Life is about normalising just now.
Not so much about getting back to normal - the old normal is dead and gone, never to return - but about adjusting to a new normal, trying to get your head around it.
In Sweden, everyone gets birth leave, mothers and fathers both. My wife keeps referring to her time off as paternity leave, which makes me wonder if there's something I should know. Ordinarily, you'd have a few months off as a father, to be taken immediately or spread out over the first few years of baby's life.
Of course, as freelance, self-employed types, it's all so much dust in the breeze to us. I'm doing odds and ends of voice work, she's been on sick leave due to the pregnancy. This is great, in some senses, as we aren't struggling to fit the new arrival in around jobs or work routines. There's a fairly obvious downside to that, of course.
I had to cancel a teaching gig due to the labour, at short notice. My wife is currently locking horns with the redoubtable Swedish Försäkringskassan, the national insurance office, who will in due course be paying us a monthly allowance that's given to all families with a new baby, regardless of employment, a little child support thing. But first, there's the paperwork.
You are very well looked after by the state here, but you need to convince them you're not just some luckless chancer fleeing the economic ruins of the UK (even if you are). Currently, my wife is filling out a form where she has to estimate how much money they're going to give her in advance. That's a bit mean, surely? How are we supposed to know? It reminds me of Play Your Cards Right, where to win a prize, you had to predict if Brucy's next card would be higher or lower.
We'd like, I don't know, 3 000 SEK a month, please. Oh, I'm sorry! The official results form we've just flipped over says you're not eligible for that much, which means you're not going through to the next round. But nobody gets deported from Sweden empty handed, here's your Hurdity Gurd checkbook and pen.
I'm off to get advice from the special artistic job seekers board, Arbetsformedlingen, on whether I need to set up my own company or not for tax reasons. Probably not, but then a lot of actors do that over here, you can't just say 'I'm self employed' and get on with it. Technically, I get paid salaries for my voice work, which is nice as the tax side is sorted out for me, and not so nice because the tax is quite a lot.
And we're both wrestling with this complex bereaucracy on extremely limited sleep. During the night, anyway. The sleep during the three hours of Swedish winter daylight is great. I remember the sun. It's big and red and pulled through the sky by a chariot. It chars my skin.
Our baby is thriving, luckily, more than her grey-faced parents look like they're doing right now. She's already past her birthweight and now into a new size of nappies. And quite recovered from her jaundice, which means she's now got the full use of her voice and the strength in her arms. Which is obviously splendid in many many ways; as with our employment, there's something of a downside to it as well.
It's hard to think that two weeks ago, I had never changed a nappy. Or that Freja wasn't part of our family, she was the bump we called Flipper. Right now, she's lying on the floor hiccupping, blissfully unaware that in all likelihood, she'll outlive us both. Outsleep us, definitely.
I'm led to believe that this exhausted state of semi-disbelief is normal for first time parents. Good. All normal here, then, nothing to report.
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