He works until 10 at the very earliest, so most likely I won’t be able to pick him up until 10:30 or later. He was also sick over the weekend, but not nearly as bad as I was last week, and is already back to work.
I am very slowly packing up Christmas. All the house decorations are on the dining room table, and I’ve filled one box so far. Two more to go and then I’ll start on the tree decorations. I also want to thoroughly dust and clean all the shelves and furniture before I start putting things back, so this is a full week project, I suspect.
Mood: thoughtful
Music: Lena—That Again