Greta Thunberg’s mother is opening up about her daughter’s struggles before the climate activist gained global recognition.
Malena Ernman, the mother of Thunberg, described her daughter as severely depressed before taking on her role as an icon for climate activism in an edited extract from her forthcoming book published Sunday by the Guardian.
Beginning in 2014, Thunberg — who is diagnosed with Asperger’s, high-functioning autism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder — struggled to eat, play, laugh, or talk with others as she entered the fifth grade. Her mother also claimed the then-11-year-old cried without ceasing.
“She cried at night when she should be sleeping. She cried on her way to school. She cried in her classes and during her breaks, and the teachers called home almost every day. Svante had to run off and bring her home to Moses, our golden retriever. She sat with him for hours, petting him and stroking his fur. She was slowly disappearing into some kind of darkness and little by little, bit by bit, she seemed to stop functioning,” Ernman wrote.
In their initial reaction to Thunberg’s depression, Ernman and Thunberg’s father, Svante, planned to bake cinnamon buns for the family, but Thunberg refused to eat. Though her parents try to react calmly, they eventually went on to “scream” at her, demanding that she eat.
“’Please eat,’ Svante and I say in chorus. Calmly, at first. And then more firmly. Then with every ounce of pent-up frustration and powerlessness,” Ernman recalled.
“Until finally we scream, letting out all our fear and hopelessness. ‘Eat! You have to eat, don’t you understand? You have to eat now, otherwise you’ll die!’ Then Greta has her first panic attack. She makes a sound we’ve never heard before, ever. She lets out an abysmal howl that lasts for over 40 minutes,” she continued. “We haven’t heard her scream since she was an infant. I cradle her in my arms, and Moses lies alongside her, his moist nose pressed to her head. Greta asks, ‘Am I going to get well again?’ ‘Of course you are,’ I reply. ‘When am I going to get well?’ ‘I don’t know. Soon.’”
Ernman said it was difficult to have her daughter eat just five pieces of gnocchi for lunch, which took Thunberg over two hours to consume. While the child’s scores on her “depression tests” were “sky high,” Thunberg eventually recovered a normal eating habit, to the joy of her mother. But as the child improved her eating habits, she then began to open up to her mother about “unspeakably awful” bullying incidents.
“Stories about being pushed over in the playground, wrestled to the ground, or lured into strange places, the systematic shunning and the safe space in the girls’ toilets where she sometimes manages to hide and cry before the break monitors force her out into the playground again. For a full year, the stories keep coming,” Ernman said.
The mother added that Thunberg began to find fulfillment in climate activism, yelling at celebrities through the medium of her mother’s Instagram feed.
“‘You celebrities are basically to the environment what anti immigrant politicians are to multicultural society,’ Greta says at the breakfast table early in 2016,” her mother wrote, adding that her daughter’s journey of becoming a climate activist made her smile more and be “at ease.”
“The audience stands up. Shouting, applauding. The ovation doesn’t stop. And Greta is smiling the most beautiful smile I have ever seen her smile,” Ernman said. “I’m watching everything from a live stream on my phone in the hallway outside the dressing rooms at the Oscarsteatern. The tears keep coming.”
Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis by Malena and Beata Ernman and Greta and Svante Thunberg is set for release on March 5.
