My paradoxical mother
My mum was born in the midst of flaming war in a farm house in Northern Finland. The area used to be part of Lapland and populated by reindeer hearding Sami people. She had 13 siblings, two of whom died in a young age, and I believe she was the youngest and was cared for by an older sister. While German aircrafts were zooming past, she would find comfort with the animals in the barn, and perhaps unsurprisingly, she became a great animal lover who loved watching shows like Animal Hospital.
When she was 4, my mum was sent to the capital as an evacuee with a note around her neck. In Helsinki, she was taken in by an upper class family, the writer Arvid Lydecken and his wife. The wife was sister to a famous prima ballerina, Edith von Bonsdorff. Edith and her maid had concerns for my mum who wasn’t all that well cared for in the Lydecken family. My mum used to say that she hated buns because that was all they stuffed her with when she lived with Aunt Majlis. She became fat, but in reality, she was malnourished, and needed proper care. Edith took her to see the famous paediatrician Arvo Ylppö who suggested a more suitable diet. Prompted by the faithful maid, she ended up taken in by Edith and her husband Per von Bonsdorff, a high society dentist and professor of odontology. They lived on the upper floor of a yellow manor house in the most prestigious area in Helsinki. My mum jokingly said that as a child she had been the terror of the area (‘Brunnsparkens skräck’). She hated having bows in her hair and didn’t appreciate Edith’s efforts to make her into a ballerina (she didn’t succeed). My mum was still artistically inclined, but only as a visual artist. Dancing and singing were not amongst her talents.
It all sounds like a fairy tale in some ways, but it really was not much fun. Edith, who had danced with the avant garde Swedish ballet, was a self possessed diva who refused to give up any of her comforts to a child. My mum really only found motherly comfort with the faithful old servant Hilja Mari, whose second name I was given. She was placed in Per’s dentist’s waiting room, and her bed had to be cleared away every morning and there could be no signs of her toys. The couple were tight knit and elderly, without children of their own. In addition, Per was a kind person, but he suffered from Parkinson’s disease. His condition prompted my mum to be ‘the man in the house’, i.e. she dealt with technical stuff such as operating machinery and driving the boat at the summer house. This is perhaps one reason she came across as a tomboy. When I was growing up, she would frequently grab things from my hands because she deemed me too slow and inefficient, and felt that she would do a better job herself. This was not exactly the most psychological approach, since it affected my self confidence pretty badly.
My mum was Finnish speaking to begin with, and had a Finnish name, Sirkka-Liisa Karjalainen. This was awkward when she went to a posh Swedish speaking school. When she was twelve, she was allowed to decide whether she preferred to be adopted and take the von Bonsdorff family name. I believe she had briefly met her biological mother at this point as well, but I don’t know what her sentiments were. She did get adopted into her new family. After a few years when she was fifteen, the family moved houses, and now she was finally able to have a room of her own. She started to sew her own clothes because this was also a point of contention: all the money went into Edith’s spring wardrobe, I heard. Apparently Edith also liked to drink.
My mum didn’t go on to high school, instead she worked and studied art in evening classes at the Ateneum. When she was 18, she started working at the Swedish language newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet as a copyist, and it was in the dark room that she met my dad Bert. As a freelance press photographer (one of the first female ones in Finland), she assumed the artist’s name Lis. I believe Edith and Per were pleased that my mother’s suitor was a baron, and they also wanted her out of the way. My parents got married when she was 19 and he 29, and she used to say that the age difference was too great. When she was still in her twenties and was keen to have fun, he wanted to settle down. Both of them had scars from the war. My dad had been evacuated to Sweden, and it seems that not all was well with the family he lived with. No one really spoke about emotions and they were not shown very liberally.
My mum desired a child but it took them four years to conceive me. My dad was infertile and my mum finally gave him an ultimatum. She would go to Italy for a while and in the meantime, she expected my dad to overcome his fear of needles and get the B12 jabs he needed to boost his sperm count. Otherwise, she would leave him. He did it, and when she got back in October 1965, I was conceived.
There was a great plan to photograph my life from the moment of birth for a year onwards, a job my dad took on very willingly. But when he came along with his camera to record the birth, he was promptly told to sod off. Men were not allowed on the ward! My mum grabbed the camera and said she’d do it herself. And the weirdest thing happened. In the midst of birth labour, she managed to take photographs of my birth. She was the first woman in the world manage such a superhuman feat. The whole thing was also technically demanding because of the poor light conditions and the camera’s limitations, and so there was no guarantee there would be any photos at all.
Of course at first it didn’t really occur to either of them that this was special. But then news spread at the newspaper and various other newspapers and magazines started to get in touch. The photos of me being born appeared in quite a few journals around the world, and my mum also won a prize. These photos can be seen in my Flickr album. When I think back on the way I entered this world, I think there was so much love there.
See more photos on Flickr.
I had a wonderful early childhood, up until the age of four. I think our first home in the Lauttasaari suburb must have left an indelible impression on me because I still hunger for the wallpaper and the stylish 60s decor. When I was two, my parents rented a summer cottage far out in the Finnish archipelago where we would spend the summer holidays. In Finland, the summer holidays are ten months long, beginning 1st June and ending mid-August. In the summers, I was swimming all the time and in the winters I went sleigh riding with our wonderful dog Senny.
I got a cat of my own. Sadly the dog Senny died in an accident when I was four. My mum always blamed my dad for being careless. Apparently my dad hurried to the kiosk to get his cigarettes though the poor dog had a full bladder, and when she panicked and was run over, her bladder was destroyed and she could not be saved. Even when she was close to dying, the one thing my mum told everyone around her was that we used to have a dog. I can see that Senny really meant the world to her, and that’s what she was reminiscing about as she was parting ways with the world.
My parents could have bought a flat when they were young, but my dad didn’t think it was a good idea. Our second home was nice, but then we had to move again, and this time the flat was horribly dark and dingy. I had my own room but it had been painted in dark glossy red and the old linoleum floors had layers of old dirt, and none of this was changed. The French doors had been painted over with brown paint but one window pane was broken and replaced with cardboard to prevent the cats from jumping through it. I really hated the room where I spent most of my childhood. Things really started to go south. My mum took to drinking. She no longer cared about interior decoration, and nice things were exchanged for horrible 70s versions. Many nice things also disappeared altogether, no doubt to finance my mum’s visits to the local bar. We now had really ugly furniture, and I don’t know where most of it even came from. Many things were painted in bright glossy colours such as yellow and orange. Some things were inherited from my wealthy grandparents, but most of it wasn’t very nice, and some of it was just big and bulky, and was eventually gotten rid of when almost nothing else was left. For instance, a poorly varnished dentist’s table was given to me, and I also had a big chest, as well as their 60s sofa and butterfly chair that were completely unsuitable for a child. The butterfly chair didn’t even have the original leather upholstery anymore.
My parents began to quarrel and I recall how they would chase each other around the flat. There was a wall in the middle next to a poky windowless kitchen, and the fridge stood in a corner outside the kitchen. You could go around the structure with openings and doors on all sides. It’s hard to believe but he even hit her on one occasion and broke her nose. I know she was often very provocative.
My dad’s mother had divorced her husband in the late 50s and the contact between him and his two sons had been broken for good. I grew up with just my grandmother Gunni and my dad’s cousin Peggy as close family (photo below). My mum’s adopted parents Edith and Per both died in the mid-60s. Gunni lived in an old flat right on the last floor on Museonkatu, and I found it a comforting place to be.
From having been a very happy child, I grew up feeling increasingly shy, anxious and depressed. In a world where disappointments rained like showers, I was always expecting the next one. When my mum was drinking, she often threatened to commit suicide, which was pretty tough to deal with as I felt compelled to talk her out of it. I remember rambling on and on and on, unwilling to see that she would never remember a word I spent on her in that state.
I was healthy as a child, so much so I thought I had a superpower, but when I entered puberty, the symptoms of hEDS appeared. Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome is a genetic condition caused by faulty collagen. My spine collapsed and I felt generally uncomfortable in my skin. I suffered from emotional dysregulation. The fibromyalgia may have been the result of childhood stress. When I was eleven, my parents got a divorce. I stayed with my dad and was relieved that mum would no longer enter the house in a state of drunkenness. The flat was now very empty and echoey, so much so I would pretend to sing opera there. My mum did come to have supper with us on Sundays sometimes, and we also spent a few more summers in the cottage together. I’m glad they did all this for me and I don’t have any complaints in this regard. My dad became preoccupied with a lady from work and I became pretty self sufficient. By age 14, I was cooking for myself. I soon decided to become vegetarian. My mum never minded and enjoyed my food, but she never became vegetarian herself. She was very much stuck with certain conventions although she was also a modern and emancipated woman in other ways. For instance, she enjoyed walking around naked, which as a child, I thought was horrible (most children do, it seems!). Unfortunately, my mum’s story of health concerns was very different from mine, so she never understood what I was going through. I don’t know if deep down, she felt responsible and rather evaded the issue.
My mum was struggling to maintain a job. With her immense talent as a photographer, she could have continued to make good money, and she would have found happiness, I’m sure. Instead alcohol ruled her entire life. When I was fifteen, she left to live with her biological family in the North, but things didn’t work out that well. I also met some of my biological family and could see that their culture was very different from ours. Ultimately, we didn’t really get along in any meaningful way. My mum then decided to take up some studies and left for Rovaniemi, where she studied to be a chef. She did extremely well, and things looked up. But then she met a man who was also an alcoholic, and things became stressful and chaotic again. After a couple of years she realised they were en route to destroying each other, and left. She went as far South as you can possibly get in Finland. And that’s where she lived from 1985 until her cancer diagnosis in 2014. I spent the summers with her in her tiny flat and dreamed of getting out into the real archipelago. When a boyfriend kicked me out of our home in Helsinki, I moved to be close to my mum.
So who was my mum, really? I look at the many beautiful photos of her as a young woman and I find her absolutely stunning. She had looks, she had charm, she had energy, she had a great sense of humour, she had taste, she had positive values, she had intelligence, she was tough, she was healthy, she was technically talented, and she had creative talent. She just never made much use of all her assets. She did photograph all her life, and when the digital age started, she was as excited as my dad about computers. She gave me mobile phones and cameras, as soon as such gadgets came on the market even though the output quality was modest in the beginning and she couldn’t afford anything expensive. Meanwhile, I bought her nice things for her home and handed down the clothes I no longer wanted. She had no interest in interior decoration or clothes unless I prompted her to pay attention, and at that point, she always knew what looked good. She also painted, but something always held her back, and her choice of colours were odd in my eyes. She loved my work and was very supportive, in fact, without her encouragement, I would not have made as much art and sold as much as I did.
The alcohol was always pulling her down, and with her depressive state of mind came poverty, which caused more depression. The truth is that she was a really wonderful and very special person, but her emotional struggles were daunting. When she was already over fifty, she decided to pull herself together in order to make some money, and signed up for a job at a Christmas factory. She became ‘glitter machine operator’. Nothing could really be more ironic. She had some gruesome debts following fast loans, and she paid them off over a period of ten years. When she died, only 500 euros were left unpaid.
Over the years as my mum became more settled and vowed not to drink in my presence (or before we had agreed to meet), she also became my ally. She supported my art and encouraged me to take part in the exhibitions she herself was taking part in and even organising. She led a very modest life but she was well liked by other people. When she wasn’t drinking, she was always genuine, kind and fair. I’m really quite a different person from her and I certainly don’t have her constitution. But something connected us very deeply. Perhaps it was simply the fact that I was her only true family, and she genuinely loved me. When I was growing up, she confessed to being excited to getting to know the person I was becoming. When she moved past some of her self-preoccupation, she taught me loyalty. It was not an easy lesson, but it was a good one.
