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The tooth fairy is dead. Long live the tooth fairy.

December 7, 2018 by EmmaP 1 Comment

It’s the end of an era. The tooth fairy is no more. The family myth was foiled yesterday morning by the youngest in the family. An upper tooth had fallen out at school and even though it was lost on the way home, she went ahead and left a book under her pillow (a habit our kids have/had was to leave the tooth inside a book). The only problem was, she didn’t tell us she did it because she wanted to send a signal directly to the tooth fairy. When that magical creature did not show up next morning, the game was up.

My daughter’s distress as the myth crumbled during my pre-breakfast dismal admission of subterfuge caught me by surprise – “so that tooth that fell down the armchair… you really did find it 4 years later didn’t you?”. And her distress made me remember just how young she is. When you’re only nine, why wouldn’t you want to hang on to that kind of belief for a little longer? Indeed how could you, at that age, even get your head around a concept like suspending belief, of not going along with everything your parents tell you about something unseen?

Charlie and Lola discuss the Tooth Fairy

When the real story was revealed to her, it was like a switch – and quite a painful one – from one of those pillars of childhood to an unfamiliar adult one. With no going back.

Many parents choose not to “deceive” their children with modern myths, like this tiny winged creature who takes charge of every baby tooth across the world. (Just do the calculations.)

Watching her be so upset, I wondered if we had done her a disservice. When her father and I chose to take the path of mythical beings – familiar to both of us from our own childhoods – we realised it was all or nothing. And that sometime it would end. When I was a child I remember the truth dawning on me slowly, from hints and comments of friends and older siblings, but it didn’t upset me. And I thought it was worth it.

My husband and I have chosen a mobile, rootless, family life for ourselves. We have adapted and made up some of our own traditions as we’ve moved our children from Canada to Norway to Italy to Ireland. We probably thought that Santa, the Tooth Fairy and just a hint of the Easter bunny would bring some stability from our own family backgrounds. And they have indeed proven to be a constant in our lives as we have moved language, friends, schools and houses.

What has been amazing to watch is how our two intelligent children have managed to go along with their parents’ official version of all these myths, for years, all the time ignoring what their friends around them in whatever country believed.

In Norway, for example, where we lived for most of their early childhood, everyone around us would expect Santa Claus to knock on their door and say “hallo” before handing over the presents – on the evening of December 24th, a full 12 hours earlier than us. But there was never any question in our house that Santa would graciously come, unseen, down the chimney (though we didn’t have one) during the night while we slept. And he certainly wouldn’t have looked like our neighbour in a red suit. What a notion!

Unlike the routines of Christmas, teeth can get lost at any time of the year. Anywhere. And so the tooth fairy has been our constant companion, moving and travelling the world with us.

We came up with a way to ensure the tooth fairy could always find us by explaining that a red light would show outside the window of any child that had lost a tooth that day. A red light that’s invisible to human eyes, of course. 

This fairy has been especially good at currency conversion depending on where the local pickup/drop-off needed to happen. The conversion isn’t totally accurate, but we wouldn’t expect her to carry change. 2 euro does not really equal 2 dollars (Canadian) nor indeed 2 British pounds nor 20 kroner (Norwegian or Danish). But this worked out to be a handy on-going maths and retail exercise for the kids, who always expecting the amount to be rounded up.

The most global adventure we dragged the fairy on was when our elder girl lost a tooth while we were visiting friends in Oxford during one big summer trip. She wanted to hold on to the tooth for longer so it came with us to Dublin – our next stop – and for some reason she wanted to get it all the way to her other grandparents’ house in Canada before finally agreeing to put it under her pillow and to trigger the red light there. She was thrilled to wake up to a two-dollar coin (a Toonie) the next morning and now she always associates that coin with that day.

Our younger, more rational, child (who I had thought was the one more likely to smell a rat) asked questions like: How does she carry all that money? Why only money and not also a present? Why doesn’t she come to grownups? The older sister would tell her that the fairy takes away all the teeth and builds up a great big store of them – but we’ve never figured out why.

A few times during our couple of years living in Italy, it came up that Italian children sometimes expect a tooth mouse, not a fairy, to come and collect their dental indiscretions. But we never heard much talk of it, and it doesn’t seem to have the same superstitious punch as the northern European tooth fairy.

So now, the tooth fairy has made an abrupt departure from our life but our girl has been assured that 4 euro (yes it’s gone up) will still be paid out for each tooth. She has yet to face up to dealing with the Santa issue, but she’s smart – it is only 3 weeks to Christmas and I can see why she’d let that conversation slide.

An old parental-guidance letter is doing the rounds again on social media this Christmas season, which begins with the words “Dear Daniel, you asked a really good question. Are mummy and daddy really Santa?… The answer is no, we are not Santa.” The letter goes on to explain that Santa is the spirit of Christmas, the magic and love and spirit of giving that is kept alive through parents. He lives in our hearts, not at the North Pole, and is there to teach young children how to believe in something they can’t see or touch.

Shall we go along with that advice, and stay close together as a family as we let the hard beliefs of childhood fall behind us and move on? I think we will.

A cartoon Tooth Fairy man in a tutu.

Filed Under: Family, Kids, Norway, Travel Tagged With: Living abroad, Tooth Fairy

One cup of family baking

November 22, 2018 by EmmaP Leave a Comment

It’s a slow family Saturday morning in Dublin. Our eldest daughter has offered to make one of our favourite breakfasts, waffles. Norwegian waffles.

We have a standard recipe (with its secret ingredient*) but I’ve never written it into my recipe book. Instead it’s bookmarked on the iPad at Norwegian food site Matprat.no. I could of course find one in English but this is more fun and reminds us of our old home in Oslo where we lived for 7 years. Our daughter traces down the list of ingredients and measurements with her finger.

And the questions start.

  • What does ss mean again? (it’s a sugar spoon/dessert spoon)
  • What’s 4dl? Is that the same as millilitres? (It’s 400 ml, use the measuring jug)
  • Should the flour be plain or self-raising? (plain)
  • Can you take over? (sigh)

I’ve lived in a lot of places over the last 20 years (the US, Canada, Norway, Italy, now Ireland) and in each one I’ve been preparing food for myself, the husband and eventually for our kids to eat. Not only does each country have its own cuisine, but also different cooking techniques, tools and measurements.

I am neither a serious foodie nor brilliant at numbers so I feel I’ve done quite well to adjust to all the different methods. I’m a decimal kind of girl. Grams, kilos and litres suit me fine, and the best cookbooks include them as well as pounds and ounces. I would have grown up with both. Moving to the US was my first wake-up call. The American use of cups and spoons for measuring is ingenious and it meant that for a few years I got by without buying a decent weighing scale. But when I’m on this side of the Atlantic and baking from my US days, I still get stuck when I see a recipe call for “2 sticks of butter” as that’s how they package (what they call) butter over there.

Liquid measurements are all over the place. There’s the British (and Canadian) 20oz and American liquid pint (16oz) and little-used dry pint (um, 1/8 of a dry gallon). This makes a difference when you’re working through a recipe like festive rum and liqueur eggnog from your Joy of Cooking, my first cookbook. I’ll just take a litre, or liter, thanks.

My husband is, thankfully, brilliant at numbers (and we’re training up our younger daughter for this level of mental maths) and he’s used to my panicked shouting over the years from the various kitchens we’ve had, for on-the-spot conversions. “How many grams will 6ozs be?” or “If I double the sugar is that 7/8s of a cup?” I have of course been able to Google conversions for the last 10 years but it’s just not the same.

Our usual moving box marked “Kitchen” carries most of the basic tools for international baking: my two basic weighing scales, (the nice digital one is only for good occasions), my trusty nested cup measurements (bought one rushed New York lunchtime away from the office) as well as the plain plastic baking bowls I somehow picked up at the convenience store next to our hotel in Hawaii. I’ve managed to keep the same brownie pan, long hand whisk and the little stone that keeps brown sugar moist in the jar. Electrical aids like blenders have come and gone as we moved from one country’s electrical system to another.

I’ve managed to master all types of cooker (gas, electric, induction or just temperamental), though I still struggle to remember that boiling an egg in sea-level Dublin takes less time than at my in-laws’ house 1km above sea level in Calgary. Or is it more time?

Now that I’m back in Ireland I love to hang around the baking aisles and enjoy the long-missed offerings like caster sugar, golden syrup, several types of brown sugar, self-raising flour, proper oats and other heavy things I couldn’t smuggle back abroad with Ryanair. And let’s not forget the butter! Nothing nowhere compares to the golden taste of Irish butter – the only foodstuff I’ll admit to bringing back to Italy.

There’s also that staple – bicarbonate of soda, poetically called bread soda in Ireland. When I first moved to Norway I needed to find some to make a batch of my (Darina Allen) scones. I was finally enlightened by a woman dressed in 19th century peasant costume. She was doing a live demonstration in a smoke-filled hut at Oslo’s National Folk Park, baking lefse (a delicious potato-based pancake) and she explained that the stuff I really need was hjørnsalt, a traditional Norwegian raising agent which originally was the powder from a deer’s horn. I tried it out but then had to find something resembling like buttermilk to go with it – any Irish baker abroad will sympathise with that ongoing quest.

From country to country my favourite cookbooks have come with me, as well as the orange-coloured notebook I bought at the Bay in Toronto just after my eldest was born. In it I’ve been slowly recording the recipes that work best for us as a family, copied in by hand from books, websites, friends, aunts. And even more useful are the back pages where I’ve written down the party food menu for the kids’ birthdays in three countries: what a gift it’s been to see the names of the friends who came, kids and their parents. Memories we’ll keep for the next chapters – and recipes – in our lives.

———

*And The secret waffle ingredient? A good pinch of ground kardemomme, or cardamom.

 

This story was published in the Irish Times on 20th November.  

Filed Under: Dublin, Family, Food, Ireland, Kids, Moving to Ireland, Norway, Travel Tagged With: Baking, Family, Waffles

Watching the Eurovision back in Ireland

May 14, 2018 by EmmaP Leave a Comment

The week of May 7th saw the lead up to this year’s Eurovision song contest – and Ireland’s strong entry (for once). It suddenly hit me that it would be quite exciting for me and my family of foreigners to watch it here, having followed it before from Italy and Norway – and with my Canadian husband now a big fan. I wrote this piece for publication in the Irish Times the day before the competition final.

After many years abroad, it’s my first year back home in Dublin and Ireland has made it to the final of the Eurovision song contest. Finally! On Saturday I’ll settle down to watch it together with my family of foreigners. We’ve never really followed the X-Factor or TV dance-shows, but every May we more than make up for it, wherever in the world we happen to be living.

This year we’ll have the huge luxury of turning on the telly in the corner and being able to flick back and forth between RTE and BBC. We won’t have to magically conjure up Graham Norton through the laptop, playing his brilliant commentary over the poor-quality picture of our local Norwegian or Italian TV, putting up with a two-second delay.

I loved to watch it as a child, and now it’s even more fun with my own kids, though no-one enjoys it more than my husband: he grew up in Canada and once he finally caught on to it, he’s been boring his nonplussed friends back home with explanations of its appeal.

Read the full story on the Irish Times online.

San Marino’s entry needed robot backing singers – that’s how small the country is

Filed Under: Dublin, Family, Moving to Ireland, Norway Tagged With: Eurovision

Two girls in a tree

November 9, 2017 by EmmaP 4 Comments

Two old friends climb a tree in an Oslo wood. They’re only 8 years old but these girls are fierce; in their minds anything is possible.

They haven’t seen each since two years ago, when we moved away from Norway to Italy. My girl has moulded herself into a new life and a new language. She has mostly forgotten how to speak Norwegian but she remembers her life here and her best friend from the nature kindergarten that got them out in the woods (and up trees) several times a week, all year round.

They have often talked about each other during the two years, which is a long time at this age: “Mummy when are we going back to Oslo and when can I see her and overnight and watch films on their big screen in the basement?”

And on this visit, (only our second since we left), they’ll see each other. The two mums have made a plan to spend a few hours out in the woods around Oslo, a huge element of Norwegian life that our whole family has missed.

It’s October and the sky is clear but also crisp, so we remember to bring hats and scarves but we don’t need boots. There are big grins and hugs as they see each other in person – a little taller, two years of school behind them but otherwise they’re no different.

We drive a short distance. The car doors open and like a pair of retrievers they jump out and bound off into the woods, just as they were trained to do. Within two minutes, when the rest of us get out, we’ve lost them.

We find them again, yapping away in some language between Norwegian and English. They’ve found part of a swinging rope dangling off a tree at the lake edge. My Norwegian-mother-mode kicks in, overriding my Irish-mother-mode (and well past the nervous Italian-mode that never really took hold) and I stop myself from telling them to “be careful!… forskitig!” They’ve done this more than I have, they’ll know what to do.

Moving countries and travelling with children, I’ve seen many times how children can settle quickly into a mode of play even when they can’t speak to each other.

This Norwegian friend has been learning some English – from travelling with her parents and from school – and it’s fun for her to have a friend she can speak it with.

And my girl? Who lived here from birth until six, who spoke Norwegian every day and yet is today puzzled when I use regular family words like barnehage (kindergarten) or even pølse (hotdog)?

I know her Norwegian is lodged deep inside that powerful little brain – the powers of communication, the memories and associations and feelings that come with speaking certain words, phrasing things in a particular way. When she does say something she remembers – like the phrasebook-like question she pulled out of thin air to impress the passport officer at the airport yesterday, hvem spiser brød? (who eats bread?) – even then, she says it with that perfect pronunciation I never managed after seven years living in this country.

Here up in the tree, she responds to her friend with any scraps of Norwegian that come out – some fundamental phrases like se her (look here) or nei, ikke sånn (no, not like that). But she’s also using English words, and she’s actually doing something I’ve never seen before, something remarkable. She’s speaking English to her really slowly and carefully, like an older person might use with a little child who they think understands no English. “Can… we… go… over… there…and… try… that?” and “This…bit…here…look”.

Where did she get this from? I don’t think she’s ever seen me speak like that to someone on our travels. Did her teachers in Italy speak to her like that after we had just moved there, in a way to help her clearly hear the words? I think not, as they were fast talkers.

By slowing down her English speech, it’s as if a part of her subconscious has kicked in to rationalise and slow down her words, to watch carefully her friend’s face and make sure her point gets across, when the Norwegian words have failed her.

The swing no longer provides amusement – they can’t agree on who does what – and we move on to a treehouse a local kindergarten has made in another part of the forest. Within another hour it’s starting to get darker and colder and we have to say goodbye. But just that small amount of time, and inventive communication, has been sufficient to add a little more glue to this long-distance friendship. That’s good enough for now.

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: Kids, Language, Nature, Norway, Translation Tagged With: Language, Norwegian, Oslo

Pure lykke

September 20, 2017 by EmmaP Leave a Comment

It was a moment of joy – lykke – when I found this old tin of Norwegian skincream in yet another half-opened box from our shipment of stuff in our new house in Dublin. This is the second time we’ve moved country with kids and of course, all our worldly possessions were put into boxes (or last-minute suitcases).

Much of our belongings were shed, some of them was lost along the way (our towels?) and a fair amount is still unsorted rubbish. But when I saw my youngest’s skin starting to react to the damp Irish climate, I really hoped that I had saved this magical lavender-scented cream we used in Norway, the only one of many that actually worked and which was never used during our 2 years in the mild air of Tuscany. “Is that the nice-smelling stuff you’d put on me before I went out to kindergarten?”

It’s so Norwegian, I love it. I read somewhere that the recipe came from some nuns on a remote island in the north, and just the name is such a joy – Lykkelig som liten, Happy as a youngster.

Filed Under: Kids, Norway, Travel

The day the bomb closed the bus stop

July 21, 2017 by EmmaP 3 Comments

I was looking through photos from 6 years ago and one from made me stop to catch my breath.

It was taken 6 years ago today, on July 22 2011, on the day of the Oslo attacks. We had been living in Oslo for 3 years and that week happened to be in Dublin visiting my parents. Wherever we’ve lived I’ve still called Dublin home, but then, Oslo was the only home our two girls really knew. That afternoon we were having a rare wander around town, taking goofy photos, climbing on sculptures and at Temple Bar we stopped at a fancy sweet shop. The friendly owner was curious to hear we lived in Oslo, telling us how much he liked the Norwegian tourists, who were always so friendly. I took this photo of our younger daughter up against the silly wall chart. This particular look on her face is the look of a toddler, her look, that doesn’t really show anymore, but the seriousness in her face chills me – this blurry moment in time has become very precious when I remember what happened next.

As we stood outside eating our jelly beans, time briefly stopped when I read the first of many texts on my phone. From my mum “some kind of explosion in Oslo”, and from an Oslo friend “are you okay? we just heard about what’s going on in central Oslo”. This was our first inkling of the horrendous attacks that were just getting started, one lone man who planted a car bomb in the city centre (killing eight) in an effort to distract the security forces while he drove to the island of Utøya where he went on a shooting spree at a political party summer camp where he killed 69. Those are the facts which I’ll quickly remind you of, which still make my stomach turn. The tragedy is usually defined as the worst attack in Norway since World War II but that’s a huge understatement – to me it was one of the most horrible events I could ever have expected to live through.

But all this was still unfolding far from us while we continued our family afternoon out – I didn’t have a roaming plan so I stayed off the news sites and Twitter, and I didn’t think it sounded too serious. Maybe it was an accident or the act of some crazy angry anarchist. We quickly heard back from a neighbour that there was no damage to our street, our building, any shattered windows or general chaos. We had no idea that something much more horrible was already underway.

We had the luxury of distraction and were busy with seeing family and travelling later that weekend. That evening we didn’t want to watch much news – there were reports of the awful attacks on the island and no-one (least of all the police) had any clue as to who was responsible, or what was happening, but there was plenty of speculation online about foreign-born terrorists, about Norway’s generous social system getting its comeuppance. It all still felt at one remove, not my tragedy.

I have only experienced real shock a couple of times in my life. The kind that can take your breath away, where it’s impossible to compehend how something truly awful could happen in our lifetime, while we watch. The morning after the attacks was one of those shocks.

With my cup of tea in hand I read the BBC website and I learned how bad it was – more than 60 teenagers had been shot in cold blood during the shooting spree, probably just one man was responsible and it took almost 2 hours for him to be stopped. And he was not a stranger, he was as Norwegian as they come, from one of the nicer parts of Oslo which we knew quite well. This was in the city we called home, where our two children might grow up.

My mum and I had planned to take the kids to the park that morning. While they played I took a walk and as I sat alone on a bench watching the swans in the pond and listening to the shouts of the football dads nearby, I found myself collapsing inwards with tears, from grief for those families who were still being notified, the overwhelming awfulness of something that was already in the past, that had not been stopped. In the cafe afterwards, I tried to focus on the present. My mum said to a couple at a neighbouring table “my daughter here lives in Oslo, you know, where that terrible attack happened yesterday”. “Oh yes,” they nodded, “we heard about that. Awful wasn’t it?” Yes indeed it was, but what more could they say except that the carrot cake was quite good?

The next week kept us busy, at the beach in Youghal, visiting the giraffes on Fota island, trying to enjoy a normal holiday, but every so often I’d let myself think about Oslo and feel weighed down by it all, unable to help, feeling it was beyond anyone’s grasp. I wanted to be there, with friends, in the city we loved, but it was also good to be away from what I knew would be a difficult and very personal aftermath. Though the bomb had gone off close to our apartment we rationalised that the chances were slim of our being on that street on a Friday afternoon and we realised quickly that no-one we knew was involved. We were very lucky, but still, the place we considered our home had been attacked.

We flew back to Oslo a week after it happened. Things seemed mostly normal, but on the first evening my husband and I took it in turns to go and look at the bomb site a few blocks from our place, to check out the security situation, road blocks, see how safe we might feel. During my turn I rode my bike down to the cathedral where the news had reported that a spontaneous sea of roses had been growing over the week. I didn’t really want to go and see it as it felt too painful and private to look at other people’s pain. But what a sight it was to experience this mass of colour and light, of sympathy and love and refusal to be squashed down. This strong emotion followed into the very public marches and speeches and concerts that followed: brave and strong and normal people who stood up to declare their hope. It was the most powerful possible denial of the evil that had happened among us, especially among those of us who had grown up here and had even less understanding than I did of what caused this to happen here.

We didn’t really talk to our kids about what happened that day. Our older daughter was 5 and we had to tell her something – we told her that a bad, unhappy man had left a bomb outside one of those office buildings nearby and he killed some people, but that we was locked away in prison now, and we were not in any danger. She seemed to accept that and didn’t ask more so we didn’t tell her more.

What affected her most was the fact that the bus we took most days to kindergarten – which went through the government quarter – had to be diverted by the damage, (and it still is, as they have not yet decided how to rebuild that area). She used to get excited when the bus would announce the stop at “Apotekegate” because she would giggle and call it Potato Gate. Over the first few months she would sometimes declare on the bus, “we’re going this way, and not going to Potato gate because that man did that bad thing with the bomb. Why did he do the bad thing mummy?“ I had to tell her I didn’t know, often choking back tears. I still don’t know why, but I was never able to tell her what else that same man had done that day, how many people actually died and how horribly. She still doesn’t know the whole story – and we have never talked to our younger girl about the attacks, following general advice that you should answer childrens’ big-world worries when they raise them and not before – but they will both learn it in time, as part of history, and there are enough other stories going on in the world these days to keep us anxious.

I found that many people just couldn’t bring themselves to talk about it. I find Norwegians to be very pragmatic and even detached, and with work colleagues it felt like something you just didn’t discuss: but there was also an understanding that there was nothing to be said and after the first few months, the tabloid media came in for a lot of flak for finding any reason they could to print the attacker’s name or photo – a prison complaint, some issue with his mother. The ten-week trial was complex and heartbreaking and I often had to pass by the downtown courthouse, a beautiful modern building which was scarred by a huge black security and media tent on its front. I did my best to follow it in the papers, to watch how the rule of law was trying its damndest to deal justly with a guilty man, to find reasons for his actions and teach us what could have been done better to prevent something like it happening again, anywhere in the world.

Apparently, one in four Norwegians knew someone who was injured or killed, as the victims had come from all over the country to this summer camp. The effects lingered and will never really go away. We learned that an acquaintance was actually a dentist and had led the indentification team. A year later, while on a work project I spent an hour interviewing a Sri Lankan-born executive about why she loved her job with that company and I was speechless to learn afterwards that she had lost a daughter on the island. I wondered, how could she function, continue with her working life, not think about it all the time? I would never find that out, that was never for me to know.

Norway was scarred on that day, a sudden, deep and very personal hurt – right at its heart: its children who were meant to go on to shape its future society. Unlike other modern massacres there was no real “movement” to attach to these attacks which might give it some sense of otherness and madness. It was simply senseless, an act of self-absorption by a thoroughly-detached local boy who seems to have spent too much time playing violent video games.

In his excellent 2015 essay, Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote: “That is where we should direct our attention, to the collapse within the human being which these actions represent, and which makes them possible. Killing another person requires a tremendous amount of distance, and the space that makes such distance possible has appeared in the midst of our culture. It has appeared among us, and it exists here, now.”

We left Norway two years ago: after 7 good years it was time for us to leave. We would always be foreigners there, it was just the way it worked out. And it might seem fair to say that July 22 was not, is still not, our tragedy. But it is actually, it’s all of ours. We cannot forget to reflect on how this happened, why it happened. And to watch in amazement how the country managed to move on and absorb its grief, remembering those who are not living and those they left behind.

Filed Under: Norway Tagged With: Oslo

A Blog and More

I write about language and the quirks of our family life in Dublin and previously in Italy and Norway. Read More…

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Wash my language?

Språkvask is the Norwegian word for proofing text. Literally it means “language wash”; a more poetic way of saying it!

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