The bumpy road of my life.

The year is 1983 and it´s August and I begin second grade in my new school. It was a big class, 32 pupils with me! We only had one teacher, but she was so good at holding us together and staying calm, so we had good learning lessons. Every grade had 3 parallels so you can understand the school was quite big, all from a daycare center to the 9th grade.

It had a big sports center because, in that little town, football was big! And the trainers came from big football clubs around Sweden to train the teams. I joined a team like right away and became a goalkeeper. It suited me perfectly. I discovered that I was really good at sports, everything from running to trampoline gymnastics.

I held the record for 60 meters two years in a row at that school and was number two on 100 meters for several years. The coach we had when we had sports class, asked my mum if I could join the sports team at the school, but we couldn´t afford it… We couldn´t afford to buy proper shoes or clothes for that. And the travels they made to the competitions were by car, and we didn´t have a car.

That´s how I discovered our financial status and status overall towards my friends and classmates! It even got worse the older we children got, and the more we required.

At the end of October, my youngest sister came to the world. My grandmother came to us and stayed for a couple of weeks to help my mother out. Dad wasn´t around that much. Now I know why, he didn´t like babies. He thought they were a pain in the as because they cried all the time and he didn´t change a single diaper. Today it makes me wonder why my parents got all of us kids… my dad who disliked babies and my mum who couldn´t take care of us by herself… Now, afterward, I know she had had cancer for a couple of years, and even during her latest pregnancy so that’s why my grandmother came to us a lot to help during our first years in the countryside.

I didn´t like my grandmother that much as a child, she was a little bit too hard, both verbally and physically. But when I got older and moved out from home, we had a really great relationship. The point is that my grandparents never lived together, they had like a two-night stand when they met at a dancefloor in the 50s and my grandmother got pregnant… That was a big taboo, not being married and pregnant, during the 50s! What happened to my mother when she got pregnant the first time, first happened to my grandmother. My great-grandparents let her come home after some years and made up a story that her husband had died… I will not go in on how she managed to cope during that time, but she once told me it was very hard.

Now back to my childhood.

During the first years in the countryside, everything was often great. I had a lot of friends, was good at school, had lovely summers at the beach with all my friends, and had a lot of sleepovers. I felt free. We didn´t have a lot of money, but you could get a little bag of candy for just a dime! In that way, I didn´t need to feel left out. Many of my friends wanted to come and play at my home because at their homes they had a lot of expensive things and we didn´t. And my mum was always home, not theirs. They felt secure in my home in some way, felt free. To save money, my mum always made lemonade from all sorts of fruits and berries, and when my friends were at my home, she made popcorn and lemonade for us. She was never stingy!

At the end of 6th grade, when I was 13 years old, mum said we had to move again. I was devastated! I had just started to get together with a boy, who I had had feelings for for a long time, and the summer was right around the corner. The social welfare office couldn´t afford to pay for that expensive townhouse any longer, so we had two weeks to pack all our stuff and move out!

Move number four. We moved to a temporary living, a big attic in a summer cottage. With all our stuff gathered there, it was small! It was just 800 meters from the townhouse, and we could still go to the same school, puh! The rent was half the rent of the townhouse. In this house, we couldn´t have a phone because it didn´t have telephone wires connected to it. I remember the shame I felt when my classmates asked if they could call me, and I had to say “No, I don´t have a phone”. You could see the shock and wonder on their faces and that felt so embarrassing! We stayed in that attic for two months and then we had to move again. That was because the apartment in the attic was rented out to summer guests from the inland who paid a lot of money for staying by the ocean during summer.

At the beginning of July 1988, we moved to a little town 10 km from where we had lived. We moved for the 5th time. This was an old building from the 19th century, and also a summer house. A rich man had built that house once but then died. His relatives had taken over and made it to small summer apartments. It was very crowded with all our things stacked along the walls, with only a narrow path in between. But it wasn´t all darkness, we found a new truckload of friends to hang with and were down by the sea all day when the sun shone. So many happy memories from that period. I even got a boyfriend for a while, but it was very innocent.

That summer I also started to smoke. I think that´s the dumbest thing I have ever done! 13 years old and started smoking! I felt so cool and grown up, but it tasted like xxx! Mum didn´t notice before I was around 14- 15 years old. I tried to quit several times, cause I couldn´t really afford it, but it went down the drain…

During this time living there, I started 7th grade. I had to take the bus for 30 minutes to get to school. The thing is that 7th to 9th grade moved from my old school to another one because the premises went too small. A lot of people moved from the big city out to the countryside at that time, that’s why it went too small. Going by bus for 30 minutes didn´t bother me at all, I have always liked to travel, but it was hard not being able to gather with my friends after school.

We stayed in that house until the beginning of December. It had no radiators so you can imagine how raw and cold the apartment was. We had to sleep with clothes on and take short showers because the hot water heater didn´t have that big capacity. Luckily, we had sports on the schedule 2 times a week, so it was there I washed my hair. We all had quite a high resistance to being sick, and that I thank G for!

We started packing our stuff again and off we went moving back to our little town…