Until recently I led what looked to be quite a global life.  Not in an elite, business class, kind of way, but because of my work I did travel regularly, and many of my closest friends lived in different countries.  There was even a good friendship I had made off the back of one encounter in real life and then a meeting of the minds over time on Facebook.  Some friends I reconnected with after gaps of 10 or 15 years through other friends in a web spreading over several countries.  I had close colleagues whose voices and opinions I had become very fond of over Skype without ever having met them in person.  

Motherhood changed all of that.  In those early months, there is nothing a baby needs more than to be physically close to its parents, and nothing the parents need more than to feel that the baby is ok.  And I don’t say this in a cultic ‘parenting tribe’ way.  The only parenting approach I have ever followed is the #thatjusthappened #whateverworks  school. Exhausted but surviving  A baby-sling was liberating, especially in London, where you can never rely on lifts to be working at train stations.  A pushchair was more liberating in Helsinki, where you ride for free on public transport if your baby is in a pushchair but not in a sling. 

In Helsinki, in the incredibly rainy October/November we had, still not well networked socially, our world got even smaller.  The rental flat we got because of its closeness to our daughter’s nursery became a kind of job for me.  It was brand new, in a concreted, businessy, re-developing area of Helsinki. The flat was as far removed from the memories of log cabins by lakes from my childhood as it was from our draughty Victorian terraced house in  London, which had bellyached constantly from the conflict of a 21^st century family living in a 19^th century house.  We had spent several weeks of our last month in London without a functioning bathroom but it was hot enough outside to just hose the kids down on the patio, while every winter our state-of-the art wifi-connected boiler ran out of battery in its thermostat and plunged us back into authentically Victorian cold.  During my dissertation work I had pondered Corbusier’s idea of the ‘house as a machine for living’ and now in Helsinki I got to experience being in such a machine, impersonal but more comforting than the perpetual grey rain outside.

I had to keep the flat happy, and at the same time accept I could not control it.  The heating came on not because I turned it on but when a pre-programmed thermostat decided it should.  The house was so well built and insulated that until the mercury hit zero outside the heating barely came on at all, and I was so warmed by the solar energy from our south-facing windows that in this apartment I could pad around barefoot in vest and leggings in the middle of winter.  But the flat extracted a price in terms of closely-regulated behaviour.  The air exchange system required bathroom doors to be shut so that they could be dehumidified properly.  I became the guardian of the apartment’s needs, not its resident, but its maintenor.  I compensated for other people not understanding its needs by remaining perpetually vigilant, pressing appropriate buttons on the environmental control and never complaining that the building, not I, decided what my indoor temperature should be.  

The outside streets were frightening to me.  Twice daily we had to face them to take my daughter to nursery and bring her back.  I could not understand why cars were allowed to ride, even in a stately and slow fashion along our pavement, when there was a whole huge road and a parking lane for their use.  I couldn’t understand how this society, that I had heard was so safe for children, could allow a culture where it was okay for cars to nudge their bonnets onto a zebra crossings as I took my children over calling out ‘green man, safe for us to cross’ more as a tight-throated prayer than a cheerful public service announcement.  When the snow started, the ploughs piled it up along the side of the road so the cars could scoot through, but I would have to lift the pushchair over a ploughed and packed snowdrift eighteen inches high to get onto the crossing, leaving the four year old to get over it as best she could by herself.

I had also given up on getting to know new Finns.  I was tired of psyching up my daughter to approach kids in playgrounds only for her to be rejected, and I was fed up of trying to initiate conversation with mothers who didn’t want to talk to me.  This society was doing well, it was a good society and it didn’t need us, was the firm message coming from Helsinki.  I felt we were seen as disruptive, badly dressed, illiterate.  My machine-flat was clean and warm, and in the absence of human or natural noise, the hum of the trams going past became something I listened out for with affection.  My space became my flat and the tram ride to two baby groups that catered for immigrant mums, and the twice-daily, terrifying, car-harassed nursery run.  I would go to a cheap cafe on the way back from nursery for a re-heated bun and send a picture to Annika with the message “one for Shitstagram,” and shared laughter helped. Then the snow happened. 

Thank God for the snow.  If I had asked Google to map my movements I would have seen an exponential increase in daily space covered between the end of November and the end of January. Going outside the city at weekends to go tobogganing, or on walks across the frozen sea. In the week, going to a stop on the metro with my baby son and just walking until I found a patch of coastline and looking at the pale gold reeds against the white ice and lapis lazuli sky, or the iron grey islands gripped in skirts of snow, the fir trees like dark hairpins.  I grieved all over Helsinki and Espoo for my grandparents, who had never been able to see that I would come back to Finland, and that I was trying, however inadequately, to give my kids a door to the Finnish side of their identity.  In the new flat we bought by the sea I communed with the amber-coloured wood flooring because it reminded me of them, and then walked over the necklace of little bridges and green islands and blue sea.  

I still feel I am on a piece of elastic and if Toby let go, I would ping back to London so fast that I’d brain myself on the front door at Dennett’s Road.  But summer here is beautiful.  The air smells of pine and roses, and walking through forests carpeted with lily of the valley to a beach that is both secluded and 20 minutes away on the bus feels like a dream.  I am hopeful for picking bilberries and lingonberries in the late summer.  I realised something important about my career, which is that I want to be able to spend more time outdoors.  I don’t know what that looks like.  I feel closer to Asian influences in Finland than I did in the UK, which is interesting, as I assumed the UK was the more global country.  I am not at home.  I can’t be.  But I can try to live resolutely in a place without having to have it feel like home.