American Ice Cream: A Danish Girl's Discovery of Independence
I call my mother a crazy Danish lady. She is a firecracker, unafraid to speak her mind. Strong. Silly. Full of life, and full of stories. I would know, I’ve heard them more times than I can count.
She was nearly forty when I was born, and it was a long time before I truly grasped the life she had lived before I came along. There was this basic information that I always knew: coming to the States with her Girl Scout Troop at 18, immigrating two years later, marrying after six weeks of courtship, having four kids throughout a tumultuous nine years, divorce, single motherhood… Then she met my dad, 11 years her junior, got married, and then surprise! I came along.
I had spend much of my youth traveling with her to Denmark. I heard stories of her childhood there, but as a person, I didn’t really know my mother deeply. As I moved into adulthood, became a mother myself, and started to really pay attention to her stories, I realized that my mother was an incredibly strong woman who had a story of a lifetime.
It’s not so easy to write my mother’s story chronologically. She talks about experiences that relate somehow to when she was a kid one moment, then to her adult sons the next. But that’s a little bit how my mom is, how she operates. She jumps around a lot. Her mind is like dominos, set one in motion and a whole lot follow.
Kirsten Mærsk Dyhr was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in the spring of 1942, the “second disappointment” as her father said, since he wanted a son. A few years later, he got his wish. As the middle child, my mother got all the bad luck, she says: kejthåndet (or left- “awkward” handedness), long narrow “submarine” feet, and the lifelong loss of her brand-new two front teeth, thanks to a marble countertop. She suffered a terrible nail-biting habit and poor vision, left undiagnosed for years, causing her school instructors to think she had a learning disability.
Despite all these misfortunes, my mother was not unfortunate. Her mother was Edith Rita Mærsk-Møller, granddaughter of the shipping magnate Peter Mærsk-Møller, founder of Mærsk Line. This would come to be both a blessing and a curse. For wealth in Denmark was much more complicated, carrying with it a stigma, a false sense of security and happiness.
When my mother speaks of being a young woman, I sense much resentment in her. For most of her childhood, she was made to feel unimportant, ugly and common, despite having an upper-class family and a highly esteemed heritage. While the war did cause economic stress on her family, my mother wasn’t poor or starving. Yet she speaks of this time as though she were a trampled flower in the street. With all of her insecurities, she sounds as though she never even had the opportunity to bloom.
The timing has to be right, she says, to talk about this stuff. And one morning as I’m drinking my coffee and we’re chatting on the phone, she starts to tell me about the type of freedom America offered her.
No longer a downtrodden, awkward middle girl. In America, she’s exotic and foreign. Following her summer with the Girl Scouts, she stays with a wealthy family, gets a blonde American hairstyle, she gets a job, gets a car. Travels the States, and realizes, I can do this. “America was freeing from the ideas of what I was,” she tells me. Not who, but what. She could cast off the bonds of her childhood and remake herself into whatever, whomever she wanted to be.
She tells me about sailing on the Gripsholm into Manhattan in 1960. Vividly in her mind’s eye she can see Long Island, the long string of lights as cars move into the city. Her longing to be like one of the passengers, one of those people, the desire to belong.
It reminds her of being in the back seat of her parents’ car, between her brother and sister, a car full of family members— that same sensation of wanting to belong to a group of people that surround you. But here, this was where she should have felt that, in her own family.
This sensation she describes, suddenly rings clear in my own mind. The growing up surrounded by people who should, and probably do love you, but don’t understand you. Always an outsider.
We have more in common than we both might think.
The Danish girls of Troop II Absalon (right) shake hands with the American Girl Scouts, having just arrived into New York City after a week sailing on the Gripsholm from Copenhagen, Denmark. Kis is the 6th girl up from the bottom right.
Far away in the fog we could catch a glimpse of the shadows of buildings: New York! Hurrah!! The sky was now dark, around 8 p.m., with only a rose-colored line on the horizon where the sun had been. There were seagulls flying around: a sign of land nearby. The air was warm and heavy. It smelled of land.
The ship had started back up, but slowed down again as suddenly we spotted a tiny tugboat coming toward us. The ship had put up a flag that we needed one, but it was replaced with another that sent the message we had received the tugboat. As we continued slowly on, there were more and more boats around us. The ship increased its speed and soon we could see the first lights from the city. AMERICA!
Later on, we began to see more and more lights. It was quite fantastic. We shouted and pointed. We just stood there for half an hour and watched the lights as they came closer and closer. There was land on the starboard side of the ship, and also towards the stern, and we could clearly see moving car lights on the streets along the shore. On the port side stood the Statue of Liberty with its lit flame on the top.
Now the ship will lie at anchor overnight. As we lay here in our bunks, we miss the sound from the engines. Once in a while, I’ll peek out the port hole. On shore, I can clearly see the lights from the cars driving. And there again, far out off the bow, we could still see that tall shiny column with one light on the top: The Statue of Liberty.
Kirsten “Kis” Hendershot, American Ice Cream