LMK asked a question

LMK asked about my reasons for wanting to go to America. i have talked about it before but I will dig into it more deeply and see what emerges. It had a lot to do with my mother. She had told her friends and told me, so many times about her third pregnancy. There was nothing a woman could do to prevent or terminate a pregnancy. There were knitting needles and such but l guess there were many stories about the tragedy that often happened after attempting that course. She claimed she had a perfect family and then discovered that she was pregnant again.

My father was a captain in the Merchant Marine and usually he was gone for a year or a year and a half. When he returned home, I guess he insisted on having sex with his gorgeous wife, and as far as I know there were no birth control pills in those days. So she tried everything she could do to terminate the pregnancy. She said she rode her bicycle over rocks and through potholes in the roads. She took some kind of baths that were rumored to cause a miscarriage and tried everything to lose me. All this was understandable but why did she talk about it all the time? She would be having a cup of coffee with a friend and she would tell her for the fourteenth time. With me and my siblings in the room.

And then I was born and I turned out to be the most difficult child ever invented. When she brought me home from the hospital she could not stand hearing me cry so she pushed me out in the baby carriage to the farthest corner of the garden. This of course I do not remember, but I remember the talk about it. Everything to make me feel wanted and loved. I think I probably early said to myself, Can't wait to blow this place.

My sister who was perfect, she really was a wonderful intelligent person, but very sickly. Early on my mother decided she should go to the best School and there she did very well. When it became my time to go to some school other than what was offered in our little village, mother decided one in a different town was good enough for me. There was no bus service in that direction. I had to go on my bicycle. In Sweden the weather can be quite horrid and I remember going North on the road along the coast when the wind was so strong it could keep you from moving. Suddenly it turned out that I had some kind of heart trouble and the doctor said I could no longer go on my bike to school. And so I was able to go to the same school my sister did. This changed my life for it was more than just a reading, writing thing. School became a finishing type of thing. It built my confidence in myself and it made me realize that if I wanted to become more than what I was, I had to go elsewhere.

And so after I had graduated from that school and spent the summer doing what I wrote about in my last blog, an aunt came home from America and she offered to pay for my sister to go with her back to the states. My sister was not able to go because of her lungs and so hesitantly my aunt offered to take me. She of course had heard much about how difficult I was and so she was hesitant. I was overjoyed and when my Visa arrived in time I was gone and the rest is history. I have never regretted becoming an American. I love it here.