The bumpy road of my life

Oh my God, I'm almost 50!

I have heard that many people are scared about hitting 50-year-olds, but I'm not! It feels okay actually, I really don't know why I should be scared.

I feel that I have accomplished a lot throughout my years, I have done everything, well almost everything, I have wanted, and I don't feel like I've missed anything in my life.

OK let's start with some background about my parents…and me.

I was born in quite a big town in 1974. It was a suburb of a bigger town on the West Coast of Sweden. I was child number four in line, and we are seven siblings in total, but only five of us lived together due to difficulties.

My father was an alcoholic, a heavy smoker, and an artist. He painted very realistic oil paintings of nature and animals, the Swedish nature I mean. My mother was also an artist, and she painted faces and people. She had a more surrealistic approach in her paintings, painted with both oil and charcoal.

None of them had real jobs. My father jumped from job to job, he was also a carpenter and a painter. My mother did some cleaning from time to time at older people's houses. As I mentioned earlier, we were five sisters and brothers living together, so you can understand that my mother didn't have time to work. She had her hands full with us children! She also had plenty to handle with my father.

It was 15 years between my parents. They met when my mother was only 17 or 18 and my father was 32 or 33. My great-grandparents disliked my father because they saw a man with no job and drinking problems. My father had black hair, brown eyes, and sunburned skin because he worked mostly outside when he worked. He once told me that his great great great great great great grandparents came to Sweden, like 300 years earlier. They were Walloons and thats why he got easily sunburned. On my mother's side, they are light-haired or red-headed with quite pale skin and blue or green eyes.

My mother was the only child and very overprotected by her grandparents. She told me this and said she felt very excited about my father and his interest in her. They ran away together, and her grandparents forbid her to ever come home again because she was pregnant! This was really the only thing she mentioned about the two of them getting together.

When I was 25, I asked my grandmother about my parents, and she told me all about the difficulties they had at the beginning of their relationship with my two oldest siblings who never lived with us. I don't think I will go into that now because it's a looong sad story…

So, back to my childhood.

My first years of my childhood, I don´t have any memories of! I know that we moved for the first time, and it was to the big city on the West Coast. It is kind of sad, but I can't remember when I look at old pictures of me in a stroller or sitting on a swing etc etc. My first real memory is when I went to kindergarten as a five-year-old. I remember the smell, the furniture, and the teachers and I can even see some of the children in front of me. Strange…

We moved again to another apartment in the same city, and we stayed there for like two years. Move number two. It was a time of childhood diseases for all of us children because we lived 6 persons in a two-room apartment. Now there are vaccines for them. But it was also a happy time! With that I mean, dad lived with us almost all the time. He was almost never drunk and worked at a firm as an all-in-all from time to time. We were a big happy family with nearly no money, but we had fun. I remember it like that, but I don´t think my parents would have agreed…

We siblings had a lot of friends around us, and I started my first year in school there with a lovely teacher. When I look at the school photos of the whole class flashbacks hit me of the first love of my life, Dennis! Yes Dennis, a boy with blond hair and blue eyes and twenty centimeters taller than me. He had big lips and gave me wet slippery kisses when we all played “Spin the Bottle” at disco parties when someone in my class had a birthday. I was just eight years old, but I was always invited to birthday parties because my mum was like the best gift-finder! Everybody loved to have gifts from me! Like I said, I was just eight at the time…

Suddenly my mum was pregnant again with the youngest of my siblings and we moved again.

Move number three. We moved, during summer break, to my dad's hometown. A small city in the countryside by the ocean. All of us children loved it at first site! My parents rented a townhouse with a little garden and a terrace. Since they had no income, the social welfare office paid the rent. We children didn´t know that then but got to know that brutally a couple of years later.

We had to share a room, my one-year older sister and I, and my two little brothers also shared a room. My youngest sibling slept with my parents. This townhouse was big, I thought then! But actually, it was still too small for our big family. In this little town in the countryside, our family was a little bit exotic because we were five children and two grownups with no car! There were no families with more children than a maximum of three and everybody had 2 cars and jobs. We all had bicycles and took them wherever we went and by bus when we went into the larger town.

However, even if we all children loved that place with all our hearts, it did not get so good for mum and dad. They didn´t divorce, they were never married, but my father started to drink more frequently and was away more than home. He had a cottage by his parental home where he started to stay and paint his wonderful paintings and at the same time drink. We children didn´t think of it then, we had found a truckload of friends to be with all day long. But sometimes we heard dad argue with my mother when he came by during his drinking period, and that didn´t feel so good… He wasn´t kind to her! Today I can say that I´m very happy that we siblings had each other during our childhood…