Universal Health Care Breaks The Back of the Patriarchy

So, I got fired.

I protested against my colleague’s gossiping about another team member.

I confronted my boss during a team meeting when she criticized the work of an absent team member and other inconsistencies. (I suggest you refrain from doing that if you want to keep your job.)

I got tired of squeezing customers and punishing them for ignorance.

I got tired of exploiting their frailties for Corporate America.

I paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax in the years I’ve been working in Denmark. I got paid well and was in the top tax bracket for decades.

When a gynacologist told me that my ability to have children was reduced by 50% due to an out-of-action ovary I cried the whole evening. I don’t know why I cried so hard; as the third daughter in a family of seven, I’d had my fill of diapers and crying babies. I had never really had the feeling that I wanted children. I oohed and aahed over them but never really had the urge to have one of my own; not much, anyway. Why bring children into this terrible world, with wars and conflicts and poisoned water and multinationals? I had overthought myself out of breeding.

Why bring children into this terrible world, with wars and conflicts and poisoned water and multinationals?

Since I believed myself more or less unable to have children, I decided to go back to school in 1998, inspired by the sexy, energetic, smart women I met in San Diego when I visited in 1995. Carlos, a half-spanish colleague, encouraged me and gave me some valuable tips.

My husband-at-the-time and I used prophylactics but since I had the idea that I was semi-barren we began to use coitus interruptus outside of days 14, 15 and 16. (Reminds me of: “What do you call people who use the Vatican-approved rythm method of contraception?” Answer: “Parents”)

The Danes call it getting off in Roskilde instead of taking the train all the way to Copenhagen. (I am sharing intimate details of my sex life on the internet; what is wrong with me?)

Looking back, I think I got pregnant the first time and had a miscarriage. The second time, I got pregnant for real, to my astonishment.

I was ecstatic. I finished my MBA, lounged around for that wonderful summer of 2000, re-connecting with friends that I’d left two years before and generally enjoyed myself in my big-bellied waiting for Godot. It was physically an easy pregnancy, after the nausea wore off. I was, however, concerned about my unborn child’s cleft lip and gum.

After the child was born, my husband-at-the-time, even though he fell completely in love with his son, was upset about being displaced from top dog position. He was no longer number one. No more breakfast in bed for him. Not only was he no longer number one in the household priorities, he was bumped all the way down to third place. We agreed amiably to divorce; we’d been friends for years before ruining it for a while by marrying.

I imagined that I would never meet anyone else but there was this guy. He was very persistent and he had a sexy ass. I was sad and lonely. When you are used to constant bickering with the one closest to you and someone else treats you with warmth and kindness, it melts your resistance. At least it melted mine.

This guy “forgot” to get off in Roskilde.

“L___, what have you done?”, I cried.

What he had done was spray a teaspoon of DNA all over the two primed-and-ready-to-go eggs that my remaining single ovary had released within seventy-two hours of that moment. He wasn’t shooting blanks. The main hospital contacted him a couple of years later; they wanted to test how sparky his DNA was, but he was too shy to participate in the twin-father study.

I lay on the matress at the ultrasound clinic with my head turned to the side and understood immediately the significance of the two kidney shapes on the screen. I laughed and I cried. I got the father-to-be to take me to a fancy restaurant on Nyhavn for lunch that day. He’s a real skinflint; I love spending his money. (Later I would demand a $400 dress to assuage my hurt after an argument; I know how to make it sting. I loved that dress.) To this day, I remember how good those flakes of parmesan tasted on my green salad that I ordered as a starter. He was forty-five and a bachelor. His parents had given up on him ever having children. Today they dote on those twins although the grandfather-to-be was shocked and angry when we broke the news to him and the lovely grandmother-to-be at lunch one day.

It was almost as if I had committed some terrible transgression by providing them with something they had consciously given up hoping for. That was exactly how I felt when my father made me buy the violin. Still, they soon recovered and called me that evening to apologize for taking the news so badly. They welcomed my first child into their family as one of their own flesh and blood. I will be eternally grateful for that — although in his current teenage nonchalance and contempt for his elders, he sure as hell ain’t.

One of the twins had a hard couple of years; he had astmatic bronchitis, eczema and all their attendant miseries including me physically forcing him to breathe through an inhaler on a daily basis. The other has a heart problem; not a big one but something for which he may need an operation someday. The tricuspid valve only has two flaps or something like that. He is called in once a year to be checked. How we found that out is another story. It remained undetected neither by the hospital where he was born nor by our assigned general practitioner. (Yes, I know this is a cumbersome and possibly incorrect double negative. Do you have a better suggestion? Please respond.)

I had a pretty hard couple of years myself. These photos can give you an idea of what it was like.

I don’t need to earn big money. I don’t need to marry for money like my godfather intimated that my mother did.

When that lawyer with bags of money whom I considered dating (I liked him very much; we got on REALLY well) inadvertently left a message on my phone saying, “Pick up the fucking phone”, I didn’t need to think twice about blocking him on email and on my telephone. When I tell my friends the sorry tale, they sympathize. I pause for dramatic effect, then say:

“But he had a shitload of money”

and we shriek with laughter.

We laugh when we look at fear from a safe place.

Let this brilliant lady speak:

Men with money have power over women who don’t. The Scandinavian governments have partly redressed that imbalance.

Once the government (to which I have contributed significantly via sky-high taxes) supports single mothers like me with rent supplements and social security that really gives social security in our time of need, it takes away that power. Not to mention the fabulous childcare.

What about the shopkeeper who accepts payment in kind because of the desperation of the impoverished rural women; an ongoing droit-de-seigneur. Maybe he swings both ways. His day of reckoning will come too; maybe even at the hands of his biological sons.

After I was fired I started up two businesses: one medical, one IT. I ploughed all my savings and then some plus a pension that I cashed in into these enterprises. One of these business was moderately successful but not successful enough to support me.

I began this as an opinion piece and it has turned into my life story.

As a teenager, I felt sickened to the core by Benny Hill, a “comedian” who distracts unknowing women into letting him cop a feel or sneakily take advantage of them sexually in some way.

He would have short shrift in this country because women have money and we can vote with our feet. Nobody ever catcalls women here.

If I walk across a building site and a man leers at me or makes a sexual remark, I can laugh.

Because I am not threatened. A man like this has little power in this society; this civilized society in which I have had the privelige to live and to contribute financially to for more than twenty-five years.

I was horrified when I learned that Hill is popular in Malaysia but it makes sense when I think about the subjugation of women there. Ben Elton was right:

The only thing that mitigates my antipathy for Benny Hill is the fact that he’s English. Thank God for that.

I don’t need a fuck-off fund like Paulette Perhach. My country provides me with one.

My country of which I am now a citizen and whose societal values I hold in high esteem.

Gud Bevare Danmark — May God Preserve Denmark

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