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 detail – the enormous lessons that I learned from being a non-politician in the political power centre, about the powers and counterforces that arise, about the tough political game. And about myself and my weaknesses, but also my unexpected fighting spirit and my great toughness. Perhaps I’ll write about this some day.
In any case, the dramatic journey came to affect my inner life and my body – big time, as the Americans say.
We moved back to Great Britain, to my husband and the son who had stayed. I couldn’t sleep for weeks, in spite of strong sleeping pills; I woke up every night in a sea of sweat and pinched myself in the arm.
Is it true that all this happened to me?
I was confused and shocked. Family members went into depression. I felt a deep sense of guilt for everything I had exposed them to but had a hard time providing the support that I wanted to since I barely had enough energy for myself.
Then I found Emelie. This ethereal woman was a personal trainer at a gym in the area, and she carefully trained me twice a week. When she massaged my back at the end of one session, my tears began to flow.
‘Why are you crying?’ she asked.
‘Something terrible happened,’ I explained. ‘In another country.’
She looked at me with her kind eyes.
‘That doesn’t mean anything right now.’
But of course it did. The questions gnawed at me. Would anyone ever want to have anything to do with me again? My husband, who had never even felt I should become a politician, was fantastic in supporting all of us and bringing us back together. But I needed to find my inner strength again.
With her exercise sessions, Emelie helped me do it. My self-confidence began in my body, like a steady flow from her wonderful sessions. I strained and worked with my body and began to realise that I had been barely breathing for the last two months, just panting like a panic-stricken dog.
I also began having new thoughts that I had never had in my life. I had experienced difficult times before,