INTIMACY

Sisterhood of the Traveling Shit-Pants

Something Got Lost in the Finnish-to-English Translation, but it wasn’t Sisu

My mom’s mother was a neglectful alcoholic. Nana — pronounced not like the word for an Italian Nonna, nor like the name of Peter Pan’s dog Nanna, but, for some reason I never thought to question, “NAH-nuh,” — didn’t teach my mother much besides how to hate the way she looked.

Well, that and the Finnish word sisu — the “guts” one needs to survive such a mother.

But even my narcissistic, “cautionary tale” of a Nana brought more to the table than stoicism.

We were never what you’d call close. The last time I saw Nana before her death in 2014 was at my 2006 wedding. My mom had paid for Nana’s plane ticket, worried that none of their dysfunctional family of tumbledown addicts would show up. Mom would then be left to make nice with her ex-husband’s side.

My wedding was at a beautiful, Suquamish-owned lodge in Poulsbo that overlooked the Puget Sound’s Agate Pass. Mom’s side all stayed together at a cottage at the venue— the “Ya-Ya House,” as it was locally known.

The author of The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood had once owned it.

An hour there reminded me of more than I’d cared to remember about my mom and her family of origin.

“You’re late.”

Mom was nervous about my and Joe’s big day, and as some of my bridesmaids and I walked into the Ya-Ya house for hair and makeup, I could feel her relentless dissatisfaction in those two small words.

“I’m, like, ten minutes late, Ma. It’s 8:10, and the wedding’s not ‘till 3.”

Long, passive-aggressive sigh from the fissure of her mauve lipstick.

My cousins and friends looked away with embarrassment.

“It’s okay,” the hairstylist whispered to me in solidarity as Mom popped out to use the bathroom. “It’s always either the bride or her mother that gets bitchy, and I’m glad it’s not the bride this time,” she smoothed me over.

Well, now it’s about to be both, I thought.

The stylist was a consummate pro. Quickly, she switched into a placate-the-mother-of-the-bride mode by having Mom go first. Curled her fine, strawberry-blonde bob into a wavy mini-updo. Mom had always been pretty, but now she looked stunning.

But Mom took one look at the style that had taken 50 minutes to create, tore out the hairpins, and ruffled it into oblivion with her fingertips à la Dumb & Dumber’s Lloyd and Harry.

Did “sisu” translate to being a huge pain in the ass?

Difficult relationships suck. Psychotherapists try to manage expectations in their clients, preferring to use the word disappointing to label behaviors. It took me years to retrain my brain to think that way — rather than telling someone who hurt me to, as the Finnish would say, suksi vittuun, or “ski to a cunt.”

And as someone who ended all contact with her mother, I’ve lived and breathed that struggle.

Boundaries: they’re both freeing and lonely. I am 125% sure I have done or said something hideous to one of my cousins, who for years hasn’t wanted to so much as be in the same room with me. K owes me no explanation whatsoever for no longer talking with me. It’s been years, and still I grieve her hilarious and pragmatic presence. We all have limits to what we can and can’t tolerate in our close relationships, and what I hope for now is to find a soft acceptance in her decision.

And I especially hope that she now has the peace in life that she deserves.

Disappointing mothers, grandmas, and female loved ones can ski for years through our psyches on icy snowblades. Long ago, my mother — then a teenager — walked into her living room to find Nana having sex with some rando dude on their living room couch. I personally wasn’t the one to have to carve that image out of my eyeballs — thankee vittuun. But it’s fair to say that Nana was a mother that was perseen suti (crappy, or literally, “the brush of ass”).

I have not yet added Rebecca Wells’ Ya-Ya Sisterhood nor the Traveling Pants film to my long-neglected lists, but despite their earthiness these stories, themes, and women need a place.

Why hold space for a chain-smoking, wino, absentee Grandma who sucked at having regard for others? She certainly didn’t give a living-room-fuck whether we adored her or not.

Nana’s empathic limitations didn’t hurt me as directly as they hurt my mother. Trauma travels through time and space with great resilience. But in rare moments of non-suckage, Nana was filled with enough sisu to relate to her grandkids through humor. On one of her few and most memorable visits she got a kick out of teaching my little brother, Mack, and me the Finnish words for “little shit-pants.” Heritage education for the win!

The outlandishness of Finnish swearing is a legacy that’s, at best, mixed. But it’s something of which I hope to pass the best parts to my kids — while trying not to let them be hurt by the saltiest.

If Nana were a YouTuber today, she’d make “How to Swear in Finnish Like a Boss,” [external link to explicit language] which features such gems as vittu soikoon (translation: fuck this shit, or literally, “let the cunt chime.”)

Damn, that’s a good swear. I tried for years to reclaim that little-shit-pants phrase with Google. What I wouldn’t have given ten years ago to be able to mumble that one under my breath when my kids were being punks! Even if it ISN’T an empathic term of endearment.

And there will never be another cunt like Nana.

Pienet paskahousut.

Join Lindy Vogel on Medium, get her humor newsletter, and follow Sweary Mommy for more colorful family phraseology.

And for more unwholesomely grandmotherly tales —