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Sparkle (4)
It’s been nearly a month since Anders Behring Breivik wreaked havoc in Oslo and Utoeya island. And while the rest of the world has moved on to the next headline, Norway, and those who love it, have just begun to develop a measured response. I mourn the Norway of my childhood, the birthplace my mother.
Given the recent violence, I am grappling for words to express the loss I feel not so much for myself, but for the idea of what once was. The Norway I knew was a place of laughter and ease, untroubled by the pressing issues weighing down the rest of the world. Now, tragically, it is a place where even hate can fester and cause deep and, perhaps, even irreparable damage. I lament innocence lost.
As a child, we only visited the home of my mother’s youth occasionally, but still my first memories are from Norway. Hearing the horses race on the track below the hill where my grandparents lived. Searching for blueberries on the mountainside above and then eating them until my fingers were blue and my mother’s smile was stained purple. Waiving the red, white and blue flag that lacked stars but still had its stripes at special occasions, or holidays, or just any old day. I loved it there. I still do.
My mother left Norway at the age of seventeen to study in England. She met my American father there and the rest, as they say, is history. When she came to the United States in 1961, her English was as good as a high school student’s could be. She learned to be American by watching television. Commercials and soap operas were her teachers. The news, with its daily lessons in social and political upheaval, was too disturbing for a life already chaotic with change. She did her best to assimilate and that meant, or so she believed, wearing her pearls, cooking canapes, and vacuuming in her best dress and girdle just as she saw on TV.
Soon her accent was gone and the only things tying her to her homeland were memories, a few select recipes, and her insistence we celebrate Norway’s National Day each year on May 17th. As lonely as my mother must have been, she hid her sorrow except on that one special day. Then, she would overrule our complaining, force us to dress up in our intricately embroidered Norwegian national costumes, and insist we march in the annual parade in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. I remember rivulets of tears streaming down her cheeks as she watched us wave the flag of her native country and eat the food of her youth.
As much as I complained, I loved the annual tradition. It reinforced for me the fact that my mother was different, special, not your typical American housewife and by inference, that must mean I was special too. My friends went to Des Moines and Pasadena to visit relatives; mine were halfway around the world. And while we traveled back to Norway on only a occasions as I was growing up, being Norwegian was central to my identity.
For me, Norway is not just a place my forebears came from, it is an ideal of how we might all be if only we were the best of ourselves. Despite rumors to the contrary, Norwegians are fair and reasonable and fun and loving. And they are enlightened. They implement policies that mean every citizen is cared for, their women enjoy full societal participation, and their men even take paternity leave with no consequence to their careers (!). Egalitarianism is the norm. This is the country that invented both the highest peace prize and the highest literary prize in all the world. What is not to love about a peace-loving, literate people?
In 1985, I insisted my then boyfriend, now husband, Bill, join me on a trip back to my mother’s country to see this place to which I felt so deeply connected. It would be the first of a series of family reunions scheduled every five years to honor great grandparents Willa and Jodem Hoem, whose union was the base of my extended family tree.
After dinner one night on that first visit, as we strolled the promenade along the bay, Bill said, “I love this country -- everyone looks just like you.”
And it was true. Norway of 1985 was a sea of blonds with blue eyes making my Italian-American boyfriend stand out. Beyond Oslo, so
