The next morning, after dreams of gynaecological chairs and Swiss-cheese walls, I feel drained and sick as a dog. This has been happening a lot lately. I even struggled to sample all the culinary delights that Sicily had to offer (most unusual). Yet despite this, my food baby isn’t shifting, I notice as I get out of the shower and study myself in the bathroom mirror. I’ve been getting dizzy a lot. And grumpy. And sleepy. And probably a few other of the seven dwarves. I need to wee all the time, but can’t seem to summon the energy. On the plus side, my chest is currently giving Pamela Anderson a run for her money and I have, frankly, fabulous hair. I locate my phone and turn to the hypochondriac’s best friend, Dr Google, for a diagnosis, tapping ‘irritable’, ‘bloated’, ‘big boobs,’ and ‘nausea’ into a search. Before I have the chance to process this list of symptoms and apply any kind of basic logic, a slew of articles appear with titles like:
Congratulations, you’re pregnant!
First trimester symptoms
and:
Positive test? What next…
‘Oh. My. God.’
‘What?’ Lego Man is ironing in just his boxer shorts and socks next door while simultaneously eating a bowl of cereal and trying not to slop chocolate chip-infused milk onto a clean white shirt.
‘Um … nothing, I’ll be out in a sec.’
Back in the bathroom, I start opening and closing drawers, furiously pulling out handfuls of slim, rectangular boxes. We’ve been trying for years. I have seen numerous specialists who have prescribed me a myriad of hormones to be ingested and then injected daily for the past 24 months. I’ve spent a small fortune trying every alternative therapy in existence, taken hundreds of tests and pretty much kept my local chemists afloat. Fortunately I’m still well stocked.
I tear open a dozen foil-wrapped packs and wee on as many as my bladder will allow. Three minutes later I emerge, brandishing two fistfuls of pink and white plastic sticks like a reproductively victorious Edward Scissorhands.
‘I think we might have been a bit clever,’ I say, as Lego Man sponges a brown milky splatter out of his shirt at the kitchen sink.
‘Are they…?’ he starts, setting down the dishcloth, ‘are you…?’
‘Yes!’
‘And they’re definitely…?’
‘Uhuh.’
He comes closer to check off each double-lined window in turn. And then we both cry. And I make his white shirt even soggier. Lego Man and I have made a baby. With no swinging, dogging or stirrups involved.
* * *
Things I’ve learned this month:
Denmark shuts down in July
Holidays are good for you, but stay away too long and you’re dicing with divorce
…which is fine in Denmark. Everyone’s at it. And it may even make you happier
Danes do sex. A lot. And they’re refreshingly un-British about it
It’s possible to reach your mid-thirties without knowing what a glory hole is
Being pregnant can make you really cross (but you do get great hair)
8. August
The Kids are Alright
Having discovered, Jeremy Kyle-style, that I am already pretty far along in this pregnancy lark (the obvious signs having been absent, just to clarify – my biology teacher wasn’t that bad), I am suddenly catapulted into the brave new world of parenting.
Lego Man and I are delighted; relieved that it’s even been possible for us and grateful that it’s happened. But we’re also terrified. Conversations around the homestead start to go something like this:
Me: ‘We’re having a baby. I’m growing an actual living creature. Inside me. Like in the film Alien. And we’re in a country where we still can’t speak the language. And I’m going to have to push out a watermelon in approximately five months. I’m Going To Have To Push Out A Watermelon. Or have something alarming done to me with knives. KNIVES!’
Lego Man: ‘I’ll never be an astronaut now. Or James Bond…’
Me, momentarily distracted from my woes: ‘Were either of those on the cards?’
Lego Man: ‘Well, no. But it was nice to know the options were there.’
I want to be supportive, really I do. But I can’t help suspecting that it isn’t just impending fatherhood that has deprived NASA and MI6 of my husband’s services.
I notice small, pink, squirming things wherever I go, and start seeing the prams routinely left outside cafés and restaurants in Denmark in a whole new light.
‘Danes just leave their babies in the street? Unsupervised?’ Lego Man asks incredulously, having only just clocked-on to this phenomenon. ‘Can you imagine this happening back home? Or anywhere, in fact?’
I recount a tale that American Mom told me about a Danish mother who left her baby outside a restaurant in New York while she ate and was promptly arrested for child neglect and abandonment.
‘God. Right. Good to know,’ is his response. The idea of taking such a risk with your baby seems bizarre, but this isn’t how Danes view it.
‘We trust each other,’ says Helena C, who, although happy for me, is mildly miffed that her every-other-Saturday-night wine wing-woman will be out of action for a while. ‘It’s like we plan for a positive outcome – we think, “let’s leave babies outside to sleep in their prams and get fresh air, which is good for their lungs” – rather than planning for the worst and thinking, “if I turn my back for a second, my baby might get stolen”. Plus people don’t steal babies in Denmark.’ Ah, the famous Danish ‘trust-in-the-system’ again, I think. Nothing bad ever happens in Denmark…
But because Helena C et al believe that their compatriots are, on the whole, ‘good people’ who are ‘like them’ and ‘to be trusted’, they feel safe and behave as though they live in a world without danger. This makes them happy and more inclined to act in a community-minded way. And so their trust is rewarded. And so on – until it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
‘There’s nowhere else I’d rather be as a mother,’ she tells me, ‘and nowhere else I’d want my family to be raised.’ This is a grand claim. But in the land of Lego and Hans Christian Andersen, children really do seem to be at the centre of everything.
‘It’s all geared towards the family here,’ says American Mom when she’s finished high-fiving me, and I ask about her experiences of raising children in Denmark. ‘It’s the best country in the world to have kids,’ she tells me. ‘Everything’s been thought about here and it means that kids have a really fun time!’ To prove her point, she ropes me into doing the nursery run the following week to pick up her two young children and see for myself. ‘You can get some practice in,’ she tells me. ‘You also have to sign up for daycare practically as soon as you give birth anyway, so it’ll give you a chance to look around and see if you want to send your little one there,’ she points at my now swollen belly and I tug down my top self-consciously, to distract from The Bump. Already in love with my child-to-be, the idea of handing him or her over to anyone else feels strange. But Danes spend the majority of their early years being raised by someone else.
Every baby born in Denmark is guaranteed a place in daycare from when they’re six months old to when they start school, aged six. Vuggestue, or nursery, takes children up to the age of three to be looked after by pædagoger, or social educators, who will have completed a minimum three-year education programme. There’s also the option to send under-threes to a dagpleje – a child-minder or ‘daycare mum’, who may not be qualified but can look after up to five children in their own home. Packs of toddlers and their child-minders are a familiar fixture at parks and play areas nearby and they’ll either bundle into four-seater prams to be pushed home or hop on a wooden trailer to be pulled by bike. Danish mothers often become so fond of their children’s dagpleje that I hear of some women timing the conception of future babies to fit in with the availability of favoured child-minders.
From the age of three until they’re six years old, kids go to a kindergarten or børnehaven (translated as ‘ch
ildren’s garden’, like the German) where trained staff prepare them for ‘big school’.
Danes pay between 2,200 and 3,500 DKK (around £235–374 or $400–635) per month for under-twos and receive 45 hours of care a week in return. Prices vary slightly depending on which kommune you live in and whether lunch is included. There’s also the option to send them for 25 hours a week instead, which costs even less. From the age of three, the price drops further (to 1,730 DKK, around £185 or $315 for 45 hours a week where I live). This is because less one-on-one care is needed and, as American Mom tells me: ‘they shouldn’t need so many diapers or wipes by then, which saves a few kroner. At least, that’s the hope, anyway…’
Having heard horror stories from friends back home who’ve had to remortgage their house or sell vital organs to pay for childcare, the Danish rates seem surprisingly affordable. But this, I learn, is because the state picks up 75 per cent of the cost. If your annual household income is below 470,400 DKK (approximately £54,000 or $92,000), you’ll get a further deduction, and if you earn less than 151,501 DKK a year (around £17,000 or $29,000), it’s completely free. There’s also a discount for siblings, so if you have more than one child in daycare you pay full price for the most expensive option and half-price for the others. A bit like a Richard and Judy’s Book Club deal at WHSmiths.
‘I pick up my kids any time from 3–5-ish in the afternoons – they’re fairly relaxed about it,’ American Mom tells me as we walk to their combined vuggestue and børnehaven the following Monday. ‘And since most people who have proper jobs—’ here, she shoots me a pointed look, aware that I get teased for my freelancer status in Denmark, ‘—since most of us work 8am–4pm, it works pretty well.’
We round a corner and I hear the nursery before I can see it.
‘Raaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!’
A roar of white noise is coming from the smart-looking cream-coloured house up ahead. A few men emerge, pushing prams or holding sticky hands.
‘Do a lot of dads do the daycare run?’
‘Of course, this is Denmark!’
It’s 4pm. On a Monday. This would be unheard of outside of a few progressively trendy middle-class ghettos of North London.
We push open the metal gates to the nursery garden and a dozen mops of blonde hair flock to greet us, cheeks flushed, faces covered in a mixture of sunscreen, soil and sand, all grinning like mad. I look around at the Teletubbies-esque landscape in front of us, with swings, slides, sandpits and toys everywhere. Near-feral-looking children streak up and down grassy mounds, dodging smaller ones who sit in a circle under the shade of a tree with one of the few grown-ups I can see.
American Mom types a code into a wall-mounted monitor to sign her kids out before we set off in search of them.
‘These are the kitchens, where a cook comes in and makes fresh organic food daily,’ she tells me on our mini tour. ‘Then there’s also a whole room for the various kit we have to send them in with to cater for Denmark’s crazy weather.’ This, I learn, includes a rain suit, a ‘warm suit’ (usually a quilted jacket and trousers), a sun hat, rain boots, bike helmets, reflective vests, and a complete change of clothes, ‘in case of bathroom-related emergencies,’ she tells me. ‘But that’s just in summer: in winter, you need snowsuits, snow boots, hats, snoods and mittens too.’ More outdoors gear? Lego Man is going to be ecstatic.
‘And this,’ American Mom pushes open a door to reveal a shady wooden appendage to the main building, ‘is the “sleeping shed”.’
I peer inside to see rows of pistachio 1930s-style perambulators, each with a mini ladder to help the more mobile (or heavy) toddlers clamber up.
‘Wow. Retro…’ I mutter.
‘Yeah, and check this out,’ she flips hinged wooden bars over the opening of one of the prams. ‘These are the baby cages for the under-threes. So they don’t escape when they’re supposed to be sleeping.’ The whole thing looks archaic.
‘Don’t the kids mind being behind bars?’ I wonder.
American Mom shrugs: ‘It works – they nap like a dream here.’
With neither child to be found inside, we head back out to the garden and eventually locate American Mom’s little girl up a tree while her son is busy aiming a paper aeroplane at the roof of the bike shed. Shoes are the next challenge. After finding three in the sandpit and one under an apple tree, I presume we’re good to go.
‘Patience, grasshopper,’ American Mom stops me and then addresses her kids: ‘Empty!’ Both children obligingly upend their shoes and turn out their pockets as trickles of sand fall into neat pyramids all around them. ‘If we don’t do it here, I find mounds everywhere at home. There’s a good tablespoon most days,’ she tells me.
Nursery in Denmark, I decide, is probably the most fun it is possible to have without artificial stimulants involved. It’s like Lord of the Flies but with a happy ending. With the littlest one strapped into her buggy, we wheel our way to the metal gates that separate the playground paradise from the rest of the world. I ask the older child what he got up to today, expecting an answer along the lines of ‘cutting and gluing’ or ‘face painting’. What I’m not expecting is ‘tractor shopping’. I give the five-year-old a quizzical look then turn to his mother, presuming that this is a flight of fancy.
‘He went tractor shopping?’
‘Yes, I did,’ the boy goes on, oblivious. ‘A girl in my class loves tractors so the whole class walked to the shop to look around.’
‘Is he pulling my leg?’ I ask American Mom. Could five-year-olds pull legs?
‘No, that’s probably true. There’s a girl in his class who does really like tractors and it’s only two kilometres to the nearest dealership.’
I love how I now live in a place where such a thing exists. I can honestly say I’ve never given a moment’s thought to where farm vehicles come from before now. I also love that I’m in a country where such an ad hoc child-inspired trip is even possible.
‘So the whole class just went? And the parents didn’t know?’
American Mom waves a hand dismissively: ‘We signed some sort of disclaimer when the kids first started saying that teachers could take them out on excursions, so they go out and about quite a lot. It’s not like the US – you don’t need permission slips or insurance procedures or risk assessments for them to even leave the premises.’ She tells me that there are daily expeditions where children are expected to dress themselves in outdoor gear to go out exploring.
‘They came home the other day telling me they’d spent the morning looking at water in town – so everything from clouds to puddles, drains, fountains—’
‘—the porny pony?’
‘—the porny pony fountain, yes, and then the taps back at the nursery. It’s kind of cool that they got these little kids to think about where their water comes from. They’ve also taken them to the grocery store to teach them “this is how you behave in a store”. Things you’d expect to have to teach kids yourself – how to wash their hands, how to behave buying groceries, bike safety even – daycare does it for you.’
Many nurseries go above and beyond the call of duty. Several I’ve been told about in Jutland lead field trips to the home of any child whose birthday it is for an hour’s ‘cake and chaos’. A parent pops home in their lunch hour with baked goods of some kind, then the teacher arrives with the class and the kids go mad for 50 minutes before they all go back to school again. There’s no social one-upmanship about whose parents have hired the hottest kids’ entertainer or trumped their peers with the best party bag, and there’s no infringing on ‘family time’ in the evenings or at weekends. It’s just a ninja birthday squad: in and out. Staff at one kindergarten I hear of in Funen are so mindful of parents’ needs that they offer them ‘couple time’ – caring for children outside of working hours to allow mums and dads to go out on a date night.
I wonder how organised the whole machine has to be in order to make this work, but American Mom tells me that there’s not s
o much a structure to the day as a ‘rhythm’.
‘They arrive, do some gymnastics or dance, nap, have a snack, then go for an outing. The kids know what to expect next, but for the most part they’re free to play.’
This sounds wonderful. I may have to rethink my plan to come back as a golden eagle in the next life and opt for ‘Danish toddler’ instead. Danes seem to start life ridiculously well and just carry on from there. I start to wonder whether life as a Danish kid might perhaps set the blueprint for all future interactions – for a lifetime of contentment and well-being. Have I, perhaps, stumbled on the secret to Danish happiness? Do they just build happy Danes this way, right from the start?
‘Of course there are quite a lot of fights, because teachers don’t tend to intervene much,’ American Mom interrupts my reverie, bursting my bliss bubble.
‘Oh!’
‘Yeah, there are bruises and sometimes scratches,’ she goes on, ‘but the kids are mostly OK in the end. And they always want to go back the next day.’
I hold a hand over my stomach protectively.
‘Doesn’t it scare you? Seeing your children get into fights?’ I ask, mentally inspecting hers for bumps and feeling a ripple of relief when I note that their youthfully perfect skin is blemish-free – albeit covered in sand.
‘It did a little, at the start – but kids have a lot of freedom in Denmark. And I think that’s worth a lot in the long run.’
Numerous studies have shown that children growing up in the UK and US today are missing out on the full-throttled fun of being a kid because they’re so micro-managed and swaddled in cotton wool; protected from dirt and dust and grazed knees, and stuck inside on iPads instead. But for kids living Danishly, there’s more of a Famous Five-meets-Swallows and Amazons approach to child rearing. And the kids I’ve seen so far appear to be thriving on it.
Of course, the system has its critics.
‘It’s not freedom, it’s laziness,’ a Danish mother-of-three tells me. ‘The staff at my son’s nursery just sit there and drink coffee while the kids run wild.’ Another expat says that stay-at-home mums are looked down on in Denmark: ‘It’s assumed that both parents go back to work here, and the fact that I haven’t seems to reduce my status.’
The Year of Living Danishly Page 18