Bitter Bitch

by Maria Sveland

  Sometimes when I am at home visiting I get angry and snap at her to sit down so that we can talk. It is impossible to hold a sensible conversation with someone who runs off, disappears, every other minute. Then she sighs and says yes, yes and sits down with half a cup of lukewarm coffee, takes two gulps before she is up again, at the cooker, where the potatoes have started to boil over. It is a restlessness that lives inside me too, but not in the same self-sacrificing way. Instead it is a fear that I might stop and feel something.

  Isadora’s mother, an eccentric red-head, says constantly that she would have been a famous artist if she had not had children, that is to say Isadora and her sisters (Gundra, Miranda, Lalah Justine and Chloe Camille!).

  They grew up in a large, fourteen-room flat in Central Park West, with two studies on the north side, a library and real gold leaf on the ceiling. Isadora’s mother points out that it is impossible for a woman to be both an artist and a mother. You have to choose, and since Isadora was named Isadora Zelda it is clear from early on that she is expected to choose everything her mother did not.

  I guess few upbringings could have been more unlike my own. Admittedly my mother can be eccentric at times, but she is entirely devoid of artistic pretentions. Some time ago it struck me that I could not remember my mother having a hobby. Images of baking, pretzels, fish sticks, potato peeling, coffee and cigarettes being smoked next to the fan in the kitchen come to mind when I think about her.

  If anything, my problem has been my parents’ lack of expectation. It was not out of cruelty, but they have never been interested in what I wanted to be, whether it was a cleaner, an engineer, a postal worker, a doctor or a top lawyer. I cannot remember them ever asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up. It is this lack of interest which created an enormous need, for acknowledgement and a life unhindered by demands.

  When I was twenty-one I graduated with my bachelor’s degree, but I do not think they understood what it was. My God, I barely knew what it meant, just that it was an academic degree you received when you had earned enough credits at a university. A world and a language, far, far away from my own. All they understood, all I understood, was that I was taking a lot of strange courses in Stockholm.

  It was different when I got my first long-term project placement; they understood what that meant, and Mum sent fifty kronor to Johan with a handwritten note asking him to buy a bottle of sparkling wine and celebrate that ‘Sara has got her first position.’ Position was a reference she understood, a job: working.

  Unlike Isadora, I did not become preoccupied with an indefinable, mystical female fellowship until I had a child. That was when my mother breathed a sigh of relief, sighed a kind of sigh of normality. In her eyes a bachelor’s degree was nothing compared to becoming a mother.

  When Mum was twenty-six and pregnant with me, Grandma got cancer. She died when I was six months old, but it was only when I became a mother that I truly understood what it must have been like to watch your own mother dying while you were pregnant and then giving birth to your first child. How indescribably wretched it must have been to hear your chemo-poisoned mother puking in the next room while your newborn daughter is spitting up on your shoulder.

  I understood this properly when I tried to talk to her about when I was born. At the time I was pregnant with Sigge and I definitely was not looking forward to the delivery. I was hoping to hear a calming story, but the only thing she could tell me was that she did not think it hurt that much, ‘because the whole time I was thinking about how much pain Grandma was in and I knew that my pain would be over soon.’ She did not remember any other details despite my hundred and one questions: Were you scared? Was Dad there? Were the mid wives kind?

  I have never met another woman who remembers so little of her deliveries.

  One weekend when Sigge was only a few months old, Mum came to visit and we had coffee. Sigge was lying contentedly in his buggy and Mum was surprised at how calm and happy he was. She has said many times how much I cried and never slept, so much so that she finally took me to a paediatrician and asked for help. That day, when she told the story for the hundredth time, I got irritated with her.

  ‘I was probably crying because I was anxious,’ I said coldly. Mum looked at Sigge and then looked at me.

  ‘Well, I probably couldn’t bond with you because I had so much grief.’

  In that moment I was prepared to forgive everything. It is so typical; she is the one I have always taken for granted. So typical that she is the one who irritates me the most, the one who was there, always. Time for a bitter bitch warning:

  It is hard enough to become a mother in this damned society. The mother role and its heavy, rotten baggage is something no one should have to bear alone. Yet women are still sitting there, generation after generation, abandoned after giving birth. In the best-case scenario, a confused man is standing next to them who has been tricked into believing that he is taking his responsibility as a father by cutting the umbilical cord.

  I really do not think there is much difference between becoming a mother during the 1970s or in the twenty-first century. In the beginning you are just as alone with your child as most mothers have been for centuries – despite paternity leave and daycare.

  It is sad, but becoming a mother seems to be one of the most difficult undertakings when it comes to equality. It seems as though struggling against biological inequality and the even heavier weight of social and cultural inequality is just too difficult. Everything is wrapped in a longing and a love for your child which is bigger and stronger than anything else you have ever experienced. Plus, if you see the world through feminist glasses it hurts even more. It is like in the film The Matrix, when you have chosen the truth pill and you wake up out of your cocoon to a far uglier world than that of sleep. There is no turning back.

  When we wake up and see reality as it is, a lot of people blame feminism. They twist everything around and claim that the feminist vision creates demands which are too high and contradictory, demands that break overworked women down with stress. They claim that everything was so much easier when women were housewives without the demands of work and career. Motherhood and a clean home were a woman’s self-realization. Today most women work two jobs, one outside and one inside the home. Yet if we lived equally and men took just as much responsibility for the children and the home, women would not be broken down by the stress. Perhaps it is only possible to accept the difficulties if you see feminism as a resistance movement, and the only path to possible freedom. Because resistance almost always involves pain.

  To say that the feelings which overwhelmed me when I became a mother were confusing is an understatement. I do not think I have ever experienced a greater joy, a greater fear, a greater thankfulness or a larger bitterness. Everything at the same time.

  When it was Johan’s turn to stay home everything changed, slowly but surely. Suddenly Johan was the one who knew everything, from when something was missing from the fridge or that Sigge needed a new winter coat, to which story Sigge liked the best. Suddenly I was the one who came home to a tired Johan in need of relief. I came home happy and filled with stories from the outside world.

  Yet it is obvious, and has been for thousands of years, that it is the mother who should have, and often does have, the primary relationship with the children. The father’s presence is more like a bonus for which we are expected to be grateful. Most fathers proudly soak up the gratitude, secure in the know ledge that they will soon return to work, confident that the average two-month paternity leave is but an interesting guest appearance.

  Maybe it is the view of men’s paternity leave as an extraordinary feat which makes me the most bitter bitchy, since my maternity leave is taken for granted. In the park near where we live I once saw a father wearing a dark blue t-shirt with the slogan ‘On Paternity Leave’. He was walking with a baby buggy, puffed up with a self-satisfied smile just when I was the most bored with my maternity leave and hungered to go back to work. He to
ok his baby over to the swings and swung the baby dangerously high so that his son screamed with delight. On another day, at another time, I might have found him charming.

  He was one of those rare fathers who actually takes parental leave, but my generosity shone with its absence and so I stood next to him, pushing Sigge on the swing and asked where he had got the t-shirt. I do not think he noticed my bitterness, because he just replied cheerily that he’d got the t-shirt from the Social Insurance Office. It turned out that the Social Insurance Office had handed out the shirts to the fathers who attended its parenting classes as an encouragement to take out ‘their portion of parental leave’. A nice thought and a gesture that stings my bitter bitch eyes because it shows so clearly how this society views the father’s responsibility as something extraordinary. Despite persistent campaigns and t-shirts from different public authorities, it unfortunately seems rather impossible to get the fathers to feel or take the same responsibility for their children as do the mothers. Fathers in Sweden take on average twenty per cent (barely) of the parental leave. And only a small percentage of all couples share the leave equally.

  The worst thing is that we go along with it, both expect ant mothers and fathers. When I had just found out that I was pregnant with Sigge I happened to see a community programme on television. A woman in her thirties was rushing through an office area with a baby hanging on her hip. The narrator explained that IT executive Maya had been bringing her son Albert to work with her since he was born. Little Albert was crying as his mother tried to nurse him while leading a staff meeting at the same time. Then the scene changed to a demographer, a man in his sixties, who proclaimed rather seriously that there have never been fewer children born in Europe than today. This, according to the Male Demographer, was one of the worst attacks a society could be subjected to. He actually used the word attack and continued by saying that ‘women’s liberation’ wasn’t something simple, but rather something that had a string of negative effects. But unfortunately, according to the Male Demographer, you could not say this publicly without being called a reactionary.

  ‘The core of the problem is that you can’t say out loud that curbing women’s education would be a good idea too,’ he complained.

  Then the Italian Rafaella was interviewed alongside Maya and the Male Demographer. Her ambition was to become an executive before becoming a mother. Images showed her shop ping, putting on make-up, going to a job interview as well as eating at a restaurant with friends. These images were accompanied by subtitles telling us various things, like: ‘The Italian woman wants to have two children, but only gets one …’

  Nothing was said of how many children Italian men want, because it was very clear that the men had nothing to do with having children.

  And the more selfish we women have become, the more society deteriorates. The Male Demographer painted horror after horror, all the grey retirees filling the streets and not enough taxpayers to take care of them.

  The IT executive Maya, who sometimes worked from home, was filmed wiping Albert’s snot on her sleeve while she held the telephone with the other hand, trying to hold an important conversation. Little Albert was crying the entire time, and clearly seemed upset that his mother had ambitions other than that of being a mother. The whereabouts of Little Albert’s father were not interesting and never mentioned.

  The fact that women in Sweden carry out seventy per cent of the unpaid housework popped up as a subtitle, as did the fact that women in Italy do ninety per cent of the same work and that there are only enough daycare places for six per cent of all Italian children. Facts that just as easily could have been presented as the explanation, or as a part of the problem.

  The programme ended with a serious male voice proclaiming that, ‘a large group of women born during the 1970s are not going to have time to fulfil their dreams of having two children. We have to pay the price.’

  I sat there in front of the television with my mouth hanging open. I belong to that large group of egotistical women born during the 1970s, I thought to myself. Admittedly pregnant, but now I would have to pay the price because I had chosen to have children without giving up my job. Of course there would be maternity leave, a few months, but then? I do not even have a permanent job. Because I am a freelancer, what would happen when I was worn out from insomnia and could not work overtime when I needed to? And, just as men’s responsibility was so strangely absent from the television programme, I realized that Johan’s involvement was strangely absent from my thoughts. The message had hit its mark: children are women’s responsibility. Children and career are not a good combination. Yet, if you don’t choose to have children, you are selfish.

  A few months later it was time to go to the parenting course under the direction of the Maternity Clinic. The breastfeeding course was lead by a woman whose last name was Tiits and the father’s course was lead by a man named Dick. Tiits and Dick. Boobs and Willy. A complete coincidence.

  The breastfeeding specialist’s lecture was about how it was very important to breastfeed. She painted nightmarish scenarios of allergies, illness and bonding problems if you did not nurse, and made breastfeeding seem crucial for one’s future relationship to one’s child. That any alternative existed was not something Tiits mentioned.

  In reality it was so simple – you could buy formula at the shops, you did not need to get it with a prescription from the chemist as I’d thought. This was something no one told us, nor that there are actually a lot of advantages to bottle feeding – you can take turns every other night, something which allows the mother to sleep and gives the father and child a chance to bond from the beginning, and that formula is more filling than breast milk which means the baby will sleep better at night. No one, especially not Tiits, told us this.

  The Dick man began his lecture by maintaining that deep down inside, seventy per cent of all men want to have a boy, but they will only reveal this in an anonymous poll. He did not say anything about the mother’s corresponding desire, or what this could result from, instead he continued by saying that paternity leave really is not all that important. What mattered was the qualitative nearness. Dick explained that he knew several men with their own businesses who had not used a single day of their parental leave, but had still managed to be around enough during the baby’s waking hours.

  We took a break. I did not want to transform my suspicion that everything would work out badly into a fact. But it was already so clear that no matter what I chose it would be wrong.

  Now I can laugh hysterically at Willy’s lecture. What a surprise that so many couples get divorced before the child turns one. For Johan and me, it was his paternal leave which saved us. That’s when he understood what it meant to take full responsibility as a father. Men should in fact take longer parental leave than women, since women have a biological head start because they have carried and given birth to their children. Men need more time to get the innate experience.

  Yet I still must struggle bravely against the creeping feeling of complete egotism which rears its head whenever I choose something over Sigge. As soon as I want to work longer instead of picking Sigge up earlier from daycare. As soon as I want to go out and drink red wine one night instead of putting Sigge to bed. As soon as I want to go to Tenerife alone one week instead of being home with Sigge.

  If the Male Demographer only knew how many self-absorbed feelings are housed inside me, but I can always comfort myself by reading Isadora’s sensible words.

  I knew that the women who got most were the ones who demanded most out of life (and out of men) and if you acted as if you were valuable and desirable, men found you valuable and desirable. If you refused to be the doormat, nobody could tread on you.

  I knew that servile women got walked on and women who acted like queens got treated that way. But no sooner had my defiant mood passed then I would be seized with desolation and despair …

  It echoes in my head: The one who demands the most gets the most. In reality it is a disg
usting ideology which builds on genuine egotism and a complete lack of solidarity. But sometimes I think women should be more self-serving. When it comes to women, maybe egotism can damn well work as a means of correcting the imbalance. It is just too bad that my own egotism clashes so readily with my girlish upbringing, the one which has taught me to take a step back rather than a step forward.

  For example, when I’m at a party and the party’s female cohorts, my fellow sisters, are running back and forth setting out the food and the wine and the dessert and the coffee and the booze while the men calmly remain sitting at the table talking and drinking more wine, to whom should I be loyal? I want to sit there too and talk and forget about the damn dishes. I want the men to get up and do their part, so that my fun, smart female friends can also gather around the table, because it’s hard to carry on a conversation of any interest while you are running back and forth with the dishes, regardless of how intelligent you are. That is why men’s conversations around the dinner table are often more exciting than the constantly interrupted one among the women which goes on in the kitchen. And so I sit for a bit and run around a bit and feel furious, like a traitor to my gender.

  Perhaps it was this suspicion, that motherhood would devour me, make me a mother lizard without my own thoughts and time, which caused me to go to Paris when Sigge was five months old. Confused by the pain of my conversion to motherhood, I decided to go to Paris with my best friend Sanna for a week. Before me I saw uninterrupted nights of sleep, long walks, conversations and an endless amount of much needed time for myself. Paris would be the proof that motherhood had not changed me, confirmation that I was still a free woman, with my own needs.

  What I had not counted on was the enormous longing and guilt which hit me after just a few minutes on the plane. A longing that was purely physical; my heart ached and I could not focus on anything. The only thing I could think about was Sigge’s scent, his warm little body next to mine, and I wondered desperately how I would survive six days in Paris.