Barbarism
Backwater Atrocity

When after a brief liaison with my dad-to-be, Lisbet found herself pregnant with me (it was an accident, my father assured me many years later—thanks a lot, Dad; well, at least he did the right thing by her), her mom Olga (and, I assume, her aunt Ebba and uncle Axel—thick as thieves, they were those three siblings, Axel usually at the helm) living as they did in a cultural backwater, decided to have all of Lisbet’s teeth removed and replaced with dentures. This, ostensibly, was to save her all the teeth trouble that pregnancies (they believed) would invariably entail. Come to think of it, I now remember that Olga had dentures, too, but I don’t know whether her teeth were removed while carrying Mom, insisted on by her mother (and, perhaps that generation of siblings).

Either way, I know only one word for this, and that word is Barbaric.

An equally barbaric (and unworkable) solution by her over-the-top Christian (of Xtian, as Gary Snyder likes to say) mother and her equally over-the-top Christian aunt, was that when Lisbet as a small child pulled a saucepan of scolding hot water onto the side of her face, they refused to take her to the hospital for treatment (to try to avoid the terrible scarring that my mother then lived with for the rest of her life) deciding instead to leave it all up to God, who they knew would do what was best for the small Lisbet.

Well, apparently, God figured it was best to disfigure the young girl but good and have her live with that.

Yes, barbaric.

But it is really strange how a young child (as in me) pieces various bits of information together to make some sort of sense of things.

It was high summer, so we were visiting Grandma Olga again (we always did at this time, each summer). The year was probably 1953 or 1954, so I was either four or five. That was the summer I first noticed my Mom’s scarred right cheek and one day I wondered what happened. She touched her cheek as if to see if it was still there and a little ashamed, I guess, that I had noticed; but she did not answer my question, instead sidestepping it somehow—easily done, of course, when asked by a four or five-year-old, just mention ice cream.

I didn’t think more about this until some days later after I had just managed to sting myself but good on the nettles that edged the courtyard of Olga’s house—there were tons of them (actually cultivated by the old women for they made an amazingly delicious soup from the stinging nettles, called, appropriately, nettle soup).

Olga, as I recall (or imagine), was smearing some sort of ointment on my arm or consoling me or something, and then, to make me feel better, she also told me that as a child about my age Lisbet (not wearing any clothes at the time) had fallen head-first into this small forest of nettles and burned herself badly all over. Very badly, said Olga; her way of telling me that the blisters I had on my arm, by comparison, were nothing. Nothing. Kiss and make better. See. There you go. And stay away from the nettles.

And here is where I make the odd, but for me workable, connection: that’s how Mom scarred herself, I realized: yes, she fell into the nettles. I wondered briefly why she didn’t just say so, but no matter, now I knew.

And for the next ten years, at least, I indeed “knew” that Mom’s cheek had been scarred by her fall into nettles. In fact, I was a grown man by the time one of Lisbet’s cousins told me what had actually happened—Lisbet pulling boiling water onto herself and the old ladies’ subsequent refusal to have it examined and treated at the hospital (twenty miles away—which may have helped fuel the reluctance, who knows).

Also, and this is even more interesting, somewhere in the dim recesses of my childhood mind I came to attribute her lack of real teeth to having fallen into nettles, as well. Don’t ask me how that connection was made, but in some nebulous way, it was.

Until, again, years later, I was told the truth. Freshly pregnant (with me), she had been shipped off to the hospital (this time twenty miles apparently no obstacle) to have all of her teeth extracted and her toothless mouth fitted with dentures.

These days, I read recently, dentists strongly advise against tooth extraction during pregnancy due to the body’s heightened sensitivity, since such extractions would likely lead to excessive pain. How the young mother carrying me must have suffered, for I’m sure Olga and Ebba saw it fit to leave the pain management up to God as well.

Oh, hell.

Barbaric is still the only word that comes to mind.

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An afterthought: It is both observable and amazing that once you’ve accepted, and let in, as it were, an answer to a question—be it right, or somewhat wrong, or utterly wrong (like my nettles answer), you tend to let it rest there as the answer forever unless for some reason you come to re-examine and correct your assumption.

How many tons of wrong answers do we carry around as ballast and still depend on as “right answers” when we evaluate and solve all the small and big problems life likes to throw at us?

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