My wish for Christmas is ‘new eyes’

Dear Father Christmas,


I’m writing to you for the first time in 45 years. You may already know the story I’m starting my letter with. Christmas elves were out and about already when my mum was a child and they must have witnessed events in her life then as well as later. I also have vivid memories of you visiting us every year when I was a child. You always brought a couple of presents for my mum too. I hope you finish reading this letter because even though it may not seem so at first, I have a request for Christmas.


Mother


My mother was born on 22 August 1936. The family already had five children, the oldest of whom was 12. They lived in poverty. While my mum’s mother was pregnant, her husband walked away, abandoning his family. So at birth, my mum became the sixth child of a struggling single mother.The single most important newspaper ad of my mum’s life was published in Helsingin Sanomat in the winter of 1938. It was very small in size and innocuous in appearance. But it was the flutter of a butterfly's wing that caused a typhoon in my mum’s life. It ran along these lines: A well-behaved 18-month-old girl given to a good home. This short text was followed by a phone number.


The couple I thought of as my grandparents until their death answered the ad. My grandad worked as an electrician at Strömberg and my grannie was a hairdresser. They lived in Töölö, in Helsinki. They had tried for a baby for a long time but all the pregnancies had ended in miscarriage.So the little ad completely changed their lives as well as my mum’s life. My grandparents adopted my mum and brought her up. I remember being surprised that my grandparents had no baby pictures of my mum. The first picture of my mum was of her walking hand in hand with my grannie in a park. She is about 2 years old in the picture. Knowing what I know now, it’s easy to understand why my mum was an only child and why I have no aunts, uncles or cousins from her side.


In so many ways, the newspaper ad defined my mum’s life. Her life had plenty of good things in it. My grandparents brought her up as their own. At the age of 16, she spent a summer with a friend in England, which was unusual at that time. She became a doctor, specialising in child psychiatry. She had three children with my dad – I’m the oldest. Years passed by, as they tend to do. My siblings and I grew up, went to school, studied and spread our wings, starting families of our own. My mum had time to see all these stages and be part of them before her death in 2009.But this is not the whole picture, nor the main consequence of that fateful newspaper ad. My mum never got over it. For her, it meant her own mother had given her away. Why, oh why?


When my mum approached her early teens, my grannie told her that she was adopted. It didn’t come as news to my mum as she’d heard the gossip circulating among the children of friends and relatives. When she’d learned to read, she’d gone through my grannie’s papers and found the adoption documents. She knew what had happened. When she grew up she could understand why but still her whole persona, her choices, the path her life took, they are all rooted in that ad. Why? Who am I? Why didn’t my mum want me?


To my mum, it was always important not to need anyone. She was extreme in her quest for independence. This also applied to her relationship with her husband, my dad. She didn’t want to owe anything – money or favours – to anyone. She had few friends but the ones she had were very close and dear to her. She hated pretending. To find answers, she became a child psychiatrist. While treating her patients, she also tried to heal her own deep, persistent wound. As a child of her adoptive mother, she felt that she was struggling with the expectations and dreams my grannie had invested in her unborn children. And she never measured up. Or that’s how she felt.


She had a good life, and she was the best mum to me and I’m happy and grateful to have had her in my life. But I think that for the main part of her life, including her later years, she was not happy. She yearned to go back to the beginning and follow a different path, one where she had more time with her birth mother. Nothing that happened later in her life, no decision, event or achievement, could make up for what she thought of as a fatal mistake. I think – and I don’t blame her – that she never learned how to take an honest look at her own life and the surrounding world while being happy. She saw everything through that newspaper ad, and the tears filling her eyes brought the bitterness of abandonment, endless searching and unanswered questions with them.

My Christmas wish


Thank you, Father Christmas, for persevering, and reading my letter this far. We are coming to my request now. There’s a lot of my mum in me. Some I learned and some I inherited. I have plenty of reasons to be happy, and not that many or big reasons to not see that happiness. I pretty much have everything people usually, including me, want from life. Health, family, work, interests and opportunities for doing what I like. Why is it then so easy to feel discontent, to want something more, something different? To have these vague complaints, while being quick to blame others!


The feeling that grass is greener on the other side, that happiness lies somewhere else, and that life is yet to start must be coded in our DNA. Dissatisfaction spurs the humankind to keep developing and searching for something new. Because of it, we live in a world that is different from the one inhabited by the past generations.


Louis XIV, the Sun King, was one of the richest people of his time, at least in Europe. He left behind great monuments, such as the Palace of Versailles. And still he slept with a honey-covered metal jar on his chest, designed to attract lice and to guarantee him a good night’s sleep. I bet the great ruler would have been more than happy to exchange all his personal physicians for the doctors of my local healthcare centre, with their knowledge, equipment and medicines. I’m also 100% certain that very few ordinary modern-day people would consider it a good deal to change places with the Sun King.


I’m not very good at being satisfied. And I have noticed that others, both people I know and those I observe on TV, in politics or in newspaper comments, are unhappy most of the time. And I feel annoyed with them, in addition to feeling dissatisfied for my own personal reasons. Perhaps this is another thing I learned from my mum. My mum used to read several newspapers, including Helsingin Sanomat and Iltasanomat, and while doing so, she scribbled notes and comments in the margins. Most often, she was provoked into underlining and making notes as a result of the constant complaints and demands penned by journalists or uttered by interviewees.


And it’s not only us Finns that are constantly moaning and groaning – it seems to me that the entire world and the prevailing atmosphere are increasingly characterised by dissatisfaction and conflict where each group makes demands and clamours for its own rights, however poorly justified. Everybody’s aggressively and vocally dissatisfied and ready to blame others for it.


But we don’t see things correctly. When thinking about our own happiness, we don’t look properly or we look in all the wrong places, either wilfully or out of sheer stupidity. We should take a good long look in the mirror, and look into ourselves. That’s where happiness lies. It’s there right now. It may be hidden but not lost. Whether we find it is up to us and our attitudes. It’s not down to material possessions or even heath or any other external factor. Satisfaction is not a circumstance but a state of mind.


Father Christmas, I’d like to have new eyes for Christmas. Eyes that allow me to see inside my own head and to notice and remember all those things big and small that are right. And if at all possible, could you also give such eyes to DT, XJ, VP, EM, TM and the rest of that lot.


If the elves beavering away at your digital workshop have come up with an app that allows us to recognise reasons for happiness in our own lives, one that can be mass produced cost-efficiently, could everyone in the world get one for Christmas? That would make all of us that little bit happier – and it might even save the earth.


Pekka, 57


PS Even tough I’ve already asked for so much, I still have one more request. If some deity exists and if you have any strings to pull there and if there is an afterworld where my mum now is, could you please pass on my wish to get those same eyes for her.