Health Revolution. Maria Borelius
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the maternity centre and had to support me as I walked in.
‘You have a loosening of the pelvic ligaments,’ the midwife told me.
She gave me a pair of crutches. They helped a bit, and I shuffled out of there.
I felt like I was seventy-five years old as I limped into work with my crutches, next to my young and childless co-workers. I had to swing one leg in front of the other in order to get over the threshold and down the stairs. Our tough but brilliant boss had a reputation for bullying people, and one of his former colleagues had advised me to always stand when I talked to him so as not to give him the upper hand. So when I spoke with him I would stand up and lean on my crutches, but I didn’t feel particularly tough in all the struggles we had over how to do things.
My midwife associated the pelvic loosening with the physical and psychological struggle of communicating with my boss. It was caused by stress as much as by my body.
Things got complicated in the supermarket, as I juggled shopping bags and crutches, and was barely able to lift my hungry two-year-old.
One of my workout friends, who also was a naprapath, came to my home and looked at my back. She gave me some exercises that helped.
‘Your ligaments are worn out,’ she said.
‘What can I do about it?’ I asked.
‘You have to make sure you keep your muscles strong, to compensate. Never stop working out.’
My eating habits were more balanced by this time. It was the early 1990s, and we ate a lot of pasta and bread, as people did in those days.
I gave birth to four children within five years and also had a miscarriage and an ectopic pregnancy that led to major surgery. After that, my lower back was worn out. The large central abdominal muscle, or rectus abdominus, had been torn in the middle, and I had scars from various complications. My female body had been subjected to the rigours of birthing and ground down by everyday life, but it had also been loved and nursed babies and was beginning to understand how wonderful life was. I was no longer a carefree young woman whose thoughts centred on men and studies. I was a mother with great challenges on the job and in the family.
It wore on my body. But I still felt strong.
Along with the children came an interest in food. In the past, I had struggled to normalise and find some kind of balance, but having to take care of the children transformed me.
In the early 2000s, my husband’s workplace moved to Great Britain and our whole family followed. I began working from there, also in a new role, and became aware of organic food. It was a different country, where eating habits were completely different from the meatballs, quick-cooking macaroni and fish sticks that had been our everyday fare in Sweden.
The supermarkets were bulging with processed junk food, and the results were visible everywhere. In the children’s new schools, we saw a lot of overweight students, who stood around eating sweets after school or sat in the schoolyard with a bag of crisps. At the same time, there was a selection of organic fruits and vegetables that I had never seen in Sweden, where organic products in the early 2000s consisted mainly of small, wilted carrots.
Here the organic produce was greener and fresher. It was exciting. A new friend inspired me to begin making more food from scratch. She taught me how to make casseroles and showed me the Jewish chicken soup that she had learned from her mother-in-law that was better than penicillin. It clicked. Something in all of this reminded me of my mother’s food. It was real food, the kind I had grown up with, the kind of homemade food that I used to eat, before single life, fast food and stress messed everything up.
I found an article about the powerful effects of omega-3 oil and experimented with myself and my family. The oil seemed to make everything better: PMS, stress, anxiety, concentration problems . . . What kind of miracle oil was this? How did it work?
In an American magazine article, I found an interview with an American dermatologist with perfectly smooth skin, Dr Nicholas Perricone. He talked about salmon as a miracle food that helped counteract wrinkles, stress and anxiety. He also talked about something that he called ‘low-grade inflammation’, as well as about food and disease prevention. I put the information into my fleeting internal memory.
Gradually, our family’s eating habits began to change. We ate more homemade and organic food. We ate lots of vegetables, good fish and poultry. Our butcher was situated in the English countryside, in an old shop from the nineteenth century on a winding country road, and also sold homemade applesauce and little jars of pickles that were lined up above the chicken breasts and roasts.
They also proudly displayed sausages that had won both gold and silver in the British sausage contests, hitherto completely unknown to me. These gold and silver sausages were made of real meat, from locally raised animals, and contained mixtures of lamb and mint or pork and leek. They were a taste sensation and became a staple food in our home.
I enjoyed baking, using good ingredients. Chocolate cake on Sunday with extra butter, berries and cream. I no longer dieted. We got a dog, and walking the dog became my new workout, aside from some sporadic visits to a nearby gym. These were sunny years. Good years, shimmering years with a wonderful flock of growing children. Nothing could hurt us.
At least that’s how it felt then.
Life’s blows come in different shapes.
Some people go through devastating divorces. Others have children with serious illnesses. People are injured in car accidents or become ill with incurable cancer. You lose your job, go bankrupt or experience other tragedies. You can feel as if your life has ended. For my part, the tsunami washed over me in October 2006 – at least it felt like a tsunami at the time.
I was asked to go into politics. Not that I was a typical ‘partisan’; I had never really understood how you could see people as enemies just because their opinions were different from yours. It felt more like a kind of visionary military duty, to work on a number of issues that I felt were important, like research and entrepreneurship.
I was an outsider who made my way into a system that was hard to understand, and both the preliminary party election and the parliamentary election went unexpectedly well. Just in time for the 2006 election, I moved home from Great Britain with three of the children, while my husband remained with one son for a transitional period. I was elected to parliament and also quite unexpectedly became trade minister. The whole thing was unthinkably strange. But I had a dull feeling in my stomach.
After only a few days, a storm arose when I said that my family had paid a nanny under the table in the 1990s, long before my political involvement and before Sweden implemented the ‘RUT’ tax deductions for household help. With four small children and my own business, as well as two ailing parents, I couldn’t have made my life work any other way. Of course it was completely wrong – I realised that. But it was hard to explain myself once the machinery was set in motion. What I said in explanation sounded crazy or confused when it was printed. As an outsider in the political system, I felt completely helpless. I didn’t have good political networks; I had no one to talk to and little support.
At home, the Swedish Security Service, or Säpo, explained that my family had received death threats and that they couldn’t protect us since we didn’t have a fence around our house. My children cried. We couldn’t go out and walk the dog because there were so many journalists standing in the garden. We were on the front page of every newspaper.
Finally, I couldn’t handle it any longer. I asked the prime minister to be excused from my post because I felt that I would never be able to perform any meaningful work at all. We were in total crisis, near a breakdown.
This is not the book in which I’m going to describe this in