vabruari
Sweden's favourite "joke"
28 days hath February, and in Sweden it’s generally understood that if you have young children you will be home caring for feverish small people pretty much every single one of them.
This is in fact so expected that nearly every Swede you meet will, at their earliest opportunity, eagerly1 share with you what I’m starting to think should become the official national pun: vabruari. Of course this pun doesn’t make any sense to an English-speaker, so allow me to explain...
“February” in Swedish is “februari” (so, the same as in English, just spelled with an ‘i’ instead of a ‘y’ at the end and without the capital letter at the beginning). The pun part swaps in ‘vab,’ a word which, strictly speaking, isn’t a word2; it’s an acronym. ‘VAB’ stands for “vård av barn,” literally ‘care of children3’ and comes from, of all places, one of those drop-down lists on a government form.
In Sweden there are sick days that you take off from work when you’re sick yourself, and there are also sick days that you take off from work to care for a sick child. In both cases you receive 80% of your regular pay4—and, when it comes to caring for a sick child, this always comes from the state, not your employer. So, along with telling work that you can’t come in that day, here in Sweden you have one more small task: open up a government app and claim your 80%5 by selecting the date(s) you are off work and the reason. ‘Vård av barn’ is one of the officially sanctioned reasons one can select.
There is almost no cap on these days6. So, in February, with its notoriously virus-friendly frigid temperatures here in the Scandinavian north, taking time away from work in one’s role as a child-vård (etymologically related to the English word ward, in its sense of ‘guardian’ or ‘caretaker’) is so common that Swedes have practically renamed the month after the relevant box on a government form.
And because of course it’s not just in February when kids get sick—the winter is long in Sweden, and February is merely the only one winter month beginning with right kind of syllable for vab-punning—the need to stay home from work for ‘vab’ reasons happens often enough that it has gifted Swedish with a new word.
Yes, in the glorious way of language—that most mutable and endlessly adventurous of human creations—a dry government-form description has become not only a favourite pun but also a noun (en vabb, or en vab-dag) and a high-traffic verb: att vabba, to vab—that is, to take time off work or school to care for a sick child. And as is also the way of language, this fact tells us something about the culture which has produced such a word. It is not a coincidence that there is no English verb meaning ‘to take time off to care for a sick child.’
I started this post on what was something like day 46 of nearly nonstop household illness. I was in a dark mood—I have never been even close to as relentlessly ill as I have been since moving here last spring—and I was basically planning to b*tch about Sweden as the land of constant illness. I would write, I thought, about how I had nasty colds for most of last summer as well as for nearly all of the fall and winter; about how I had become more mucus than Mandy; about how the depression from incessant illness was starting to be more of a health hazard than the viruses themselves. I would perhaps make a dark joke about Sverigedemokraterna—Sweden’s in-house anti-immigrant far-right party with Neo-Nazi pedigree—cooking up stealthy bio weapons designed to make the daily life of immigrants to Sweden miserable.
But now, sitting here in the full-on sunlight of mid-March, knowing that the days are getting only brighter and brighter, and that it won’t be long until no darkness comes at all; and, most of all, having, through writing about vabbing, reminded myself of how happy I am to have left a system that punishes the sick (and families with young children) with economic insecurity, I don’t feel pissy anymore. Even though my last bout of illness turned into a bronchitis from which I am still not fully recovered, even though I am fantastically behind on all my plans for establishing a full life and career here in my new country, right now all I feel is grateful—to be living in a place where, in an increasingly isolationist and inhumane world, they have retained some deeply human laws.
This adverb needs to be qualified for the Swedish context. Swedes almost never appear “eager”—that’s far too unreserved for their tastes. So when I say “eagerly share” their favourite pun, I mean that you can tell they’re eager because they start talking almost immediately after you’ve said something (usually about illness)—i.e. without the usual long pause. They also have a hint of a smile on their face and a whiff of anticipation in their eyes, like they’re about to hand you a little treat which they know about and you don’t. I’m always loathe to disappoint them by telling them that I’ve now heard this pun about as often as I’ve had conversations with Swedes.
Well, it is now. Vab has had so much off-label use that it now has its place in that hallowed hall of language prescription (/description)—the dictionary.
Or ‘child’; in Swedish the singular and plural form is the same (‘barn’).
I am simplifying the ‘for-oneself’ sick day rules here because no one wants to read about a whole bunch of bureaucratic details unless they have to. The sick-kiddo rules are, however, pretty much actually just this simple.
There is a ceiling on this, thankfully; CEOs, for example, do not get 80% of their usual pay when vabbing.
One can take 120 '‘vab’ days per year, per child. This piece of information tends to blow our minds in North America, where paid sick days are either nonexistent or heavily restricted (in my last job on that continent—teaching at the University of Toronto—I had two paid sick days per year). Conversely, when Swedes find out how miserly (or downright inhumane, depending on your point of view) we in the “new world” are with paid sick leave they are usually horrified. When my husband moved to Canada with (and for) me he almost didn’t believe me when I told him—in the height of the pandemic, a situation which changed nothing on this front—that there are no guaranteed paid sick days for workers in Ontario. He blinked at me for half a minute and then said, as if explaining that rain is wet, “but people can’t help getting sick. Do they think people just don’t get sick?” I sighed. “No, they know,” I said. “They just don’t care.”