Are you aware of the limits of your language?

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” ~Ludwig Wittgenstein

I was thinking of my little girl the other day and the words “mamma mín” came to me in a context which is irrelevant here. “Mamma mín” is Icelandic and means “My mom” but the direct translation does not explain the terms of endearment the words relay. Picture a little girl bringing a bouquet of daisies she has just picked to her mother, she offers her the flowers and says “Hérna mamma mín”.

I tried in my mind to translate this accurately over to English but failed. There are, obviously, words that could replace these words – “Here you are mommy dearest” might work but it does not quite replace the simplicity of “mamma mín”. The Possessive Personal Pronoun in its simplicity works as a loving remark in the mouth of the child.

When the girl grows up she will probably use those particular words much more rarely, just like she will almost seize to pick flowers for her mom. These words are precious and, in my mind at least, almost irreplaceable. In English the words “My mom” in the mouth of a child can be the expression of great pride but it doesn’t relay the same feelings  of love that the Icelandic term does.

So I started to think about language. I started to think of something Herta Müller has said about language. She claims that “Language has different eyes” and claims that different languages give different thoughts and meanings. We’ve all heard the “which comes first the hen or the egg” discussion about language. In my mind the question isn’t so much about which comes first, language or thought? than it is about the question of limitations. How is our language limiting our thoughts?

Today I juggle three languages on a daily basis to some degree. My native tongue, Icelandic, is always with me but I partially think and talk in Swedish at the same time that I struggle to write in English every day.  When I started learning Swedish 10 years ago I had a head start. I had studied Danish for years and as Icelandic and Swedish are related languages I knew some of the words too.

Icelanders almost think its “nothing” to learn Swedish because they think its so simple and so much alike our own tongue and the Danish we are taught in school. What many fail to grasp until they’ve juggled Swedish (and this surely goes for all languages) for a while is that it isn’t all that easy. Some words are the same but have different meanings and different nuances. Some words, like sjuksköterska, seem practically impossible to pronounce. But what is hardest isn’t the superficial meaning of the words or their pronunciation. After 10 years I speak Swedish more or less fluently but what still gets to me are the nuances. Words I know the meaning of have deeper meanings than I yet grasp. Concepts that were previously foreign to me have been introduced and are still being introduced to me.

Like The Swedes favorite word “Lagom” which means “average” or “just right”. It sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? Well it isn’t. Swedes love this word and use it unsparingly and it is very hard to grasp all its meanings and all its different nuances.

“How warm do you want your cocoa?”
“Lagom”.

In this case it might come down to what we’d like to think of as the Swedish National Soul. The Swedes are a very “lagom” people. Everything should be “just right”.

I’ve exposed myself to several languages. English and Danish came early, then I studied a little French and then I moved to Sweden. These different languages each provide different thoughts and I truly believe that when we study a new language it is mainly the thought behind the language that is the most difficult to grasp (which might be why I can’t remember a word of French, I never dove into the thought behind the language!). Studying irregular verbs is a hassle but learning how to think differently, that’s the true challenge. This is also why I think it’s very rude to settle in a country and never learn the language.

So are we limiting ourselves if we only speak one language? Well, yes I do think so. It’s almost like not getting to know another person, or at least getting to know them without ever putting yourself in their shoes. The Eskimo’s are said to have many words for snow but at the same time it is limited in other aspects. Are you aware what limits your language? And with “your language” I don’t just mean your mother tongue, but your particular use of that language.

I sometimes find myself in the situation where I have a thought in mind but can’t find the right word for it in any language. There is thought without language but I do think we need language to be introduced to new ways of thinking.

Don’t judge the Pirahã people for their lack of ability to count but ask yourself what their language can contribute with. Exposing yourself to new languages is like exposing yourself to new people. You always learn something new, something you didn’t know before. You always learn a new way of looking at things. It may not always vary greatly  from your own but it is guaranteed to widen your horizon and brighten your world.

The Adventures of Miss Real

(Exercise #2, Short story by Eygló Daða, 1960 words.
All comments and criticism welcome.)

When Mr. Knowitall stood Miss Real up at the airport Miss Real was sad for a short while. Then she decided to take fate into her own hands and take the trip to Paris by herself. For the first time in her life she felt like a modern, independent woman.

Her face shone with absolute delight as the airplane landed on Charles de Gaulle airport. She was so excited that she almost forgot to claim her luggage. She took a cap from the airport to the hotel that she and Mr. Knowitall had been planning on staying in and didn’t even blink when she realized that the prize was way to steep for her alone. She would work it out, this was her vacation and her opportunity to do things she had never even dared dreaming of.

The very next day she dressed like she imagined a sophisticated Parisian would instead of dressing like a tourist. She wore a red dress, high heels and she bought a Gucci bag in a shop near the hotel that cost more than her entire outfit. She was used to the high heels but didn’t want to tire herself out so she took a cap to the Eiffel tower.

She was awestruck as she walked past the people underneath the tower. A man in a brown hat and ragged suits juggled small kittens, a naked, bronze colored mime moved when people threw coins in a small bronze colored hat beneath his feet and a woman dressed like Marie Antoinette with the appropriate make up and hair sat on a chair and looked sad.

Miss Real didn’t do what the tourists did and enter the line for the elevators to the tower, instead she walked steady-fast, like a woman on a mission, down the pathway towards the park. All around her people lay on small blankets, ate baguettes with cheese, played football and some even drank red wine out of perfectly presentable wine glasses. Children ran around giggling and elderly people sat on benches holding their purses or their canes firmly.

When Miss Real was a good way away from the tower she turned around and looked back. She smiled a satisfied smile as she saw the life she was now a part of. Then she sat down beside an old woman wearing a straw hat with three roses and too much make-up above her eyes. The old woman was holding the ugliest chihuahua Miss Real had ever seen. It was gray with almost no hair on its body and its face looked like it had been squashed flat and then forcefully blown up again. The woman was snuggling with the dog lovingly, getting red lipstick all over it.

After a moments rest Miss Real stood up again, smiled at the woman with the ugly dog, who only frowned back at her, and went on her way. She walked out of the park hoping to find a really cute coffee house where she could eat like a true Parisian.

After a while she found a small, dark place with open-air serving. She sat down beside a small wooden table and wished she smoked cigarettes. After a while a young woman wearing a tight white T-Shirt, short black skirt and a green apron came to take her order. The girl had a red ribbon in her black hair and several yellow teardrops painted on her eyelids.

She ordered a salad from the girl and asked for a glass of red wine to be brought to her afterwards along with a piece of chocolate cake. Her French was bad but the girl seemed to instinctively know what she wanted and just nodded her head approvingly while scribbling the order down on a small piece of paper with a giant pencil with a red rubber duck on the end.

While she waited for her food she looked at the street life around her. A man and a woman sat down close by her and started smoking long cigarillos, they ordered a bottle of wine and laughed with exaggerated movements of the hands, back and forth, back and forth, as if they were waving a flag. When her salad came she ate it quickly and then waited for her wine and cake to arrive.

Again she wished she had something to do, a book to read or write in, a cigarette to smoke, a mobile phone so she could pretend to be getting a lot of text messages, something that made her look like anything but a lonely girl in a small Parisian café.

When her wine arrived she drank slowly and ate quickly. The glass was big and on the brim of it danced several can-can girls wearing black and white skirts, red tops, big white stockings and when they lifted their skirts she saw a hint of their secrets underneath. On the street in front of her she noticed a man in a top hat, wearing striped suits. He looked at her, waved a cane he was holding, bent forward as he took of his hat as if to salute her. She smiled and tilted her head slightly.

The man saw this as an invitation. He came into the café, sat down in front of her and started to talk quickly in French. She smiled at him, genuinely flattered that he believed her to be French, unwilling to correct him. He talked and he talked and she understood near to nothing of what he said. Then he handed her a business card, stood up and went on his way.

On the card was an address, the current date and a time for later that evening.

Miss Real tickled the can-can girls, finished her glass and waved for her bill. She payed the girl with the red ribbon, tipped well and went on her way. She hailed the next cab and asked to be taken to the hotel. In a small boutique beside the hotel she bought a white lace dress with matching gloves, white shoes and a feather for her hair. Then she went to the hotel, showered,did her make-up and hair, put on the dress, the shoes and the gloves. She placed the feather strategically in her hair pushed money in her bra and looked at herself in the mirror for a long time. She looked like someone else and nothing like herself.

In the cab she said nothing but showed the card to the driver. He looked at her twice with his white beard and his yellow hazy eyes and then he sped off.
“Here we are, Mademoiselle” the driver said as he stopped the car outside of an old, worn building. She  payed the driver and stepped out of the car gracefully. Then she walked up the cracked stairs and entered the building without hesitating.

There was a narrow stripe of red carpet on the concrete floor pointing her which way to go. She walked down the hallway, admiring clowns dancing with skeletons on the walls. A gargoyle towered over an entrance, it had a dragons head and the body of a lion. It nodded its head towards her, hissed and spat its tongue out quickly, like a frog catching a fly. Then she went inside, through the entrance and entering a large ballroom. There were huge chandeliers sparkling their crystal light in the air, big white ribbons decorated the walls along with paintings of beheaded people dancing and clinging their glasses together. On the floor in front of her were people dressed in the most peculiar fashion. A young innocent  looking girl was wearing a tight leather top and a blue leather skirt which hardly hid her buttocks. A man wearing a tailcoat and latex pants took his hat off to her. A woman wearing a chastity belt and an iron bra greeted her and offered her a glass of sparkling, bubbling champagne.

Miss Real accepted gracefully and entered the ballroom as if she belonged there. She saw a clown kissing a queen in the corner and a monk lifting up the many skirts of a fat dame with white hair, the monk had his other hand gripping the woman’s big, left breast tightly. On the dance floor kings danced with a milk maids, stable boys danced with princesses, princes danced with princes and ladies danced with tramps.

She was soon swept into a dance with a woman wearing a harlequin suit. The entire night she ate shrimp and caviar, drank champagne and danced like she had never danced before. She danced with anyone who would, a prince, a beggar, a sowing lady, a prostitute and a king, a concrete gargoyle and a queen. No one spoke a word to her and the music echoed between the walls of the room delightfully.

After a few hours of this a man wearing a beggar’s outfit jumped up on a table and started speaking. She understood little but saw the gleeful anticipation in the eyes of the guests. When the man stopped talking she heard several squeals and suddenly people were running, laughing and chasing each other back and forth and out of the room.

The man in the striped suit, with the top hat approached her and pinched her cheeks. “Run and play” he said and pinched her buttocks. “Run and play or we’ll get you” and then he laughed maniacally. Miss Real wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do. She looked at the man questioningly and noticed the baneful look in his eyes.

“Run” he exclaimed and soon she was running as he chased her down the corridor where she had come from, she ran down staircases and was greeted by skeletons, chattering their teeth and poking their fingers at her. She ran forward, terror ripping at her heart. Then she entered a room, closed the door and caught her breath.

It was a small room filled with lilies and black satin cloth, hanging from the ceiling, waving in the air. She sighed a breath of relief as she bolted the door behind her and then walked over to a window which led to the pavement outside. It was a small window but she would be able to climb out of it if she could get it to open.

She felt the satin fabric kiss her cheeks and the lilies playing softly with her feet. And then she turned from the window.
“No” she said aloud to herself, “I will not be chased out of my dream” she exclaimed rather loudly and walked briskly to the door. She opened it and faced the man in the top hat. He bowed to her courteously and smiled wickedly.

“Come with me” she said and pulled the man inside the room. Then she took his hat, placed it on her own head and took the man by the arms and started dancing. They danced like that, without music, without a sound, careful not to tramp the lilies. Then she kissed him on the mouth and sighed deeply. The man kissed her back, softly, passionately and they fell to the floor, making love amongst the flowers and the satin curtains.

When he fell asleep she slid silently out of the room and out of the quiet house. The air outside was cold and the sun was just peaking up above the horizon. Smiling gladly Miss Real walked towards a larger road nearby and hailed a cab to her hotel. She packed the white dress in her suitcase and fell into her bed.

A week of this, she thought to herself, one more day of this and I will never want to go back home. She smiled shyly and fell asleep smearing lipstick on her white pillow.

The Exercises

I posted a short story the day before yesterday. It was about 1300 words, written in one day and posted the same day. It was the first exercise of what I hope to be many.

A while ago I participated in a short story competition which required the entries to be short stories of 2000 words or less. I wrote a few of these stories and put one in the competition last April. It got short listed, which made me happy. The format also taught me a thing or two about writing. It’s really challenging to write such short stories. It’s both rewarding and fun to write them and you learn a thing or two.

My mission:

These stories I’m writing now are not just 2000 words or less but formed in a certain format. I’m going to be writing stories that a) feel (to me at least) almost allegorical, b) I will start with a single feeling and write from it and c) I will be keeping a certain flare of the carnival in the stories which will make them surreal or at least somewhat unreal.

Or that’s what I’m hoping to accomplish. I’ll be posting them as I write them. Hoping that one story will take only one day from idea to final draft (I’d hate to call them finished in such a short time). That will not always be possible of course but I’m going to try my best with the time limit, the important thing is to get the stories written and to learn something along the way.

The Death of Former Miss Amazing, Mrs. Average

(Exercise, Short story by Eygló Daða, 1300 words. All comments and criticism welcomed.)

When Mr. Average’s wife died at the age of thirty-nine Mr. Average fell into a deep depression. He had been a quiet, orderly guy his entire life. He always wore blue suits to work. He always ironed his own shirts. He never walked over a street when the light was red and he always kept money in his wallet in case of emergency. He had loved his wife well and hardly ever even looked at another woman since the day they took their vows.

Then his wife, former Miss Amazing, died. He found Mrs. Average on the living room floor in their villa in the suburbs. She was wearing a white dress with green leaved pattern and her tongue was hanging out of her mouth. Her face was mildly green and her thin, perfect body was bloated beyond recognition. He didn’t hear the police men and paramedics claim that they had never seen anything like it. He only saw Mrs. Average being taken away by the coroner and not in an ambulance.

The house changed immediately. While his wife was alive it had always been free of dust and the rubbish seemed to stayed away as if by magic but suddenly every corner, ever inch of the house was layered with dust and litter. The house that had always been light, colorful and full of life, now became gray, dirty and dark in a matter of moments. The furniture were darker, the drapes hung heavily before the windows blocking out the sunlight and the decoration didn’t look modern anymore but Gothic and old. The shadows were long and everything smelled of decay and mildew.

Mr. Average handled the questions the police officers had to ask with quiet resolution. He looked at his environment change around him. He saw quiet transformation in the faces of the men in uniforms. Pity and compassion became disdain and suspicion. When they were gone he sighed a breath of relief and out of his mouth spewed fumes of sadness and rage. It was a thick, gray cloud that settled like a persistent fog over everything around him.

He still saw his wife wandering around the house wearing her white dress with the green leaved pattern which almost seemed color co-ordinated with her green complexion. He saw her tongue lulling out of her mouth in hideous manner as she stumbled into room after room as if she was looking for a way out of her miserable none existence. He tried his best to ignore her. He told himself that this version of his wife was not welcome in his life but he knew not of a way to get rid of her, to steer her out of his life and existence.
So he decided to pretend nothing ever happened, no matter how impossible the task seemed.

His colleges saw the change in him. They saw the storm cloud constantly floating above his head, showering him with bile and acid rain. And they saw the lines underneath his eyes deepen and darken. When he was approached with gentleness and kind words he hissed and the color of his eyes changed from true blue to volcanic red. They started to avoid him, approaching him only when the work required it with absolute necessity.

Mr. Average didn’t mind. He felt he was no longer living in the world he had been born in, instead he had been sucked into the gray, un-dead world of his wife where there were no antithesis’. There was no color, no happiness, no life and no hope.

The years went by and people forgot about Mr. Average fun loving, wonderful, sunny wife in a bright dress and with a kind smile. They forgot that he had ever been anything but Mr. Sour-Grapes. The children teased him in the street, cast rotten apples at his windows and told stories about his house being haunted by a ghastly green woman with her tongue lulling out of her mouth. His dark hair became gray and then white, his body looked like a skeleton and his fingernails were yellow, his eyes dark seeing little but the fog around him and the green face of Mrs. Average, former Miss Amazing.

Then one day a sound broke the dead silence of his house. It was a Sunday afternoon and in his world the clouds were raging havoc, the smell of death and decay was suffocating and the grayness of everything around him was even more miserable than it had been the day before. The sound that clung had become unfamiliar to him but he recognized it after a while as the tune from the doorbell. Mrs. Average had had a bell installed with a tune which sounded out of place and fundamentally out of character for the place he lived in now. None the less he stumbled out of the chair in the corner of the living room where he had been admiring the green corpse of his dead wife as she tried to swallow her tongue in the middle of the floor at the same time that she cackled at him like a hyena.

When he opened the door he noticed a breath of fresh air escape inside the house. In front of him stood a little girl wearing pig tails and a pink dress. She bore a box full of cookies and a pink backpack which seemed too big for such a small child.

“Hello Mr” said the child, “will you buy sunshine cookies? It’s for our school trip” she stumbled on her words, her face became bright red and a giggling smile escaped her lips.
Mr. Average looked at the child ready to spill some of his bile over the child but instead he hiccuped and coughed. Then he looked again at her red cheeks and her smiling face.

“I guess I will” he told the child and fetched his wallet. Inside he took out a few bills which he handed the child “This should do it?” he told the girl who happily handed him two boxes of cookies from the bigger box she was carrying.
“Thank you Mr. Average” the child said in a bright voice. “You should eat them all right away, they will make you feel like dancing”. Then she spun around and ran into the street with the pigtails following after her like two faithful puppies.

Mr. Average didn’t notice the breath of fresh air swirling around his house. He sat down in his chair and started to munch on the cookies. Noticing only after several mouthfuls that the face of Mrs. Average was fading slowly before him, it’s color changed slowly from green to white and her demeanor changed. She stopped lulling with her tongue and started to brush the dust of her dress.
“Well Mr. Average” he heard her say, “I guess it’s time for me to be gone” she said. “Will you be alright without me?”

Mr. Average looked at her with sorrowful eyes, a big blue tear escaped and fell down onto the carpet. The tear tainted the carpets color, the infection spread out painting the gray blue. He didn’t notice but saw only his wife who almost looked the way she had once upon a time oh so long ago.
“I don’t know” he said faithfully and truthfully.

Former Miss Amazing walked over to her living husband and touched his cheek with her silky white hands.  “You will be fine” she said and smiled. The smile cleared the air and painted the walls white.
“You will be fine” she said again and then she turned around and walked out of the house, leaving him all alone with the breath of fresh air which cleared the remaining grayness away and swept some color back into Mr. Average’s life.

Nobel Prize in Literature 2009 goes to:

Herta Müller

Photo: #WordlessWednesday

#WordlessWednesday

Speculations on the Nobel Prize in Literature 2009

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2009 will be announced next Thursday according to the official site. So now the speculations start. Who will get it this year?

The new permanent secretary, Peter Englund, will announce the prize for the first time. It will be interesting to see if the prize takes a different direction with a new secretary or if it will (as I suspect it will) stay the same, unchanged.

I have a few favorites, who have been favorites for some time now. Last year Doris Lessing got crossed off that list of mine but I’d like to speak of a few of the others.

The author that is first on my list of candidates comes as a surprise to no one who knows me. It is the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami whose work I’ve admired for years now. His originality, magical-realism sometimes bordering on surrealism is astounding to me and I truly think there is no better novelist alive today. This is of course a bold statement if we think about all the great authors out there.

Ladbrokes has in the past year had a fairly good prediction rate on the Nobel Prize in Literature, this is their list this year. Amos Oz is predictably on top of their list, tightly followed by Djebar and Oates.

What I do think they should do is give the prize to the poet Bob Dylan this year though. He’s been on the list as an outsider for several years now, speculations either claim he is an extremely unlikely candidate or the perfect poet. I think it would path a way in a new direction for the prize. It would renew it in a way that is much needed because excluding a poet like Bob Dylan in favor of some obscure poet we’ve never heard of limits the prize’s possibilities.

I do appreciate the value of being introduced to great new authors, authors that would otherwise have passed me by completely. I appreciate that authors like the Icelandic novelist, Halldór Laxness would have gone unnoticed by the rest of the world had it not been for the Nobel Prize and I do think that it’s an interesting and a very important aspect of the prize. And there are so many authors, so many poets, so many play writers that could and maybe should get the prize but never do because of a simple thing as time limit.

Bob Dylan however, should not be seen as an underdog amongst fellow poets simply because we all already know who he is, have listened to his songs and appreciated his lyrics. He should get the prize, not because of these things, but to mark that song lyrics can be just as poetic as words written on a piece of paper or read out loud monotonously.

Other names I favor on the ladbroke list are Salmon Rushdie, Cormac McCarthy, Paul Auster, Ko Un, Milan Kundera and perhaps Mario Vargas Llosa.

I’ve never been good at predicting who will get it. I will be watching with interest to see who gets it, as I have done in the past years. I can admit that my heart thumbs for some reason when I see the doors to the chambers open and the permanent secretary enter the room to announce the prize. It’s always interesting to get to know new authors, it’s always satisfying when an author you have appreciated gets the prize.

Is there too much prestege and snobbery around the prize? Sure there is and I’m glad there are other prizes out there focusing on genre’s this prize has ignored completely but that’s a topic for a completely new entry.

Everyman is Everywoman – Thoughts on Gender and Writing

We’re all aware that the literary canon is filled with great books written by men. There are women amongst the great writers, obviously, but books written by women have been underestimated, ignored and hidden throughout the ages. In the past attempts have been made to recover lost authors and to study the  great female authors who got lost in history. The study of women’s literature has become an accepted aspect of many universities as we become more and more aware of the gender aspect of things.

Today women writer’s flourish in many genres and we even have a special “chic-lit” section in the bookstores. This is surely due to the fact that women buy more books than men these days. We have no dude-lit yet and I’m pretty sure the arrival of such a genre would raise an eyebrow or two (to say the least). The necessity of shining a light on female writer’s and literature written by women is unfortunately not something that can be left behind as an obsolete thing of the past.

When I read this article I got an imagine in my head of all the teachers in my literary classes who shone a light on different women, writer’s who history had tried its best to forget. In this case of the article though we’re not talking about women who aren’t read, we’re talking about making an anthology with known authors. And the one they chose just all happened to be male, by accident.

Surely such things happen?

Well, not to women. You have different anthologies with women but in that case the point of the anthology is usually just that, to make an anthology about women or with a female perspective. It is the starting point. Never would you see an anthology of any kind just happen to have interviews (or stories for that matter) with women/written by women only … by accident. It just wouldn’t happen…

…  so why is it that you can “forget” to include women in a horror anthology but the thought of it being other way around is simply absurd?

I don’t have a definitive answer to that but theories.

When women write fiction we’re so hung upon the “female experience” but a man’s writing is always more “neutral”. Somehow we believe that a woman writes from her sex while the man’s word as more “commonly human” and not strictly male.

Imagine Everyman a woman…

…now imagine that piece of literature not being only about the “female experience” but a “common human experience”.

…does the picture compute?

Of course the “common human experience” idea is hard in the first place. We’re all different, live in different cultures and have different experiences, with different sexual orientation and opportunities. So it is a warped concept to begin with. Still we try and often it’s enough that this “common human experience” relates to us in the culture that’s actually liable to read the book in question. But while an “everyman” can relate to everyone the “everywoman” is strictly about the feminine experience.

Does the female gender get in the way of the “human experience” or are women more inclined to identify with men than men are to identify with women? Is the male gender (certainly doesn’t apply to the genitalia!) less “in the way” than the female one?

There can be various reasons that the people making the particular anthology in question in the article that triggered this babble of mine “forgot” the women but I fear that when picking out authors (whether it’s for reading at home or other things) we often see women writer’s and automatically think of something strictly feminine (which is not something we’re looking for necessarily when we’re thinking horror) and therefore pass them by.

Do we need a Pepsi Challenge on the subject? We all know that there are excellent women horror writers and we also know in our hearts that their works are not just about “female experience” (not that I’m hacking on books that focus on that subject, they’re often an excellent read as well).

The secret is that women do not write from their gender. Surely we are different from men and have different views on things but this is really not a gender issue, it’s a human issue. Women are just as capable of being an ordinary, normal “everywoman” without the work necessarily having to be about shopping, menstrual blood or childbirth.

If you ask me the apology shouldn’t lie in making an all female horror author anthology (although I would so buy THAT book!), an apology should lie in thinking REALLY hard about WHY they “forgot” or why this “accident” happened and make sure it doesn’t happen again, not unless it’s on purpose – obviously.

Nobody Told Me and Other Stories

We’ve all heard the different stories about pregnancies. We’ve all heard the scary stories about the birth. We’ve heard the stories about the strange cravings and the mood swings. We’ve also heard that you never really understand this thing called “pregnancy”, “childbirth” and “upbringing” until you experience it first hand.

I’m a true believer in empathy and that people can actually understand things without having gone through the ordeal themselves. I always frown when I hear the phrase “Nobody understands me…” and I will continue to do so.

The things I’ve been experiencing however are fascinating and many can easily be filed under “nobody told me”. So let me share some of the things that have been baffling me lately.

Let’s start with the milk. I hate milk. I’ve always hated milk. I hated milk as a child and I still do … or well I did before I became pregnant. Now I suddenly like milk, I say like because using the word love in the same sentence as milk just seems wrong, somehow. It’s not really a case of “nobody told me” but somehow I never expected to take a 180° turn. I do expect this flaw to be corrected after the pregnancy – I like not liking milk. It’s a personality thing!

Let’s move on to the dreams.
Boy, have I been dreaming. Last night I was working as a recycling girl at Shell (Yes the gasoline company) and I had a company car but I had been neglecting the work for a long time and I worried I was going to get in trouble. The world around me was very different from … well reality. It was almost pre-apocalyptic.

These dreams are vivid. Sometimes exhausting. Sometimes (although that’s rarer) they make me smile. And I remember them really well. They stay with me for a long time. They feel like that dream you have once in a blue moon (or I do at least) and you remember for the rest of your life. They ALL feel like that, which is fascinating but at the same time quite tiresome as many of them are just anxiety dreams. Some of them are pleasant though. I’ve dreamt about the girl I’m carrying, nice, pleasant  dreams.

Most of the things that fall under the category “Nobody told me” though have to do with bodily functions. The white-goo, the involuntary urine spurts and the sensitive nose come to mind. The nose thing is quite annoying sometimes. I have a sensitive nose to begin with. I’m sensitive to smell, I easily get headaches from strong perfumes and I hate the smell of food when I’m full.

And now… let’s just say that I hope dogs have a stronger head than I do. The smells are exhausting. Smelling people around you in line at the supermarket, the overbearing hospitalish smell at the library and the smells that comes in from outside when I keep the window open. Ugh. I’ve read that it has to do with the mucous membranes in the nose. I’ve also suffered nosebleeds, although not severe at all and not many so no complaints there.

Then there’s the crying. Now we’ve all heard of crying pregnant women. You see them in the movies with the tissue boxes, crying over everything. It’s so bloody obvious but I never suspected that there are sometimes actually no emotions behind the tears at all. The tears just flow… without an ounce of sadness or any other crying-related emotion.

The tears just flow and people tip-toe around you thinking ‘oh boy what did I do now?’ I assure them that it’s all me and no problem, don’t worry but let me tell you that when I was in the car accident a few weeks back, my mantra suddenly became “don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry”.

I didn’t cry and I am immensely proud of that fact.

Then there’s the fear. That’s another obvious thing that’s hard to prepare for even though you sort of know it’s a part of this journey. It seems to creep up into every aspect of this part of my life at the moment. I fear that things aren’t going to be alright. I fear that my blood pressure is too high (it was elevated the last time) and I worry about my blood sugar levels. I worry about the little life (and I know that worry will follow me for the rest of my life with any luck!) and I worry that I’m eating wrong and that … well you know. I worry. About everything. Thankfully I have good people to calm me down and to tell the truth I’m excellent at calming myself down. It’s not haphazard, intense worrying but worrying none the less.

Nobody told me either about the wonderful feeling of an alien inside. And I use the word alien in the most loving, most wonderful way I can (can’t you hear it in my voice?;)) about our little girl.

Some things are hard to explain to others. Some things you don’t hear until the topic at hand becomes interesting to you. I turn a brave face to the horror stories, until they haunt my dreams … there I run. I like the strange stories, those I listen to intensely so if you have any then share them with me.

I have the later half to go so I’m sure my list of “nobody told me” will continue to grow. And let me tell you how great and comforting it is to know that there are so many people out there who know EXACTLY how I feel!

Oh and one last thing: I never saw Nymph(o)s as pregnant, big bellied forest deities before.

The Vacation and First Trimester

Since the 14th of June I woke up each morning thinking the strange thought:

“I am pregnant”

It was a realization each morning. A thought so foreign that I felt at times that it belonged to someone else. It was a dreamlike state spent in wonder and abstract existence, not to mention the fear that slowly crept up as I realized how fragile this little life was (and is). The initial weeks I felt like there was a stone in my stomach, I thought chocolate was the most disgusting thing on the planet and sometimes I even felt slightly nauseous. Only once did I feel a real onset of nausea though. I lost my appetite but regained it after a couple of weeks.

Summer vacation was just around the corner then and we decided to go on a short and sweet car vacation. We packed the car full of tent, clothes, quilts and other camping necessities and drove off over the bridge to Denmark and towards Germany. I felt optimistic and excited as I drove on to the boat to Puttgarden. That night we camped south of Hanoover in the rain, we cooked pasta and I found a four leaf clover (the second for the summer). We slept on an air madras that felt more comfortable than my bed and woke up feeling rested and rejuvenated. We were off before 8 o’clock the next morning. I love driving and on these vacations of ours I do all the driving. We were south of Dole in France the next day. We camped in a lovely camping by a nice river where small pony’s ran. On the third day we arrived at our destination, Frontignan Plage. We have a favorite camping there and were lucky enough to get a spot we’d been on before and liked.

The next 8-10 days we spent on the beach, staring at the night sky, eating baguettes, chocolate filled bread, ice-cream and I drank some cherry Coke and lots and lots of water. It was strange to spend the dark evenings sitting in our comfortable chairs by the tent without getting to drink a glass of red wine. I don’t know if it’s because of the wine I’ve always find the evenings in that place warm before but it sure wasn’t warm now. Thankfully I had a lot of quilts and clothes to wrap around myself so there was no discomfort. I spent a lot of time studying the people around us, mostly they were French (usually the camp is over flooded with Germans) and people from Belgium. Studying people is what makes camping such a nice experience. It’s just the cold that gets to me. People will not convince me to go camping in cold climate!

We drove around the area, which we know pretty well by now, but I didn’t feel up to walking long distances and I surely didn’t want to spend too long away from a WC or a place to rest, so we never ventured far. We’ve been there 3-4 times before so we know the area pretty well and it felt nice to just laze around Frotignan, take small walks on the beach and enjoy the nice weather and the calm.

When we decided to drive home we started early and had good luck with the traffic so we camped near Kassel. We drove till 9 in the evening, the last hour in rain and thunder. Camping wasn’t fun and I put on most of my clothes just to be sure to be warm and comfortable during the night. We found a nice camping away from the autobahn and I loved driving there through the small, strange German villages. We’ve stayed in campings near the autobahn on our previous trips, they never seize to amaze me. The small caravans are left there all year round, guarded by dozens of small gnomes and frog statues. And the people who spend their vacations there seem to think that the nearer to the Autobahn the better. I remember one where autobahn was on one side and a giant nuclear plant on the other. It was a camping village and we felt like aliens staying there as the “inhabitants” stared at us like we were the strangest people ever to arrive. We where like Mulder & Scully trying to figure out the X-file.

The morning in the camping near Kassel was cold. I woke up at around 7 (as I had been doing throughout the vacation) and walked around the camping. It was smaller than these campings usually are and very quiet. Apart from a few caravans who had, like us, decided to stay there for the night only one man and his motorcycle shared the camping with us. It had been a soft, quiet vacation, just the way we wanted it.

We arrived home the next evening. It’s never as much fun driving through Denmark on the way home as it is on the way down but it felt comfortable and good to drive over the Öresundsbro and be back home with a real toilet and the comfort of having a roof over your head.

It was a coincidence that we decided to go home when we did. It was also a coincidence that we were lucky with the traffic and managed to drive from Frotignan in two days. When we got home we found a note saying that I had a time for ultrasound the next day (I had been promised it would be delayed until we were definitely home). So the next day we went to take a look at the little passenger.

We got to see the little head and the little life. And I found out that it was week 12 then.
The first trimester already over.

And still this thought filled my mind as I woke up in the morning, this new, strange thought, which always seemed to come as a surprise: “I’m pregnant”.

(P.S. We were very careful to know the nearest emergency room/hospital at all time for those who worry:))