swedish hips

Like many Americans, I tend to obsess about my ancestry and the confusion therein. I want to make precise, mathematical sense of what is a maddening stew of "definitely 1/4 this" and "maybe 1/4 that but no one knows.... "

So I am oddly thrilled with my latest worst symptom: hip pain. My research has uncovered that this is something affecting mostly Scandinavian women. While the pain itself absolutely sucks, the knowledge that I actually possess some real Swedish physiology is great. Statistically, I have always known that my dad is half Swedish, making me 1 quarter. Its the ancestry I always claimed since I take after my dad and because his dad was born there, making him the newest American of all the grandparents. Artifacts exist, a few books, a few words of Swedish, the faint memory of a song.

I reported my hip pain to my 3 favorite Scandinavians (a Swede, an Icelander and a Norwegian) and all confirmed that hip pain is very common among their reproducing female friends and family. They even had an armory of tips and tricks and reasons that are mysteriously absent from my American books and web sites.

While is nice to feel the evidence that I am from somewhere, its still frustrating to know I mostly take after a lineage of men. What I need now is to know the females I take after. I want to know how their bodies dealt with all this. I suspect my only physiological twin would be a great grandmother long dead and known only as a name and date. I try to see myself as a living remnant of her.  I am what's been left behind instead of a journal or a photograph. She can't tell me what to expect but she is speaking through me as I go.

I suppose it's an offshoot of the same recurring sentiment of hoping to identify with someone. somewhere. Where are you.