They called him Mappan
My nickname at school was Kokosnuss, today I'm called Mappan - a short autobiography in names. At school, none of my German classmates could pronounce the soft Scandinavian «K» in my first name Mikael. Which led to them shortening my name to the more German Mika and perverting it to Mikker through Hanseatic-dialectal sound shifting; then Snickers temporarily prevailed, which was later displaced by Kokosnuss as an allusion to my surname Krogerus when we started to discover surnames as a playing field for discrimination. My teachers stuck with Mikael. They pronounced it very German. Mi-k-k-k-a-el. It sounded like a burst from a machine gun.
During my studies in Denmark, I was called Finland because I was the only Finn. When I came to Switzerland, I tried to reinvent myself as Mik, pronounced Rachen-K, following a vague instinct to assimilate. It took a long time, my boss in particular persisted with Mikael. And when he did say Mik, he emphasised it as if he was reading from a piece of paper on which the name had been written in inverted commas.
My parents call me Mikko, which is the Finnish diminutive of Mikael, a journalist friend of mine consistently calls me Krogi, sometimes Mitch. I like the latter, it sounds like tanned shoulder muscles and narrowed eyes looking out over the vastness of the sea.
Mappan is made up of «mum» and «dad».
But I've been called Mappan since my children were born. My daughter invented the name when she was two. She pronounces it in Swedish, with an emphasis on the double P. But how did she come up with it? The artificial word is undoubtedly a combination of Mum and Dad. Did she see me as a hybrid being, a centaur - half father, half mother? A post-binary hybrid beyond classic gender categorisation?
Did my daughter realise earlier than others that categories such as man and woman, mother and father, female and male are derivatives of an era that is coming to an end and that we need new words to create new realities?
Be that as it may, my daughter obviously knew what I only dimly suspected: that I would not be my wife's assistant, helpless without her partner's instructions, but the other way round, that it would be me who knew where the vaccination booklet was, who remembered the packing list for the ski camp, who aged ten years in three years.
Not that my wife behaves like a man from the 1950s who sits down at the table, strokes the children's heads and explains the world to us. On the contrary. It's more like our children have two mums. More precisely: two mappans.
Two hybrid beings who love their children like lionesses love their cubs, but don't define themselves exclusively through them. Who lie awake at night out of a guilty conscience, but conversely always want something else from life. I recently found a note on the keyboard of my laptop, my daughter had left it there: «You are the best Mappan there is.»
