The world through my American eyes

Friday was Nathalies moving day and it went real smooth. The only things that made it a bit more interesting then anticipated was a wrong turn in the parking lot with a truck that was a foot higher then McDonalds Drive-through. Some backing and turning solved the problem without tearing the roof off though. The other thing was a 30 something mile (american miles) detour to fetch a key. But all together it all went well.

Saturday, Sunday and Monday I did as little as possible due to the cold.

Vincent spent almost the entire easter with us and besides my cold we had a wonderful time and we learned lots of new things. For instance, the clouds follow the car in the side mirrors.

The cold is a bit better but have moved to my chest so breathing is a bit hard. But I will go to the doctor if it doesn't get better aunties, don't worry.

Love J

Anyway, the topic here is what if...

I feel a bit torn between emotions right now you see, I have my wonderful fiancé here and my adorable children and grandson (we shall now call him Jafar for the time being). They all represent the present and I would truely die without them. They are my very reason to get out of bed every morning. On the other hand I have my loving family in America who represent a past I never really experienced. An alternate past you might say and I love them and miss them so terribly.

So you see, my emotions are going back and forth all the time between the past and the present. A part of me wishes I had never left while another, the aware and sensible part of me realizes that if I hadn't I would probably never have become who I am today with the loving people who surround me over here.

Still, if things had been any different I probably would have packed my bags and left this place to be with my "other family". Not that I wish that things really where different, I love the people around me too much. I just wish there was a way to do both.

Love you all

Another benefit if you want to put it like that is that I left for work at least an hour earlier then I use to. I actually left before I even get out of bed some other days. With two co-workers on vacation and a third on sick leave that might be well spent time. So hopefully I will be home at my regular time instead of at seven o'clock like I've been the last couple of days.

So all together this might turn out to be a good Friday. The kids are coming tonight as well to make the weekend even better.

Not only did I rediscover my loving family I find my self reevaluating my life and stuff I've always believed in. I actually regret stuff done in the path. Wishing that circumstances had been different. I really love the people closest to me but my eyes have been opened and I can see what I have been missing for so long. It is tearing me apart, maybe not by much but small pieces here and there.

I wish I could have seen this day coming a long time ago, perhaps then I would have been better at saving money for starters, so that I could have made it possble to just take off and spend time with some of the people I love and miss a lot.

Today I wish I could be somewhere else.
One day I will be there, just not as soon as I would want.

Love J

Great this must mean that spring is on it's way I thought. Well the feeling lasted for about 30 minutes because when I went back shortly after, the snow was coming down. Not just a little, if you threw in some wind this could easily go as a blizzard.

Snow can be a bit exiting in December but not when we're moving towards April.

Give me my spring and warmth now. Pretty please?

You might say that I have been to happy.

This morning I was thinking about how selfish we really are. Everything is about me me me. In my self centered mind I've only been focusing on how I feel, what I've been missing etc. Yesterday aunt Chris wrote something that opened up my mind a bit. She wrote that she had been missing me for the past 35 years. Hey, I never ever stopped to think about that before. Who would miss me and why??!

Let's take a moment to think about this. I was 4-5 when I moved to Sweden and the people I can relate to are the people my mom told me about but there are no memories of my own, well except for talking to grandma and Chris on the phone sometimes. My family where so much older so of course they have to had their own memories of me (yes I know, I'm self centered). If I put myself in their shoes for a moment, how hard would it be to lose track of my loved ones for a couple of decades and even more.

Terrible I guess.

Now I'm sitting on the bus to work with a mushy feeling.

Aunties and dad, I do miss you and I do love you a lot even if I don't have a lot of memories of you you've always been a missing part of my life. Does that make any sence? And Sarah, whom I've only met for a short while when you where wery young, it seems to me that you are a remarkable young woman and I'm really looking forward to getting to know you.

My Swedish family was a bit dysfunctional as I grew up, not that I weren't loved, my mom was the best but there where issues and my grandma (not Irene) was kind of mean actually so the family never stuck together. So as you can see, the love and caring of each other that I see in my American family is quit breathtaking for me. Anyway, this has left me with an urge to NOT look back at my life. Events and people of the past have always stayed in the past but even that is slowly changing. I find myself looking up old schoolmates from 25 years ago. It's either the mushy feeling that won't let go of me or the fact that I'm growing older. I don't know and to be honest, I'm not sure I even care. Perhaps this is the new and improved me so OK let it be then =) and it all started about a week ago.

Next stop is my work so I have to go now.
Love J

Looking forward to seeing him again.

I didn't tell you that I am a grandpa did I. Did I tell you about the family at all?

Nathalie is on her way to 22 and she has a son called Vincent. Besides Nathalie I have a son called Tim and a daughter called Jennifer. They are going to be 15 and 13 this summer. Tim and Jennifer lives with their mom and stays at our place every other weekend. My fiancé Dannie also has two daughters who live with us full time so some weekends there are children everywhere. Her daughters, Linnéa and Emelie will be 12 and 10 this summer.

That covers all of the people in our family. Besides humans we also have an old cat, some snakes, a couple of lizards and some aquariums so our home is really full.

That will be all for now folks, my train is coming now.

I've been keeping a blog for some time now but Facebook never interested me. Rather the opposite actually, but after the seminar I decided to look into the possibilities for companies to market them selves on Facebook. So I registered myself.

I wasn't looking for anything in paritcular but I found some of my friends there and talked some with them. But besides of that I really weren't that fascinated. Beeing somewhat of an Internet Junkie I actually thought that Facebook was to screwed to use. I referred to it as what happens when you fire your crack addicted programers before they deliver the final product.

Anyway I was doing the least possible this Friday night when it struck me, what if my dad was on Facebook too? The chances where probably quit slim but as it is one of the largest social networks and it is world wide i went ahead. So I searched for him and there was something like 300 with the same name as him. So I thought Fat chance one of them would be him, but I was really bored so I started to browse pictures and after a while I saw a picture of a guy who actually could have been him. When I look at it now I rellay can't understand why I hesitated but I wanted to be 100 percent sure so I wrote him a short message.

The timediference is 6 or 7 hours so this must have been in the afternoon over there and of course there was no answer.

I searched his friends for more clues to convince myself that he really was the right guy and the next 'clue' was a another familiar face of what ought to be my cousin Sarah so I sent her a message to. She must have thought that a nutcase sent it or something =)

Exited as I where I relly couldn't go to bed without knowing if this actually where my family in the US so I looked at more and more pictures and finally I found my aunts, their names where correct and the picture of Chris just had to be her.

Now I was convinced so I sent a message to my aunt and a second message to my dad. The joy I felt was undescribeable but that wasn't all, I was really nervous as well. How would they respond? Would they feel the same joy that I did?

Well I really had to go to sleep but when I woke up to go to the bathroom at 6 in the morning I just had to check my cellphone for messages I'd recieved during the night and two of them where from Chris and Sarah! I jumped out of bed and started up a computer to read what they had replied!

Now, almost a week after I've had daily contact with my aunts, my dad and I have written to Sarah a couple of times. I've also seen my children establish connections with their family on the other side of the Atlantic and every time I hear from my relatives my heart skips a beat. It's for real and the love and joy is almost as if taken from a chick flick.

After this week I'm really hooked on Facebook and even more on my family.

Mom and dad were divorced when I was realy young and since my mother is Swedish she moved back to Sweden. I was just 4-5 when we came here and my American family where far, far away. We called grandma Irene and Aunt Chris on christmas but that was about all. My dad was nowhere to find for many years (I never did ask you about that did I old guy? No pressure but one of these days I'm going to ask you more about the lost years. OK?).

Anyway, through out the years contacts with grandma became more and more rare (entirely due to Swedish laziness or maybe the Parker gene of not staying in touch with people).

Most of my memories, or who am I kidding, all of them from the US years are planted to say. Not that the stories where bad or even wrong I just don't remember any of them by myself. My first recollections are from the first swedish year and onwards. My mom told me such amazing things about the people I'd never met so somehow most of them became like characters in an great book. You get to know them without ever meeting then for real.

So let's go on with the story. My mom never spoke badly of my dad or so, but as I was growing up he was always missing and the child in me really wanted to know why his father had abandoned him (sorry if it hurts to read dad, but I really missed having a father in my younger years). As time went by I actually started to dislike my father for not being there for me.

Well I grew older and at 18 I became a father of my own. People told me I was to young and they where probably right but I wouldn't have changed it for the World, Nathalie was and still is one of the true joys of my life. Somewhere between 18 and 20-ish I believe my father sent me a letter and at first I was thrilled but then the feelings from when I was younger catched up. Why did he have to wait 14-15 years to contact me etc etc. The feelings really tortured me and the sadness of it all won that time.

Anyway I decided that before my 25th birthday I would tell him he had became a grandfather. And that was that.

One day before my self appointed 'deadline' my answering machine was full with confused calls. Someone was trying to figure out if the people on the machine where the ones he wanted to reach. It was dad who somehow found my number and had been trying to call throughout the day (I'm not sure if he realized that we're 6-7 hours ahead over here or not) =P

Contact was made and we sent letters back and forth and called eachother a couple of times every month for a while. My ex girlfriend, me and Nathalie went over to visit some months after.

We spent a week visiting dad and had the chance to spend time with grandpa and grandma, auntie Chris and cousin Sarah. This was truley one of the most awesome weeks of my entire life. Nathalie was only 6 or 7 so she and her grandpa and communicated with okidokies and she and Sarah her watched The Lion King and imitated Rafiki. Truly amazing.

As time went by the not keeping in touch part of being a Parker kicked in and we started to drift further apart again. A letter here, answered a year later and so it went on. I'm sorry to say that I also neglected to keep in touch so it's not just my dads fault I'm just as much to blame. The only one who has been trying to keep in touch regularly is grandma Irene.

So this was some of the background pieces. Did you manage to stay with me this far? Soon the story will continue.

Im going to end this part of the Journey with a song that started in me headphones as I walked in to my officebuilding this morning. It's an awesome band, with an almost as amazing story as the one I'm telling you.

I alredy have a blog written in Swedish so why get out on thin ice and write one in English as well you might think. I sure did before I decided to go ahead with it. Because some very important people in my life don't know any Swedish and Googles translations aren't the best. Well perhaps Google and I will turn out to be as god or bad as eachother but still this is a way for me to share some of my thoughts with the people I love. This won't be a diary full of every day things eventhough they might occur from time to time. This will be more of a valve to let out some steam and tell a story or two. You might say it's a way to honor my roots, the very same people for whom I'm writing this.

Keep one thing in mind though, even though I was American my first 4-5 years I've been Swedish the last 35 so I'm a bit rusty at this.

Reday? Let's go then.

Expect the least to gain the most.