Katy’s water broke at 11:10 p.m. on October 28th. The last bus had already left for the sykehus (hospital), an hour away. We had been told that this is actually very close for Norway; women in labor who live across the fjord must call to stop the ferry to carry them to the sykehus. Somehow this wasn’t comforting. We called a cab and paid the $150 fare.
Although the midwives (jordmor, or “earth mother,” in Norwegian) spoke nearly perfect English, they sometimes had to search for words. One gently asked Katy, “Can you move your, how do you say, ‘ass’? Can you move your ass?” Even when the midwives spoke speedy Norwegian—“du kan ikke ta en pause nå, men du må tresse hardt!”—somehow Katy understood in the heat of the moment. The jordmor ran the show, even when a doctor was called in because the umbilical cord had gotten wrapped twice around our baby’s neck. In our native country, fear of a lawsuit would likely have prompted a doctor to insist on a cesarean, but in Norway C-sections account for only 12.5 percent of births, compared to 26.1 percent in the U.S.
Our spectacular little cone-headed infant emerged with a full head of hair, and soon both mother and baby were rested. “Give him a good Norwegian name!” insisted one of the jordmor. “I know it seems strange to give him a big grown-up name, but you have to remember that he will someday be an old man with hair sticking out his ears and nose. He will someday be a great-grandfather and you can’t have him with a baby’s name!” Ole, Bjørn, and Thor are all overused. Many other popular names don’t translate well into English: The Swedish “Sven” is “Svein” in Norwegian, and pronounced too close to “swine”; “Dag” is pronounced “dog”; “Odd” just isn’t fair to a baby; and “Simon” is pronounced “semen.”
We considered “Loke,” the Nordic trickster god, which shocked our friend Knut. “What? That’s the devil. I know that even some Norwegian parents name their child ‘Loke,’ but imagine calling to your child on the playground, ‘Here, Satan!’”
After poring over lists of names, we finally settled on Eilif, after my great-grandfather from the Sognefjord. All of the jordmor approved. “A good Norwegian name!” one of them enthused. “We have three Eilifs in my family and three more in my daughter-in-law’s family and they all spell it differently. Ellef, Eileiv… That doesn’t matter, because it’s all the same name. His name must be approved by the government now.” Approved? “Yes, it shouldn’t be a problem, though. They now even accept most foreign names too.”
Ironically, with all this hospitality, plus the Norwegian government’s investment in making sure our son is taken care of, Eilif couldn’t get Norwegian citizenship because both Katy and I are American. (Babies born to foreign parents on U.S. soil, however, are automatically American citizens.)
After the birth, we were given a large room for all three of us with three meals a day, plus a snack and late-evening soup, delivered right outside the room. Many of the mothers, though, preferred their husbands to stay at home, so they could form a sort of girl’s club, happily pushing their babies around the hospital in their bassinets. And who could blame them, considering the warm wooden furniture, the cozy patterned comforters flung over the beds, and even a table filled with Legos for visiting children?
The jordmor told us that we should stay on at least three or four days to make sure that the breast-feeding was going well. In this beautiful room, with its view of the snow-capped mountains and all our meals delivered, why would we leave? We asked the head midwife, Sigrid, if she ever has trouble with mothers who settle in. “Sometimes if we have too many people having babies, we have to ask mothers who have been here for a long time, ‘So, how are things going? Do you have any plans?’” On our fourth day, when they served us a dinner of risegrøt (heavy rice gruel smothered in butter) and hard salami, we took it as a hint that maybe our time was up.
We planned to take the bus back to Trondheim, but the jordmor wouldn’t hear of it. Norway’s health insurance system would pay for our hour-long taxi drive and even reimburse us ninety percent of the fare we had paid to get to the hospital.
We soon realized why the Norwegian government helps families raise their children: While health care is free, basic necessities such as diapers easily run double the prices in the U.S. “Baby buggies can cost a thousand dollars in Norway, but they’ll last you a lifetime,” Rachel advised. Luckily, we had brought a stroller from Minnesota; why would we need one to last all our lives? Soon, however, we couldn’t help but notice the rugged eight-inch wheels on Norwegian prams, useful for climbing over snowdrifts, and the shock absorbers so baby Viking won’t feel a thing. They also come with complete insurance coverage against the worst blizzard.
Common courtesy calls for any able-bodied passenger to help load and unload these huge strollers from the bus, as the little prince or princess passenger looks on happily at the good service. But a local café, Erichsen Konditori, announced it would no longer allow space-hogging baby carriages inside. The sleeping children in their carriages must wait outside—a practice that is apparently common throughout Scandinavia. Recalling New York police’s arrest of a Danish woman, who trusted East Villagers not to snatch her baby while she was inside a café, I told Sissel, my Norwegian teacher, that this practice would never take hold in the U.S. Surprised, she asked, “Why not? What are you afraid of?”
Sissel explained that Norwegian children revel in what is called “en fri oppdragelse”—a free upbringing that means they are allowed to roam and to express themselves. “My husband is English, and when we were trying to decide where to raise our kids, it was very obvious that Norway is much more friendly to kids,” she said. “In England they really like to punish them. Norway, on the other hand, is a paradise for children.”
In fact, I’ve often seen very young kids out playing or walking down the sidewalk with no adult supervision—an unfortunately rare occurrence in the U.S. But Shannon, a Norwegian-Canadian mother, was more circumspect. “The ‘free-upbringing’ basically means that kids can do anything they damn please. Sometimes they’re a bunch of animals. I just wonder how they’ll be when they grow up. At the same time, it is a kind of paradise to have children here, since it’s so kid-friendly. Children are just part of everyday life here.”
Norwegian preschools, or barnehager, are considered among the best in the world. Many of them share a helsestasjon—health station—for the children in the neighborhood. Each health station hosts meetings for mothers with newborns to get together and chat over coffee about the challenges and joys of parenting, and pediatricians show up once a week for check-ups.
Aslaug, the nurse at our helsestasjon, has met with us once a week to make sure everything is going fine and to see if we have any questions about Eilif. One of her biggest concerns, oddly, is tran—cod-liver oil. “You must start at four weeks old and give him tran in every month with the letter R. First you start with a few drops on your finger that you put in his mouth. He will spit it out. If you do this every day, he will spit it out. But soon he will take two and a half teaspoons of tran and be a healthy baby.”
An Italian friend noted, “Mussolini did the same thing. His torturers fed dissidents a whole bottle of castor or cod-liver oil until they had diarrhea for a week.”
In Norway, apparently, the torture is necessary. Aslaug explained that babies need vitamin D b
ecause of the mørketid, or darkness of winter. In fact, during Eilif’s first weeks, the sun never made it over the crest of the big hill to the south of our house. The first thing our son tasted besides breast milk was cod-liver oil. When he finally saw direct sunlight for the first time in February, he squinted and cried.
Not only do we have Norwegian health care to thank for keeping our child free of rickets, but we learned that the government is automatically depositing 972 kroner (about $145) into our bank account every month—our child credit. This money, which is doubled for single parents, is to be put toward the expenses of raising the child and continues until he or she is eighteen years of age, or until we leave Norway.
A brochure from the Norwegian National Insurance Administration clarifies the strategy behind this welfare policy of pure pro-family socialism: “Child benefit is to help covering expenses related to having a child/children. It is also a redistributive device between families with children and those without and is intended mainly to even out differences in income to the advantage of families with children.”
“It’s not pure charity,” explained Knut. Because the system is founded on taxation, it’s vital to produce taxpayers in order to secure the system’s foundation—that is, a stable birthrate—and to give the households where both parents work the opportunity to have children without too much economic or career risk. Italy and England haven’t managed this; their birthrates are too low and so their welfare systems are at risk.”
Astrid, a student and single mom, weighed in: “I heard that people in the U.S. are embarrassed to take money from the government. What do they call it—‘welfare’? Is this true? I’m not ashamed because that is what it’s there for, to help children.” She sipped her coffee and smiled, purely bewildered at the thought.