Foods to cut down on while pregnant – polar bear

The antenatal classes I attend in Nuuk are a two-and-a-bit language affair. Our Greenlandic midwife speaks mostly in Danish, a little in Greenlandic, and – for my benefit – throws in a few short explanations in English, which is necessary now and then. Although I can manage pretty well in Danish, in antenatal class there is some vocabulary at play that I don’t tend to use in daily life, and which I am seldom likely to encounter again.

At the first class, four couples gathered around the large table, plus me and one other woman attending alone. We were asked to share our feelings about pregnancy. It was the usual spectrum of excitement and anxiety amongst the soon-to-be mothers. The fathers were similar, if a little more subdued. But then there was the heavy-set Greenlandic man hunkered uncomfortably over his coffee at one corner of the table. His whole demeanour said, I don’t want to be here. When his turn came, he sat silently for a few moments, evidently hoping to be bypassed. But when the midwife continued to smile at him expectantly, he muttered a few words in Greenlandic and excused himself in stilted Danish. His girlfriend finally came to his aid. “He’s not so good at sharing his feelings,” she said, somewhat unnecessarily.

Then it was my turn. My husband wasn’t there. It would have been fairly pointless if he was, as his Danish was definately not up to it. But in any case it was probably just as well, I thought, reminded of a similar introductory antenatal class we had attended in Australia years ago when expecting our first child. As a means of breaking the ice, the midwife had asked everyone to introduce themselves, share something they were anxious or concerned about, and then something they were looking forward to. The couple who started were nauseatingly positive. The husband said something about the only negative being that they had still months to wait before meeting their new baby. Denial? I wondered. Then it was my husband’s turn. But unfortunately he’d only heard the part about sharing something he was concerned about. So he talked about his worries about the future, how our relationship would be affected, how our lives would be changed forever. Then, when everyone was expecting him to say something positive, he just looked at me and nodded that it was my turn. Everyone in the room gave me sad, sympathetic smiles. I groaned inwardly.

Here, years later, antenatal classes seemed not to have changed so much, aside from the flurry of new Danish vocabulary that I struggled to take in, Google-translating on the fly on my phone. One such piece of advice actually concerned phones, specifically avoiding too much mobile use around newborns, as they don’t like it and you should be focussing on the baby. That wasn’t much of an issue last time as smart phones barely existed when I was last pregnant and I certainly couldn’t afford one. Another point of difference was that, this time, there was also a lot more information about having sex while pregnant, the message being that basically sex is fine so go for it. I figured that this was probably the Scandanavian influence and thus not too surprising. The only other markedly different advice was about food. When I was last pregnant, I recall being devastated that I wasn’t allowed to eat unpasteurised cheese for nine whole months. This time, as I flicked through the booklet I’d been given, I discovered that the food advice had quite a different, local flavour. I should limit my intake – I was told – of sea birds, walrus, toothed whales, the meat of old seals, mattak (the fat of whales and seals), and polar bear.

I reckon I can manage that, I thought.