It is very hard to be honest in this difficult entry about my mother. My relationship with her was very complicated. (Did you know that people generally have a much harder time getting on with the parent that is the same gender as they are?) My brother finds it much easier to think of our mother than my sister and me.

My mother killed herself on October 12, 2003. Yes, she committed suicide.

I loved her very much, and during the last 2-3 years of her life, I was able to get on well with her. We had long talks on the telephone (she lived in Sweden and I live in England).

During the last few years of her life, my mother tried her best to be kind, caring and understanding towards her children. She tried to be a good friend too.

A lot of people had criticized her while she was alive (including my sister and me). My sister was more vocal and actually told my mother she was a great egoist and lots of other things along these lines. I was more of a coward. I did not confront her, but avoided her instead.

I used to think of my bi-weekly telephone calls with her as an act of charity. Sometimes I enjoyed them though. I loved it during the last few years of her life when she never judged me but always seemed to agree with me. Partly it was difficult because I knew she was trying to make up for what had happened before. But I couldn’t help but enjoying the unconditional kindness she displayed. Sometimes it was a month or two during which I didn’t speak to her. I am ashamed to say that I sometimes didn’t feel up to speaking to her.

She was ill and talked a lot about her illness on the phone. Sometimes during our calls I rambled on about boring details of my life just to make conversation. While I was engaged to James, I asked her a lot about her courtship with my father. I asked her about household management issues (’how do I remove such-and-such stain?’) and health issues, something she was interested in. I was aware that she had many good sides despite the fact that people considered her self-centred. I am sure she changed during the last years of her life.

During the last few years of her life, I gradually became aware that I was the stronger party and she was the weaker. During this period I was gravitating towards Christianity. I felt that I couldn’t be unkind to somebody who was in the kind of difficult situation that she was in. I defended her to my sister. I told my sister to back off her and exercise some humility and charity.

Almost everybody in my family said that she was self-centred. They pitied me as the number one victim of my mother’s sometimes crazy behaviour. I was slapped around a bit by her, threwn out of the house a few times for being cheeky. It’s not the sign of the best parenting skills, but it does not mean the person in question is evil. Eventually I was excommunicated to boarding school without permission to come home. All family members thought my mother had behaved outrageously.

But I was a guilty too! You are supposed to honour your parents and obey them. I did not always do that. Although I wasn’t consciously rude or very disrespectful, I disobeyed her and occasionally did really naughty things like shoplifting. The biggest problem had been that my mother wanted to control me (and my siblings) fully. I was getting to the point in life when I craved some freedom though and being her oldest child this caused problems.

I ended up at boarding school at the age of 13 and that was the end of any close relationship I had with my mother. There were 2-3 years during my teens when I literally never spoke to her.

Later on in life it was painful to realize that she didn’t know some fundamental facts about me, such as the fact that I wore contact-lenses; that I had hay-fever, or what my favorite food was. In many ways I was a bit of a stranger to her.

She knew nothing about my life at university, what summer-jobs I had or what my interests, likes and dislikes were. When I started working, she was extremely unclear on what I was doing. I didn’t do much to enlighten her.

When I was younger and heard people bad-mouth my mopther I didn’t stop them. Even the staff at boarding school thought she was a bit crazy when she called them up and ranted about things. Everybody thought I was an innocent victim. I know that’s not true though. I was secretly glad to get away from her.

My relatives thought she was a bully. But if she was, I was not an innocent victim. I could have treated her better and I could have been more loyal. I had a very strong wish for independence from her and it would have been much better if I had not had that wish, or if I had been able to supress it.

Sometimes I was even ashamed of her because she behaved in an odd way. Later, after six years at the most exclusive boarding school in the country, I started thinking that she didn’t talk, behave and dress correctly. I was snobbish towards my own mother! How pathetic of me! How self-centered! I actually had thoughts along those lines for many years before I started to get over it.

After my parents’ divorce (which happened while I was at boarding school), my mother refused to sell the house where she had lived with my father. She kept it, despite the upkeep being well outside her means. Eventually she had to start letting out rooms in the house. But for some reason she really wanted to stay there.

I was constantly on her case about selling the house, dropping hints left, right and centre. I wish I’d just respected her wishes about this. I had an idea that if she moved she could start over, leaving all the bad things that happened in that house behind her (and me). She didn’t feel the same way though

I was also constantly on her case about getting a job, any job. My mother was ill on and off with an odd kind of tumour in her head. It wasn’t cancer, just benign tumours that grew and caused serious problems, among others giving her a disease called Cushing’s syndrome. She was treated for that and the doctor seemed to think she should be fine. She had a few recurrences, but as a whole people mainly thought she was a hypochondriac.

For a long while I was convinced that she’d start feeling better if she worked. She didn’t think so. She had a relationship with a business-man who took her skiing and travelling with him. It seemed to me that somebody who can travel and ski can also work, at least in an easy office job. I really don’t think it was my business to nag her about it though, and I realised that towards the end of her life.

Mother Gets Addicted to Prescription Drugs

She had some kind of phantom pain in her throat following completely unrelated surgery. As a result she became addicted to very strong painkillers. For a while she was completely crazy from the addiction.

It took quite a while before we spotted that she was stoned out of her head on painkillers. She had been slurring and rambling a bit when we talked to her, but we had all put it down to general weirdness and illness.

Then there was the horrible incident when she lost her driving licence after having zigzagged across the lines on a rural road. People saw her and called the police who started following her car. She wouldn’t stop the car when the police signalled her, which made them more hostile towards her.

I think it was then that my sister found a mega-stash of morphine and other drugs in my mother’s house. My sister is a nurse and knew what the drugs were. She got rid of everything that was addictive. It was acknowledged that my mother had drug addiction problem.

She struggled with that for a while, and I remember some phone calls with her when she was trying to convince me to get her out of the rehab clinic that she had been admitted to against her will. She called everybody in the family, but no-one agreed to let her out until she was off the drugs.

The First Suicide Attempts

My mother made a few suicide attempts while I was at boarding school. I don’t know much about these but my poor sister who was living with her at the time remembers it well. One of these suicide attempts happened while my brother and I was on holiday with our father in Indonesia (he lived in Singapore at the time and we had gone to visit him.) It’s disgusting to think that we were playing away on the beach and sun-bathing while she nearly killed herself in front of my 12 year old sister.

Many years later was the first serious attempt that I personally can remember. My mother took a picnic-blanket and some stuff with her and went to a pretty spot in the forest not far from her house. She took an overdose of some strong drug and just lay down to wait. In retrospect I think that was a serious suicide attempt.

She was found in time though, by some people who where out in the forest picking blueberries. They called 999. She was in the hospital for months after that – first in ER, then in at a psychiatric ward, locked up.

I didn’t go to Sweden when I heard about her suicide attempt. Perhaps I should have. I wasn’t sure if she had been serious. I tried to ignore it. I think it was a bad time to take holiday for work reasons, or something like that. Some people said she wasn’t serious about that suicide attempt and that she had known that people were likely to pass by. I don’t know if she had taken a lethal dose of drugs or not. I also thought that I didn’t want to be manipulated. How egoistical of me. I didn’t know what to think and I couldn’t face her.

The threat of her killing herself had been over us for years. One of the reasons I moved to England was to get away from the situation with my mother. I think I knew deep inside for a long time that she would eventually kill herself. I dreamt about it several times before it actually happened.

A while after getting out of the hospital, my mother somehow managed to be put in a hospice, a place for dying people run by the Church of Sweden. She was really keen on that place - she really wanted to be there for some reason. The only confusing thing about it was; she was not dying from any illness, to anyone’s knowledge.

I called up her doctor and spent half an hour on the phone with her. The doctor seemed to think that my mother didn’t belong in the hospice at all and was just acting weirdly. Many doctors, including this one had taken a dislike to her though because she was behaving in a somewhat obnoxious way towards them.

I stayed with my mother couple of times when visiting Sweden. I stayed for 2-4 nights or so. But the scar that had been caused by the tragic falling out when I was 12 had never healed. Really, things had been very bad, but that is a different story.

I had had some awful nightmares that my mother tried to kill me and as result I was a tiny bit scared of her when I stayed there. The dreams had been so vivid and I actually occasionally dream of things that come true… I locked the door to my room at night. I didn’t dare to take some of the un-labelled painkillers she gave me once when I had a terrible headache. How weird does that sound! Beiing scared that my own mother might kill me…

I just feel like crying writing this. I practically never speak about this, and I don’t tell people how my mother died. At the time it happened, I just pushed the feelings that I had about it back to some-place where they couldn’t disrupt my life.

The Suicide, How it Happened

At the time the suicide happened I was working somewhere that had a very generous policy regarding compassionate leave. I took two and a half weeks off.

The telephone call about the suicide came late at night on a Sunday. It was my brother. He and my sister were together. They asked me if I was alone, which I was.

I just screamed. The phone call lasted 10 minutes or so. I then called my mothers sister and told her about it. She was remarkably cool and un-surprised which upset me a bit. Then I took some sleeping pills that I keep for emergencies, and fell asleep although I didn’t exactly have a restful night.

For a week I couldn’t get myself to book a ticket and go to Sweden. I just stayed in England behaving like a lunatic. I went on some crazy shopping sprees and ran 7 miles every day.

I did another crazy thing as well – I convinced myself that I was in love with an idiot of a guy that I had just been about to dump when I learnt about the suicide. I remember calmly thinking “I simply cannot manage this without a strong person giving me support. I just can’t do it alone. I need to get back with Brian.”

So I calmly called him up, told him what had happened and said that I took back what I had said earlier, He was away on business and told me to “keep strong and go shopping!” (Like me, he was a survivor of a totally crazy family situation, and had grewn up at boading school. He became an officer in the British paratroop regiment, and later a banker. He was also a complete lunatic and incurable womanizer but I didn’t know the full extent back then.)

I knew he’d be tough on me, preventing me from falling to pieces. He came to Sweden a day after the funeral. Him and I actually went partying at some nightclubs only a couple of days after the funeral - can you believe it! I also also attended a party at a friend’s with him while I was there. I needed his extreme stiff upper-lip and survivor personality.

At the time, I am ashamed to say, I was upset and disillusioned about Christianity. My faith was too new and un-grounded to cope with an event like this. That’s why I turned to a guy instead of to Christ for strength.

My old female friends from school were absolute rocks as usual. “Through thick and thin & sick and sin…”

In a way, the crazy illusion that I adored this guy helped me not to think about the horrible details of the suicide. My father turned up for the funeral as well, flying in from Australia, without his new wife. I didn’t need or want him there, but apparently my sister did so he did the decent thing and came.

My mother had committed suicide through drowning herself after getting stoned on painkillers. Somebody had found her body floating in the water and called the police. It was recommended to the family not to see the body but I think my brother did anyway The whole thing was quite well planned. It became obvious that she had prepared it for days at the very least.

My mother left a letter which I cannot bring myself to read. My sister read the letter though and said that it was mostly ramblings but they made her feel worse. My sister also found my mother’s diary and read it during the days after the suicide. My brother had to take it off her eventually because she got so sad from reading it.
Lidingö K:a where she is buried
Was there anything I could have done to prevent the suicide? How guilty am I in this? I tried to talk to my mother about Christianity and Jesus, but she never took it on. I didn’t call her enough by far, but when we spoke I tried to be nice and kind to her. I told her several times that I had no hard feelings about all the things that happened when I was a teenager.

I still feel guilty though and wonder if anything that I could have done might have made a difference. My grandmother feels even worse about it though. I know that very well. But I was not a very good daughter to her.
Same church, different angle
I think she knew that I loved her. She called my sister and brother shortly before the suicide, but not me. Perhaps she called and couldn’t get through? Apparently she mentions me in the suicide note, but I can’t bring myself to read it. Maybe I will one day if I have a big strong husband by my side and feel safe and secure. But as things are right now, I can’t cope with that amount of pain by myself so I have put it off indefinitely.

One friend of me Agnes, has been through the same thing. Her mother, a divorced lawyer killed herself too. Agnes and I have spoken a bit about it.

Peace to her memory and let her rest in peace. She is buried at the cemetery at Lidingö outside Stockholm.

Mamma, jag älskar Dig så mycket och jag hoppas att träffa Dig igen in himlen. Snälla förlåt allt dumt jag gjorde! Vila i frid. Jag tänker på Dig varje dag.
Technorati Tags: suicide, mother

Because I had a messed up childhood, I grew up all over the place; with relatives, at boarding school and with family friends. The families in question have one thing in common. They all ended with DIVORCE!
Divorce in a Romantic Comedy?!
The word ‘divorce’ has for me has become synonymous with tremendous failure, egoism, sexual gratification at any price, laziness, stupidity, pride and lots of similar types of negative words.

It makes me want to cry when I think of married couples I respected and looked up to who broke up their homes and marriages causing pain and sufferering to themselves and those close to them. For me personally it meant being tossed around with no real place to call home.

Here is a list of people whose divorces affected me (and them, no doubt!):

• My own parents, (Bengt and Lisbeth)
• Uncle and Aunt (Eva and Bo) who I used to stay with (paternal).This one was the hardest.
• Uncle and Aunt (Irene and Björn) who I used to stay with (maternal) After 35 years of marriage!
• Family friend in Spain (Evelyn)whom I used to stay with (she had been a divorcee for a decade when I stayed with her, but she still mourned the divorce.)
• One of my best friends Anna who foolishly cheated on her lovely husband, causing the divorce!
• My step–grandparents(not biological)
• Parents of friends as I was growing up. Many friends of mine had a bedroom in both parents’ house. A recurring theme was that they forgot toys and school books at the other parent’s house..

Enough with the divorces! There are plenty more examples but I don’t want to be a bore. These were the ones I cared the most about. A variety of reasons caused the break-ups. Infidelity (male and female), arrogance, temper, stupidity, vanity etc.

Here is the problem: The people I listed above are the majority of married people that I ever knew well, or cared about! They were my role models… And all their marriages ended in divorce.

The marriages of both my maternal and paternal grandparents survived and flourished until one party died – an inspiration and a model to take after I think. I have an idea of what made their marriages last, but I am not sure I understand it completely. Both my grandmothers have given me miscellaneous pointers.
The former lovers now try to hurt each other
“What God has put together, let no man take apart….?!” People either don’t know this statement from the Bible, or don’t care about it. And what about the promises that people make in church. when they get married? I suppose it doesn’t matter much to most people since they (including the ones I listed) are not religious anyway.

I don’t believe that divorce is a horrible sin in the way that Catholics do. But I think it is a pretty bad thing in the eyes of God and for those affected. I think people resort to it far too easily. When divorces first started to happen in the 1960s, it was like a floodgate. People started to divorce for things that previously would have amounted to a challenge or a problem to overcome in the marriage.

People (particularly women) cannot feel safe and secure in a marriage that they know is statistically unlikely to last. They will then feel it is necessary to have a backup-plan in case they get dropped by their partner. This means there is less intimacy in relationships now than 50 years ago when divorces where more or less socially unacceptable. Back then people knew that their marriage would last for the rest of their life.
……
Although I was actually engaged to a guy (James) not so long ago, I feel as if I have practically become a commitment-phobic as a result of all the divorces I have witnessed. (The reason for the break-up of my engagement has nothing to do with any of this though… I discovered James didn’t quite know what team he was batting for, as they put it…. Quite off-putting.)

Anyway, I am practically a commitment-phobic because of how much I dislike divorces. I really don’t want to have to experience a divorce. I certainly wouldn’t marry I guy whom I thought was likely to want to swap me for a newer model ten years on, or whom I thought I couldn’t love and respect for the rest of my life. If I was married, it would take quite a lot for me to want to get divorced. I’d have to fear for my life, feel completely suicidal, or be faced with some currently unimaginable horror in order for me to consider it.

I can’t understand this ‘Use them, then bin them’ approach to other human beings, particularly somebody you have loved and been intimate with. When you marry it is ‘for better or worse.’ That means that fights, having feelings for somebody else, financial problems, being bored by the other person or whatever it could be is not a not valid reason to get a divorce.
1970s Divorce Film
It is difficult for me to understand exactly how men see it, but actually, men are the ones being abandonded in many cases. Women who have their own income get tired of their husbands and think ‘enough of cleaning and cooking for this loser! I can support myself and I’ve had enough’… Or they have a really strong libido and feel unfulfilled…. Or they feel un-appreciated, un-loved and seek these emotions outside of their marriage. Or they discover that he wasn’t a knight-in-shining-armour after all, and feel cheated.

In the past, when women were less independant, they were much less likely to instigate a divorce. Was it better that way? Very tough question. Obviously I wouldn’t wish it on any woman to be locked by fincancial circumstances in a physically or mentally abusive situation.

In the case of some relatives of mine, the woman felt superior to the husband in some ways (she eventually became more successful in her career). While away on a conference, she fell for another man and eventually split her family with two small children! When I asked her about it, she said that she had lost her respect for her husband since she had much more ‘drive’ than him. I know where she’s coming from with this, but surely she must have spotted that before she married him! He never showed much drive but he is a very nice person indeed, and he is not exactly a pauper.
Marriage as a hobby…?
A close friend of mine came visiting me in London in panic after a horrific fight with her husband of only a few months. She had been flirting with his best friend…! She said her husband had been neglecting her - this was her justification for the flirt with the other guy. Her husband was a successful politician who travelled a lot. Listening to her ramblings I felt she was just being self-centred. The fight had been about his statement that he felt she should be home when he returned from his work trips. Big deal! She had got into the habit of partying on town with her single friends instead though and got angry at his demand.

While staying with me she was constantly recieving text messages from both her husband and his friend… Comical but sad! She read them out to me as they came in. The husband’s texts were sweet and caring - the friend’s texts were raunchy… It was very clear that the friend was interested in one thing only… The fact that he was making a move on his best friend’s wife clearly showed that he had no personal integrity and decency worth mentioning. My friend didn’t see it that way though and kept repeating how attracted she was by him and what a pig her husband had been.

On the whole, her husband was a great guy - immensely talented and always nice and friendly. My friend looked down on his somewhat provincial family though and felt socially superior. Although she left me with the intention of making up and apologizing to her husband, her marriage felt apart a few months later.

My friend then changed her mind and realised she loved him deeply! I recieved some phone calls from her wanting advice on how to get him back… But her husband had had enough and nothing worked. He must have been upset about it though. Lots of people saw him drowning his sorrows at ‘Cafe Opera’, a top night club in Stockholm. The whole thing was very sad.

As for men, I don’t know exactly how they think about divorces, but I am well aware that men have a hard time not fantasizing about other women on a regular basis. I guess that for many men, the temptation eventually becomes too strong, and the grass seems greener on the other side of the fence… It probably doesn’t help if his wife is constantly nagging him (men seem unable to stand a bit of nagging!) Also if the woman lets herself go. It’s sad but true; a big part of what really matters to men are looks… (But sometimes I see pictures of somebody’s wife and their mistress alongside of eachother and notice that the wife is better looking than the mistress! What’s going on there?)
Another Film with a Divorce Theme
It does not necessarily seem that men will want a divorce just because they have a fling with another woman. Judging from stories in media it seems that they can quite happily have a mistress situation going on for years without wanting a divorce at all… I don’t think a woman would be able to keep that up.

As for men and marriages, my impression is that men seem to mainly want some level of respect and appreciation from their wife, for her to take care of her looks and not not subject him to nagging. Sometimes I think men are easier to please than us women give them credit for. Women occasionally leave their husbands because they fail to meet the level of success and status that the woman had expected. When I grew up, a friend of my parents got caught with some serious tax-evasion and eventually had do declare personal bankruptcy. His wife then divorced him! I think such a scenario is very uncommon with men. They would not dump a woman for not being successful enough, or for not making enough money.

A common pattern with men and divorces seems to be: Husband has an affair for whatever reason. Wife realises and goes off her head about it, leading to a divorce one way or another. It’s hard to imagine what it must be like for a married woman to realise that her husband is having an affair. Apparently lots of women in France aren’t all that concerned about it and get on with their business waiting for it to pass. How would I react and what would I do? I’d like to think I’d keep my head cool and take some kind of positive and well-measured action. I don’t know for sure how I’d react, but as a rule I tend to think before I act.

If I was married, I would be very much on the ball, avoiding things that I knew could cause problems in the marriage. I would be actively doing things that I thought could be good for the marriage. And since any guy I married would be a) smart and b) committed to the concept of marriage, I’d expect him to make some kind of an effort too. I would also be forgiving about mistakes, if they were genuine mistakes and not repeated.

I wouldn’t want to be in a situation where I felt it was my duty to always be perfect though. If that was the case, then how could I enjoy the marriage? I once dated a guy who kept repeating how ‘perfect’ I was… He kept listing my virtues, starting with looks, career and cooking skills. It made me feel rather uneasy. Although at that particular time in my life I was capable of looking and behaving ‘perfect’ most of the time,(I am well-drilled…) I was aware that I couldn’t keep it up indefinitely. There is plenty of ‘bad’ stuff about me (more on that some other time..) and I knew that he would find serious cracks in my supposed perfection sooner or later. I dropped him before he got a chance to do that! Nobody is perfect, male or female.

Am I naive in my condemnation of divorce? Perhaps all these divorces are completely un-avoidable and the alternative would be a planet filled with completely miserable people trapped in marriages that were destroying them. I don’t think so though. I think both genders are loosing out terribly because marriage has become such an unstable institution.

Technorati Tags: marriage, divorceconservative”

Oh, I got sick AGAIN! I had to spend the better part of Sunday waiting to see a doctor who could give me a prescription for the super strong antibiotics that I need. I had to use all my cunning to figure out a way through the NHS maze of services. I needed to get hold of the strong antibiotics without getting hospitalised again (which would be the normal procedure). I succeded, but it took 6 hours altogether. I got enough tablets to last me a week. Really, the dying fibroid should stop giving me problems by then! I’ll find out if I can get the antibiotics online if I need them again.

Can’t decide whether to force myself to work tomorrow despite needing a fever-free day to recover. If I am home I risk getting a reputation as a weakling with bad health… Also I jeopardize my job, since I am not yet past my three month probation period (that’s Wednesday week.)
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UPDATE: Thanks for the comment Paul. I went to work anyway and felt pretty weak all day. I was able to do a large part of the budget of my project.
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UPDATE: A week later - still bleeding a bit… still hurting a bit. Enough antibiotics for one more day. Will I get sick again when I stop the antibiotics? I should be getting my period soon. I can’t wait for confirmation that my female parts are still working, but I am hoping that I have a ‘normal’ period that can be managed using normal protection. That’s why I did the surgery - my periods were like a horror movie.
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I have never been to North America. There is no good reason for this, it simply hasn’t happened. Going on a long and leisurely trip there is now number one on my ‘travel’ list.
Car Culture Extreme….
I can’t even drive!
Over the last couple of years I have become quite fascinated with the US and now I am saving the visit there for some exciting time in the not-so-distant future.

I’d like to make something really special of it! I have three childhood friends who live there; Lovisa outside San Francisco, Trine in New York and Jessika in rural Ohio.

First the Negative…

Up until I was about 25, I had a snobbish but ignorant view of the US. I thought I knew all there was to know about that country from constantly being exposed to American media, films, fast food etc. I guess my impression was “Why go to a country that already see and hear about every day?”
All there is to American Cuisine?
In addition I had heard all the urban myths about Americans that are circulating in Europe. I thought the US was a country mainly populated by poorly educated TV addicts, by people who never walk - only drive, by violent gang members and by greedy, egoistical and war-mongering capitalists in general…

As for things to do there, I snobbishly figured “Well what culture, art and architecture could they possibly have? The whole country is only a few hundred years old!” That’s a pretty ignorant view though, since some extraordinarily interesting things have happened there during this period! And additionally, things can be beautiful and fascinating without being old..

I also held the kinds of reservations against the US that you get if you are constantly exposed to negatively tainted newspaper articles or TV news.
Over-exposure on TV…
(The media in Sweden is normally quite critical of the United States due to the fact that the great majority of people working in media there are social democrats . Finding faults with the greatest capitalist economy on earth is part of the job description. This is slowly changing now though.)

To sum it up; the US was a constant presence in my life, but not one that interested me, or that I cared particularly for.

Now I am Positive!

My negative impression was contradicted though by the extraordinarily nice personalities of the Americans that I met here in Europe and in Asia. I noticed that they were friendly, helpful, fun and un-assuming. You really couldn’t help but like them. Their personalities didn’t fit the stereotype about their country at all. I also worked with some American techies and generally found them to be clever and hard-working.

I was also impressed that many Americans seem to have an active Christian faith and aren’t afraid to say so. I never normally meet perople like that. Those few people that I know here in Europe who occasionally attend church do so mainly out of a sense of tradition and duty. Not because they particularly want to or because they feel strongly about Christianity. I almost fell off the chair when a guy I worked with suggested we should pray together. It turned out to be quite a special moment though.

Another thing that really amazed me was realising that the US has some of the most majestic nature on the planet. Most of Europe is quite lame in comparison, to be completely honest. I discovered US nature through watching documentaries on the Discovery Channel. Just to mention a few spectacular things that I really can’t wait to see for myself:
Magnificent Badlands!
we haven’t got anything like that!

• Mighty Rivers
• Geysers
• ”Alps in Colorado, Idaho and Utah
• Fantastic Beaches and Impressive Coastlines
• Pine Forests in Minnesota
• Redwood Forest in California
• Swamplands in the South
• ”Badlands”
• The Grand Canyon
• ”Craters of the Moon National Park”
• Prairie
• Deserts
• Glaciers and Arctic Tundra in Alaska.

We have some of these things in the Europe too (but not all though!) However since we are in different countries, and speak different languages, people in general tend only to experience the nature that is in their own country and perhaps one or two other countries. Migration is quite unusual with the exception of the attraction of London and Paris on people from all over the continent. I am fascinated by the different ’states’. A country in a country?
In America on the other side, people can move to any part of the country they fancy living in!

They could grow up in Texas, go to college in New England, work for a while in Silicon Valley… then in, say San Diego and then in New York. If they want something really different they can go to Hawaii, Alaska or Puerto Rico. They could retire in a sunny state like Florida.. All without even owning a passport. That really is very impressive. I guess I envy that a bit.

(In theory we could do that in European Union too, but the language situation makes it complicated. You can’t really work in a professional career unless you have a very good command of the local language and culture.)

I also became aware that the majority of Americans aren’t very interested in visiting Europe since they perceive they’ve got everything they need on their own side of the Atlantic… I guess that’s fair enough.What’s a medieval church or castle compared to the Grand Canyon… ?

I suppose that the kind of historical remnants that we tend to value here are something you wouldn’t miss if you never got used to having it around. A scene from The Emigrants, a film about
some Swedish Emigrants to the United States”
Another very interesting thing about America is that practically everybody who lives there is a descendant of brave people who dared risking all to search a new life on the new continent.

It wasn’t the most sophisticated or successful people of their time who left Europe for America. Instead it was those who had a personal drive, a vision for their family and who weren’t afraid to take a risk.
Some of the best people left for America!
What a “brain drain”! In Sweden there are still whole villages left abandoned in the forest; called ‘dead’ villages they are left to decay after the inhabitants left for America a century ago… Their old wooden houses are rotten and probably mostly fallen to bits by now. I saw such a place once when I was out in the forest with my grandfather.

When bearing in mind the emigration to America, perhaps it isn’t so strange that Christianity is dying in Europe today. (Particularly in Northern Europe). Those who were passionate Christians left the continent for the States as they got persecuted for not sticking to the regional church practices.

Taking communion at home was illegal.
I remember from history classes that 19th century Swedes who wanted to hold prayer meetings and take communion at home got penalised and mainly left for America. At the time of learning about that I thought “Quite right too, why didn’t these people listen to the Church? Good riddance to them!” But now I realize now that they were probably the most faithful people around in the country at the time! A generation after they had left, they were pretty much forgotten. Written off. The decline of Christianity too, had started. That’s a whole different article though.

(Footnote: In my own family we had quite a surprise in the late 80s as an American from the state of Georgia contacted us and said that he was my grandfather’s second cousin or something like that. Him and his wife came to visit and were very nice indeed. They didn’t speak a word of Swedish though, and didn’t look very Swedish either. They were chuffed to bits when they realised that they were related to the (Swedish) composer of the hymn ‘How Great Thou Art”. They also really enjoyed visiting my grandfathers brother who still runs the family farm in Southern Sweden. That was where his emigrant family had left from and most of the nearby village probably looks more or less the same today as it did when his ancestors left!)

Perhaps the dynamic and intensive personalities and the entrepreneurial spirit of many Americans can be explained by the fact that modern white Americans are the descendants of people who dared to sell all their possessions and board a ship for a new, unknown, savage continent in search of a better life. If bravery is in the genes, these people ought to have it!
Now the US has its own traditions..!
In order to do such a thing you need heaps of optimism, courage and enterpreuneurship. These people didn’t even know the language of the country that they were going to!

As a European I also have to envy Americans their un-abashed nationalism. It simply isn’t acceptable in Europe to be too patriotic (unless it’s in connection with a sports game). In the US, nationalism seems to be alive and well and I guess this has been very useful for strengthening the country recently.
This wouldn’t happen in Europe.
I admire the outgoing and cheerful “everything-is-possible” personalities of most Americans. They are willing to improvise and improve how they do things, instead of being weighed down by tradition and norms. Social class, etiquette and such things are not a big thing. It is about who you are today, instead of who your familyor ancestors were. Americans seem to make the best of the ‘here and now’ and chance that a friendly manners will see them through any difficulties. I find that positive and refreshing.

In Europe we are very quick to label people based on their accents, manners background and education. I do that myself despite not wanting to do it. Lots of Europeans from disadvantaged backgrounds are absolutely unable to imagine a way out of their circumstances, whereas in the US it seems even the lowliest worker harbours high-flying dreams. There is plenty of room for individuality and freedom of opinions across a wider spectrum.

Please return for more about my American Dream! I haven’t finished yet!

I have promised myself to write something every day, but today I came home feeling so exhausted and with a terrible headache and ache after my surgery.

I spent all day in Microsoft Project and Excel, planning out the next phase of the project. No lunch today, just a sandwich at my desk. My boss confided in me that the whole project is in jeopardy. Unless we can state a very good case, very quickly, there is a chance that the company pulls out and changes the technology to something else. (Corporate madness - the technology is adequate and the software is doing what it needs to do. I really don’t see what the problem is…) Some of the big bosses came by to talk to my boss Jacob, and it is pretty clear that he is telling the truth.

I am not terribly worried about things like redundancy since it’s very easy to get another similar job in London. But I don’t want the disruption or confusion, and I don’t like to leave things before they are finished.

When I got home I watched a Swedish film and got terribly homesick for pine forests, blue lakes, red wooden cottages, pastel coloured wooden houses and blonde people.

I am going to write properly about Sweden later on this week.

Bye for now,
Cordelia

Just as I was beginning to wonder if my company was crazy for paying me a very decent salary for next to no work, I was given a considerable amount of work with a very narrow timeframe. The start-up documentation, budgeting et.c. for a multimillion £££ project. My boss is under the impression that the bulk of the work can be done by Thursday, i.e. in two days.

It looks like I’ll be managing the next phase of this enormous project after all. It’s to do with developing and deploying a piece of software in 13 European countries.. The development team is partly in India, partly in Canada and, of course, in the UK. The whole experience certainly looks fantastic on the CV, and I’d no doubt learn a lot. But as mentioned previously, I’d be much happier as a traditional housewife and mother. The irony of it!
PRINCE2 process flowchart. This is the bible of IT project-
management in Europe. Luckily I am a certified ‘practioner’.
My manager who is nice and funny in a way, can also be quite crazy. When he wants to, he bullies people like you wouldn’t believe it.

The guy who is managing the project in question, for one. My boss, (Jacob), seems unable to behave in a reasonable way towards him, always being rude, bordering on obnoxious. The Indian team members are quite scared of Jacob.

I’ve only been working there for about 2.5 months, so I have had no reason to fall out with him yet. I always behave like the committed employee, always asking Jacob for advice and taking it unless it’s too crazy. Jacob hence is mainly nice to me, constantly joking and being quite funny and decent. But I notice how he behaves towards other collegues so I can’t relax with him. The wind could turn any time. Maybe he is letting me off easiser for being the only woman who works for him. Or maybe it’s nothing to do with that.

I am still in pain from the surgery though; not feeling even close to 100%. I will spare you the details of my symptoms. Suffice to say that nobody cares how you feel at work and you cannot talk about it… If you are there, you have to do the work to your best ability. I am just biting my lip, popping painkillers and getting on with it. I’d love to lie in bed and rest another week, but it is not an option.

A nice surprise (apart from the flowers) awaited me after I was back from being off for the surgery; I have been given a really nice desk in a secluded space by the window. It’s a top spot in this massive office! I’ll enjoy it while it lasts. Daylight cheers me up during the working day so I am very pleased about that.
St Helen’s Church, a very dynamic
bible-believing church in the ‘City’
The business analyst in my team gave me his palm tree, so I have that to look at too. All the guys are very fascinated by the destruction of a high-rise post-war building next our office building. They are often standing by the window near me, observing the builders as they tear this large building down. It’s a very noisy and violent process though and personally I wish they had chosen to just renovate the building. So what if it was a bit ugly! With the destruction work going on there is a constant background noise of cement-drilling…

I wanted to attend the dinner and talk about Christianity at a City church this evening at 7:30, but because of the surgery etc I am too exhausted by the end of the day and need to go home. Hopefully I can attend next week. I really like the people on the course, the topics are interesting and the church certainly lives up to it’s reputation as the most dynamic Church of England church in London.

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